Haha those Luddites, raging against their fear of the unfamiliar rather than just getting with the times. Look where all that aimless lashing out got them! Here in the modern world we are clearly very enlightened and understand that technology is obviously good. Obviously. If only they had just stopped to think about their role in society!

Here’s a funny little story. Let’s suppose a group of people were experienced and employed in the field of producing ‘soft wares’, and took pride in producing such wares that were functional and resilient. In order to produce these wares, this …

In the far distant past of July 2024, at a time when I was using a compact camera for such things, I took some photos of a kookaburra I came across. The area was firmly in shade and, combined with the optical properties of a compact camera operating at its maximum telephoto range, the pictures are all a bit rubbish. Generally the noise of compact-sourced photos becomes apparent when zooming in, but a few of those photos are so affected that they still look bad when scaled down significantly, enough to be readily apparent to me even when that camera …

A mere few months ago I was lusting after some kind of Supernote gadget, a kind of e-ink ‘paper tablet’ that I could carry around and write maths on and definitely do drawings and sketches more than never, without needing to plonk myself in front of the computer and start up Krita for any of it. I went through a bit of a cycle, deciding that I really did want one after all, then moving towards buying one only to find that it would be even more than I expected, sit on it some longer and start again. That repeated …

About two years ago, after running through a series of second-hand compact cameras, I went looking for a compact of my own. I’m not entirely sure what the requirements were – availability, mostly – but I ended up grabbing a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ80. One of the neat features about this camera is its whopping 30× zoom: 4.3–129 mm, or “24–720 mm” as the “35 mm equivalent”.[1] That makes it a pretty versatile unit, but that far end of the range ended up being more useful than I anticipated, because it turns out what I want to photograph …

The ‘artificial gravity’ of a rotating spacecraft is a recurring trope across science fiction. Centrifugal force is a real and necessary effect in a rotating reference frame, but the description of motion is incomplete without Coriolis force alongside it. Unfortunately, the latter doesn’t get much representation in fiction that I’m aware of.

Coriolis force pushes sideways on objects that move in the plane of rotation of the rotating reference frame, causing them to move in arcs. Coriolis effects are perhaps best known in the context of atmospheric wind: as the Earth and its atmosphere form a rotating reference …

Magnifying glasses operate on a pretty simple concept: when an object is within the focal length of a convex lens, a magnified ‘virtual’ image is produced, as demonstrated by simple ray optics:

… with just the slight problem that the magnified image is always further away. An object at the focal point produces an image that is literally infinitely big – but it’s also at an infinite distance. And that really doesn’t help; the moon is quite sizeable itself, but that won’t show you the dust on its surface.

Still, magnifying glasses certainly seem to have an effect – but …

Today in Spontaneous Computer Drama…

Ran routine package upgrades, rebooted as normal and, upon logging in, was greeted with a black screen. Not actually the first I’ve seen that, but upon some poking it seemed KDE wouldn’t start because of a problem with XRandR, despite it all being installed.

Just as I was ready to reinstall everything from scratch, I found that Xinerama was enabled, which was preventing RandR from initialising. So, to any fellow souls desperately searching ‘RandR extension missing’ or, perhaps, ‘there is no XRandR 1.2 and later version available’, try this: make sure your …

A recent xkcd comic had me thinking about the possibility of listing every possible chess move, rather than enumerating only the moves available from a given position.

Chess moves are typically notated as a piece type and the square it moves to. There are 6 types of pieces and 64 squares to move to, so the easiest starting point is $6\times 64=384$ moves. But there are a few layers of complexity on top of this.