@ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Blender@mastodon.social kudos for reacting in this way and not just stubbornly defending the original announcement like I'm sure most others would have, but I don't think you can strictly claim that "No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender" when, according to Anthropic, "The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude". MCPs literally enable AIs to replace creatives. We need to prevent them, not help them.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

RE: https://gardengate.earth/@KateMinervaHarris/116539503137921100

As much as I hate being in photos, I suppose I should boost this 🙄

gardengate.earth

Kate Harris: "We went to Fountains Abbey today. @ric@mastodon.q…" - Garden Gate

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Despite driving to Newcastle and back yesterday, and Glasgow and back today, I still found time to implement text rendering into my little retro game engine 😁

Doesn't yet have the option to only line break between words though.

#retro #retroDev #gameDev #ZXSpectrum #font

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@boffbowsh@mastodon.me.uk @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk oh that's brilliant! I both wish I'd thought of that, and that you hadn't caved without getting a proper deal out of them for it.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Considering I started building this 3 days ago and had to break off to build an entire client website so this is really only about 12 hours work, I reckon my new #retro game engine is coming along nicely! 😁

Framebuffer working, scaling without pixel skew working, individual pixel draws working, sprites working, full screen toggle working. 💪

https://development.qweb.co.uk/qjerg-demo/

(yeah yeah, I know, this is too colourful for retro. Real games will have more restricted palettes I promise!)

#gameDev #retroDev

development.qweb.co.uk

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@grumpygamer yeah but... A* is real AI, while LLMs are just pretending to be AI. 👍 Ask your NPC to move from A to B and it'll look at the playing field, calculate the actual best path, and set off. It'll maybe even continuously check for changes along that route and work around them. Ask ChatGPT to move from A to B and it'll just hallucinate some options and fly through a few buildings to get there. Maybe eating a small child along the way because 🤷‍♂️

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thegiddystitcher@sunny.garden @theresmiling@ibe.social this might be the weirdest thing you've started doing so far. 👀 Not that you ever post weird things, of course.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@teahands@mastodon.gamedev.place sounds like somebody should be working on their game? Yes I'm well aware of the hypocrisy at play here. 😆

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

As if the power button falling out of my phone wasn't bad enough, I've just run out of Aberlour A'Bunadh.

Today isn't acceptable. Who do I see about a refund?

#Aberlour #Whisky / #Whiskey

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place @trezzer@social.linux.pizza urgh, to be honest I'm rather hopeful I'll have finished mine and maybe kicked out a few 16bit systems after 11 years! 😅 I have a bunch of soldering toys picked out ready to order, by the way. Going with Weller but haven't got around to ordering yet. Too much on at once as usual!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@JeremiahFieldhaven@mastodon.gamedev.place aww, happy birthday little guy 🎂 Also, this is definitely an excuse to buy cake.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

If you haven't spent all morning painstakingly recreating the ZX Spectrum font as a Javascript array of sprite strings, what are you even doing with your life? 🤷‍♂️

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@teahands@mastodon.gamedev.place 😆

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@teahands@mastodon.gamedev.place wait, weren't we competing to finish first? Down tools down tools! 😬

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place nothing says "are you sure?" quite like a big orange return key!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place we're fine as long as it's not the human that's on fire 🤔

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross so for an actually useful solar, you need a higher wattage panel than you'd think, hooked up to a leisure battery that has a decent capacity so that the actually sunny days we get fill the battery quickly, and then the battery capacity sustains the devices for the weeks between good strong charge up days.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 4w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place I'm really liking Black Sheep at the moment. The one I go to is a 1.5 hour drive away and I think I pay about £7 for a flat white + a toffee waffle thing, but it's delicious! 😅

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross my project currently sits in the wine cellar but after numerous upgrades to both the panel and battery, I ended up with a 100W panel and an 85Ah battery for a single Pi. It worked perfectly during the summer, but as autumn set in, even this didn't get enough sun time to top the battery up before the Pi fully drained it. I plan to eventually add a wind turbine and somehow dynamically switch between wind and solar for the battery charge.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 4w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales I'm always seeing sheep on their front knees and never quite sure if it's just a preference thing or if there's a reason for it.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross if you fancy doing anything like that, the ffmpeg script I cobbled together for it is here: https://github.com/qwebltd/Useful-scripts/blob/main/Bash%20scripts%20for%20Linux/ffmpeg-to-youtube-feed-for-raspberry-pi.sh

GitHub

Useful-scripts/Bash scripts for Linux/ffmpeg-to-youtube-feed-for-raspberry-pi.sh at main · qwebltd/Useful-scripts

Potentially useful scripts by QWeb Ltd. Contribute to qwebltd/Useful-scripts development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@llamasoft_ox @gilesgoat yeah I was just about to say, surely it's centralised and the paper you take in just tells them what to type in to bring the file up that says what exactly is signed off for handing out. I know this is still how it works with humans. Maybe animal prescriptions isn't the same.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat oh that's ridiculous. Surely the whole point of the prescription process is that a qualified person has deemed you or your animal suitable to give the stuff to? If they're found to be handing out prescriptions without good reason, they get struck off. You shouldn't need to prove anything to a pharmacy, you have a vet's signature.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@teahands@mastodon.gamedev.place 👀

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross from what I remember, yep. There's just such a small window in the day where the sun is actually well positioned in the sky, and not covered by cloud. There's a sort of ambient trickle too though, and the more efficient the panel is, the more it detects that trickle and converts it, so again the bigger the panel, the more time you get where there's enough trickle to keep the MPPT happy and send some charge through, where a smaller panel just doesn't generate enough without direct sun.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Gina@fosstodon.org throw a quick blog post up and link him to that instead. They can't filter generic links 😏

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place yeah, you'd still use SVN for that. Dropbox isn't a replacement, it's more for device synchronisation and backup than as a way of working. But once it's installed and set to watch the folders you want it to watch, you just leave it to it. And anything that you don't actively need on device currently, you just stop synchronising that folder and delete locally, leaving it remote for future sync.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Finally ordered the tonne of soldering toys. Now I'm just a few days away from no longer having an excuse for not finding out how rubbish my soldering skills are. 😬

Also ordered a replacement phone button, which probably won't be quite the right one but I've already wasted the only day at home I've had this week, scrolling through a zillion pages of aftermarket buttons and can't cope with any more of them!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 4w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place north Carlisle, and fussy. 😅 There are plenty of Costas etc around, and I'm generally happy with those, but if there's somewhere nicer to aim for I will. There's a place called Smilies that I like here but you wouldn't be willing to drive 1.5 hours for it.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place I've never even heard of Halon before!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place 😐 My current project currently totals 113kb. And it's nearly complete. 😆

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales ah that sucks. If even a carrot has too much, you really don't have many options do you 🤔

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I still don't use SVN, Git, or anything similar. Even when collaborating I just make sure nobody is working in the same files at the same time. I use Diff periodically, but I've just never gotten along with having to run commands to push and pull files - that's a middleman step that just annoys me. Even as somebody who writes commands for a living. 🤷‍♂️ Oh, except for WordPress plugins. You're forced to when submitting those.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to on mastodon.qweb.co.uk

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I even have my mail folders in there, so if my laptop dies I can just spin up a new one, install Dropbox, and everything reappears including my mail. I don't have to do periodic backups or anything. That's a Linux Maildir thing though. Windows is 1 file per mail folder instead of 1 file per email, so when you receive a new email on Windows it changes a ~5Gb file which doesn't finish sync before the next email comes in. Linux wins there for sure!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales can she have carrots? Every horse and pony I've ever known has loved carrots.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 4w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place although, there's literally nothing within walking distance of here annoyingly. There's a post office in the next village over, and that's our nearest shop. But even that's a 30 minute walk and they basically just sell biscuits.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales I'm not sure I ever even have real brands in my dreams!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross the problem is basically that it just isn't safe to trickle charge a leisure battery too slowly, so the job of the MPPT is to make sure the feed from the panel is a high enough amperage to allow through to the battery, and if the panel is too small then the amount of time per day where it emits a high enough feed for safe charging is outweighed by the output load. It's a super fun thing to play with, but you can't cheap out on the tech unfortunately. I tried. 😆

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I prefer just being like... Ok I need to work on this feature, I'll be editing these files. Anybody else need to? Ah right well you do that bit first then and I'll do my bit later. And these days if I have another dev working on something, it's because I don't want to touch a particular system myself anyway. So they're on their own with it. I don't really collab much in code. Hmm. Am I a professional introvert? 😆

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@teahands@mastodon.gamedev.place does that count as a draw?

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thomastc@mastodon.gamedev.place I don't remember a CRT effect, but i do remember KitKat being a codename I was excited for. To date, I think the best feature Android ever added was those cards before they went full voice search. You'd drive to London or something and it'd pop up cards telling you where to get lunch and what the weather would be like, which hotels had vacancies, what the train times were, where to park, etc. All sorts of actually useful things because it recognised you were out for the day.

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Gina@fosstodon.org maybe that's what the Bermuda triangle is 🤔

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ross oh, and they don't like windows either. I originally assumed I could hook this up in our old.conservatory but it turned out glass is generally engineered to filter out the rays these things rely on. So you have to go external which means designing into waterproof boxes while also accounting for dispersing heat and preventing condensation. I ended up with an IP67 junction box (this one I think: https://www.amazon.co.uk/GEVEELIFE-Waterproof-Electrical-Weatherproof-Enclosure/dp/B0BN3B3MDT ) and some horrifically expensive cable glands + moisture nut thing.

amazon.co.uk

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @gilesgoat@toot.wales @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I built ecommerce engines for 2 agencies and in turn all of the ecomm sites that these agencies run. So each site shares the same codebase with bespoke changes over the top, basically. There's maybe 50 sites at the moment, split between the two different frameworks. So when I make framework changes, I literally manually copy paste the relevant lines of code from a dev instance to ~25 live websites. I know Git will do this in seconds, but 🤷‍♂️

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place for some reason I'm now thinking you could turn this into a sort of... free-roam dice roll turn based action monopoly-like thing... Can't imagine that's been done before 😅

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thomastc@mastodon.gamedev.place remember when we were still around the Android 4 era, and new releases were actually anticipated? You'd drop everything and load up the announcement page to scroll through all the cool new innovative changes and then spend the next week trying to force your phone to pick the update up prematurely? Remember when Icecream Sandwich dropped and Google actually gave out literal icecream sandwiches with Nexus purchases because it was such a cool launch? Now they just trigger anxiety 😬

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales that's a lot of work just to turn something off. I'm not sure whether that's poor documentation or poor design!

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Ric @ric@mastodon.qweb.co.uk

· 3w ago

Replying to

@gilesgoat@toot.wales @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place it used to. A looooooooong time ago I worked for Icelolly, the holidays site. Their approach was to have all developers work on their own local copy of the site and constantly push changes back to a core version, until collaboratively the core version was ready to release and then it'd in turn be pulled over to the production server. We used Git for all of this, and it was a daily mess of merge conflicts. I hated working like that.

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