Blogs Posts by Nick McHardy

Welcome to my blog, where I cover tech, games and whatever else that’s interesting in the universe like vinyl, fusion jazz and side projects.

This website is inspired by the web of the late 90s - no, not just the style of the site - but also harking back to a time when people would set up websites (probably on Geocities or similar) and write about anything that interested them. Most of the websites looked terrible (my first few sites were no exception) but it was so liberating having your own site. So here’s my modern-day version of that late 90s vibe.

Not sure where to start? Here are some blogs to get you started:

Learning About Leadership Episode 1 (May ‘20)
The Humble Minidisc (Aug ‘18)
Why the Sega Dreamcast is the Best Console of All Time (Aug ‘18)
Common Website Vulnerability Scans Found in Logs (Apr ‘18)
On Being an Engineering Manager (Feb ‘19)

There’s also a 🍊 Garden Diary to check out. It’s sometimes updated as the seasons change.

Latest Posts

A Comparison of Electric Cars in Australia under $100k

📅 Posted 2019-10-30 (3 minute read)

Yikes. $100k sounds like an awful lot of money, but you don’t get much of an electric car for much less. Today’s blog is a quick attempt to see where the electric car market is in Australia, based on my unscientific 7-point comparison approach, whilst keeping the price “reasonable”.

I figured if I’m going to build a spreadsheet with some facts and figures, I might as well publish a blog on the topic.

Thoughts on working the side hustle

📅 Posted 2019-10-24 (5 minute read)

For more than 10 years, I’ve been working on website projects outside of my main career. It’s related, of course, but runs at a completely different pace. Today’s blog is a reflection of the experience.

Background

I always intended to do work-outside-of-work as a bit of a hobby. I spun up a small hobby company called Purple Toaster in January 2010. I did a bit of work here and there before that, but that was when I first solidified it with a name and went forward from there. It took me 3 days of solid thinking to come up with that name: I remember pacing around my apartment and not getting a whole lot done until I invented the name. You can imagine I figured it out once I wandered into the kitchen on day 3. Thank goodness, my life could continue. It also helped the domain was available since it feels like practically any decent name is taken these days.

Why I have a blog

📅 Posted 2019-10-22 (7 minute read)

Firstly, I need to thank Tobias Van Schneider for what is really the main Inspiration for this post: https://www.vanschneider.com/a-love-letter-to-personal-websites

In writing this, I had almost forgot that ‘blog’ is a truncation of ‘weblog’! Does anyone still refer to sites like this as a “weblog”? Maybe it’s time to bring the term back into fashion? I’m procrastinating. Onto today’s topic.

This blog has taken a fair amound of time to put together, not because it’s complicated or difficult, but because I somehow have found many websites to build in the last few weeks. Right now I’m sitting in front of an open fire in a ski lodge in the Perisher Valley, enjoying the unsual amount of snowfall in mid October. So I certainly have time to write up the following ideas.

A history of my corner of the web

📅 Posted 2019-10-21 (5 minute read)

This blog is super-condensed but showcases some pretty spectacularly terrible 90’s website design. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking some of those early sites were pretty amusing!

I’ve been interested in the web for a long time. When I say, web, I mean the Tim Berners-Lee web, which basically revolves around HTML, URIs and HTTP and provides a way to access information from all around the world without having to log onto different computers to get the information.

That time I wanted to host a video game music radio show

📅 Posted 2019-08-13 (7 minute read)

The year was 2016, I had been presenting Fusion Delusion on Eastside Radio for 5 years and it was time to try something new. I lodged an “Application for New Programme” and wanted to take my volunteer community radio hosting gig in a different direction and maybe playing out so many fusion jazz tracks had got to my head.

So here’s a bit of the brief I submitted to Eastside Radio at the time. Sadly, it wasn’t successful in getting up: the programming committee didn’t warm to the idea as much as I had hoped. I wasn’t alone, however, as a fellow volunteer helped me put together an air check and write up the proposal.

← Newer Posts Older Posts →