Things I make, learn, and think about. I write about software, hardware, AI, gaming, the homestead, and whatever else I'm tinkering with.
Valve's Steam Machine landed in Australia at $1,609. I priced a cheaper build, a like-for-like one, and a higher-end one against it — and thanks to the RAM crisis, the usual just-build-one answer isn't the walkover it normally is.
Not the one-plant, two-t-shirts kind of minimalism. A slower version built around a single idea — cost of ownership — and what changed once it clicked: a simpler wardrobe, a quieter desk, a streamlined digital life, and a noticeable weight off.
Most of what people call their values — being active, a big social circle, a good career — are really social idealisms: the life they think they should want. A short take on the distinction John DeMartini draws in The Values Factor, and the test for telling the two apart.
Owning a mistake looks like it should cost you standing. Done consistently and meant, it does the opposite — here's the outage that taught me why, and the mechanism underneath it.
Most people who call themselves brutally honest just can't read the room. Being direct when you can read it — and saying the true thing anyway — is a different trade, and the bill comes due differently at work than at home.
Summer Game Fest dropped on Friday and somehow the lineup read like it was scraped straight from my wishlist. Three of my favourite franchises, all in one show, all within a couple of hours of each other. I keep waiting for the catch.
Code Veronica is finally getting the remake treatment — retitled just Resident Evil: Veronica, Claire back as the lead, the reveal opening on a rainy Paris apartment block. It’s been the obvious gap in Capcom’s remake run for years and they’ve finally filled it. 2027, and on Switch 2 alongside the usual platforms.
Then FF7 Remake Part 3 turned out to be Final Fantasy 7 Revelation — Hamaguchi on stage, the Highwind in your hands, skydiving into an open world, job classes in combat. Spring 2027. The trilogy actually lands.
And the one I didn’t see coming: Stellar Blade: Blood Rain. New protagonist — Evie, not Eve — swapping the sword for gauntlet brawling, and Shift Up self-publishing this time so it’s not a PlayStation exclusive. Still early, but pointed at 2027 too.
So that’s my three most-anticipated games sharing a release year and a single showcase. Either the universe owes me one or 2027 is going to cost me a fortune.
Spent the week deciding on a physics engine for the game engine and landed on Rapier. It’s written in Rust and ships to the browser as WASM, which sounds like overkill for a 2D hobby engine until you watch the alternatives fall over.
PhysicsJS was the first I crossed off — last meaningful release was years ago, and I’m not building on something nobody’s touched since the previous decade. Matter.js was the real contender: pure JS, easy to drop in, lovely docs, and a big enough community that every problem I’d hit has already been answered. But the maintenance has gone quiet, and once I started pushing body counts the frame budget got tight in a way I couldn’t profile my way out of.
Rapier wins on the two things I actually care about. It’s fast — the WASM core doesn’t blink at the body counts that made Matter.js sweat — and it’s deterministic across platforms, which matters the moment you think about networking or replays. The cost is a heavier, less JS-native API and a WASM blob to load. Worth it. I’d rather pay that upfront than fight the physics layer every time the simulation needs to grow.
The comments on here are down right now. They run on Cusdis — open-source, on their free hosted tier, and the most lightweight option I could find. I’ve used a few commenting systems over the years — FastComments, Disqus, that lot — and Cusdis was the leanest by a distance: no tracker payload, no account wall, just a textbox. The catch with lightweight-and-free is that when the hosted instance falls over, my comments fall over with it, and there’s nothing to do but wait.
Which is fine. Comments were never the point of this place, and only a handful of posts ever get any. But it’s a tidy illustration of what you sign up for when you lean on someone else’s free service: you’ve outsourced a feature and its uptime. I could write my own in an afternoon — it’s a form, a table, and a bit of moderation — but then the uptime would be mine too, and that’s the part nobody misses until it’s theirs.