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:
There’s also a 🍊 Garden Diary to check out. It’s sometimes updated as the seasons change.
Latest Posts
📅 Posted 2018-06-19
(7 minute read)
The thought struck me tonight: there is a bit of a thing having clowns in adventure games. Some people find clowns quite scary and yet they appear in the most innocent of adventure games. So that begs the question, what’s with all of the clowns?
To answer this, I had to find, fire up and generally muck around to make a bunch of classics work. ScummVM of course helps a lot in these situations!
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📅 Posted 2018-06-11
(4 minute read)
Recently I’ve blogged a few times about building a serverless CMS using Hugo and AWS tech, but I haven’t talked at all about deploying it yet.
I’ve been having a look at CircleCI, especially since the release of 2.0 of the CircleCI platform about a year ago (well, once it came out of beta anyway!).
The following was all tested using the “free” version of CircleCI: that is, you can run up to 1 Linux container for a private repo for free. Additional containers cost $50USD per month, but I haven’t had to try that yet. Instead, I rely on my patience while CircleCI does it’s thing.
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📅 Posted 2018-06-03
(8 minute read)
So I finally got around to taking my Twin Famicom for a drive to my parents’ place. You see, I was on a bit of a mission to try out some 80s gaming action on a genuine CRT TV which my parents still rock. It’s brought into the modern age with the help of a DVB Tuner, keeping those broadcast TV programmes alive for a little bit longer yet.
I had actually forgotten a few things about CRTs, having used LCD TVs for so long now. Boy, they are noisy. And I don’t mean the volume through the speakers. It’s that constant high-pitched whine which I had totally forgotten about. There is no escaping it, even moving to another room the sound purveys. Of course, the older generation amongst us won’t have this issue as the top end frequencies roll off in the teens of Khz, but for me it’s still there. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
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📅 Posted 2018-05-31
(5 minute read)
Or… why I have a website
I thought it might be an idea to write a little bit about my recent experience with recruiting. I haven’t personally done a lot of recruiting so far and I can see why people don’t like it very much. It’s certainly an activity that uses a lot of time and often may not get you the outcome you were after.
Recently, I’ve spent about 6 months recruiting for a position which has 6 months worth of funding. This seems crazy in itself however it did at least give me time to think about different approaches.
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📅 Posted 2018-05-16
(5 minute read)
tl;dr
Lambda has 512MB of space to play with in /tmp/, which is shared across multiple invocations of the same function, which makes it difficult to manage. Long running functions share the same space and there is no control over when containers are reused.
Update 19-Oct-2019: I’m still occasionally running out of space on my lambda instances, which is annoying. Redeploying the function guarantees a fresh disk, but this is hardly convenient. I can’t really live without space in /tmp/. I haven’t tested mass-concurrency of executions as my CMS isn’t that heavily used, but I can imagine this would be a real problem if I was managing hundreds of websites and everyone hit ‘publish’ at once.
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