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:
Well, I thought I would have more time for this, but as luck would have it, I’m writing this on a mere 2.5 hours away from the magic midnight-new-year deadline.
So I’ll just write whatever comes to mind and I feel like sharing.
I’ll share whatever photo I’ve taken recently as the featured photo. Here’s a cricket bat stuck in the tree, for safe keeping, in Ashfield. Oh, I’ve got a few photos taken which I should really get onto the site in the garden diary but they will have to wait until next year.
I thought it’s time to think back over the past 12 months - as much as they’ve been pretty unusual - and reflect on what’s next for the little old purple toaster. I’ve continued to maintain the serverless CMS “Koi CMS” that I created, since it does make maintaining websites so very nice (I’m using it right now, of course!). And with all of that time invested, keeping it going doesn’t require a huge amount of time.
So it’s been pretty much 8 months to the day since we entered the “everybody work from home” era of 2020. Mid-March. That feels like an eternity away, yet 2020 has gone so very, very fast. This part is not unusual.
However, 2020, what a year it has been. It’s not quite over yet, with about 5 weeks to go until the end of the year. And it was certainly a very different year compared to 2019 (I can’t believe it was our first Euro trip - got in just in time, it turns out).
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!) and thus the collecting begins…
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. It’s a bit like checking in, just to see what’s new and what’s progressed since I last opened Trumpet Winsock and connected to the information super highway.