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

Big Box PC Games

📅 Posted 2020-10-12 (7 minute read)

Recently I’ve been following the trend on collecting “big box” PC games. You know the ones, mostly from the 90’s, from particular software houses like Apogee, Sierra, Lucasarts, MicroProse, Maxis… This is a great video explainer from Ahoy (and the host’s voice is so damn calming, too): Thanks to a tip-off from a work colleague, I picked up a nice copy of MegaRace (which for some reason had a 2nd CD copy in the box - bonus!

My Web Routine

📅 Posted 2020-10-08 (4 minute read)

I found this book (505 Unbelievably Stupid Web P@ges) on my bookshelf from 2003 (it was a gift at the time) and I really doubt many of the sites from back then are still around today. Maybe they are. And who would write a book about websites and print it anyway? Madness that could only come from the dotcom era. So I have this bit of a routine thing going on where I visit a core set of sites each day.

Work from Home towns in NSW

📅 Posted 2020-09-26 (2 minute read)

So, this whole ‘work from home’ thing is working out OK yeah? What if you wanted to get out of the city centre, out of Sydney and move to a ‘more’ country location and keep working as if you were in the room next door? Good internet is a must. And there is only one worthwhile technology: Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). Anything else is just a waste of time.

Better compression with brotli encoding on AWS CloudFront

📅 Posted 2020-09-20 (3 minute read)

So I saw this post on Twitter the other day which annouced that CloudFront now supports Brotli compression for up to 24% smaller file size. This intrigued me, I’m not really in the rad-compression space any more but I guess it is probably time to move on from gzip (~1992) at some stage! More info from Amazon is avaible here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/09/cloudfront-brotli-compression/ What is ‘brotli’ anyway? It’s basically a more efficient algorithm to compress text-based data developed by Googlers about 7 years ago.

A business supplies redirection scam

📅 Posted 2020-09-11 (4 minute read)

Recently a friend called me for advice, as their business had been the target of a particular form of order redirection scam that I haven’t heard of before. I’m sharing this in the hope that we can all learn to identify scams and report them through the proper channels. The scam goes like this… An order is delivered to the business. It’s something they would regularly order, from a regular supplier, so nothing too unusual here.

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