Tech

I was building the intro for a match-3 game called MatchCraft, made in Godot. Thirty-six seconds: eight painted slides that slowly push in and cross-dissolve into each other, a narrator over the top, ambient sound underneath, subtitles fading in and out on the beat of the voice. The obvious way to ship that is to render a video and play it. I did not want a video. So I ended up using DaVinci Resolve, a professional video editor, as the authoring tool for a cutscene that never becomes a video at all. The game reads the edit out of Resolve’s project file and replays it live. ...

I wanted a monitor stand to lift a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 off my desk. The monitor is 49 inches of curved glass and weighs about 14.5 kilograms with its stand attached. My stand would be 1000 mm wide, 380 mm deep, 170 mm tall, cut from a single pine panel. One question mattered more than any of the joinery: would a metre of pine bow in the middle under all that? ...

I wanted to 3D print an adapter so my Bosch POF 1200 AE router would run along a Makita guide rail. To do that I needed the base plate geometry: the diameter of the centre hole, and where the three mounting screws sit. I assumed this would take about four minutes. Bosch sells the router, Bosch sells a guide rail adapter for it, so Bosch must publish the plate dimensions somewhere. ...

I was buying a sheet of polystyrene to sit between a pool table and a plywood workbench top. The listing said “EXPOL 2400 x 1200 x 40mm S Grade Polystyrene ThermaSlab”, and I wondered what the S meant, and whether I should have bought the H instead. The short answer, if that is all you came for: S grade H grade Density 16 kg/m³ 24 kg/m³ Nominal thermal conductivity 0.041 W/m °C 0.038 W/m °C Nominal R-value at 50 mm about 1.2 m² °C/W about 1.3 m² °C/W Colour code on the sheet edge brown green Relative weight a third lighter 50% heavier H grade is denser, stronger, slightly more insulating and more expensive. S grade is the standard board and it is what most people want. ...

I have a home server called reef. I have been connecting to it with ssh reef for a long time. Today it stopped. ❯ ssh root@10.5.7.35 ssh: connect to host 10.5.7.35 port 22: No route to host Then, in the same terminal, one second later: ❯ /usr/bin/ssh root@10.5.7.35 Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.12-10-pve x86_64) root@reef:~# Same host. Same shell. Same second. One works and one does not. I have never seen anything like it, and it took a while to believe what I was looking at. ...

I have been running madebynathan.com on GitHub Pages since 2010, and ndbroadbent.com for years after that. In all that time I never verified either domain. I did not know I was supposed to. The custom domain worked, the site was up, and nothing ever complained. Then I set up this blog, went looking for the correct way to attach a domain, and found a settings page I had never opened. What verification actually protects you from GitHub Pages works out which repository to serve by matching the Host header of the request against whichever repo has claimed that custom domain. Your DNS points at GitHub. GitHub looks up who owns the name. ...