Trains need careful marshalling, your threads are the same. I apologize for this illustration, it is bad even by my standards. In my defense, I drew it on an airplane. Condition variables (CVs) are supposed to be the easy-to-use, hard-to-mess-up synchronization primitive in...

The IFComp2026 is well underway, with dozens of interactive fiction games of various forms available to play. I don't have an entry but I did help out with one in a minor way. Play Wild Ride to Earth in your browserWild Ride to Earth is a sprawling and lighthearted scifi adv...

I have been a bad blogger. For the last 10 years my feeds have contained sad little text-only snippets (actually the first 30 words) instead of the complete contents of...

I enjoy daily mini-games. I play the New York Times ones (Wordle, Connections, and the mini crossword) and sometimes Clues By Sam if I am feeling extra smart. Recently I...

Recently I completed in my first game jam, where people complete games within a strict time limit to a certain theme. inkJam is one such jam for games writing in...

When I first conceived sheep.horse, I had the idea that I was going to set the world ablaze with only my white-hot rhetoric, forgoing the flashy Javascript heavy techniques that...

First, a warning. This post contains pictures of spiders. Big spiders. If this worries you, perhaps consider reading something else - I suggest my previous post: Borneo - No Spiders.We...

Recently we visited Borneo, third largest island on the planet and home to some amazing wildlife and geography. There is too much to describe in a short blog post so...

For years now I have been aghast at the terribly impolite behavior of some bots who spider my site. It is extremely common to see many successive requests to the...

Just under a week ago I published my old game on itch.io for the first time as an experiment. I have always been told that itch really helps with engagement...

Voyage of the Marigold, my StarTrek-esque game of commanding a starship on a dangerous mission, is now available on Itch.io. There are no updates to the game itself, and the...

Another entry in my not-a-travel-blog - this time sketching out the start of our Namibia odyssey. We flew into Windhoek and picked up our rental - a large Ford Ranger....

Avif files are the new hotness, and to be honest they are pretty good. Basically a replacement for both jpeg and png with better compression and (finally!) support for alpha...

This is not really a travel blog but we have been traveling and my camera roll is ponderous with photos from around the world. I plan to post some of...

Note: As I was writing this I became aware of an even better project covering much the same ground in a more detailed way - I Left Port 22 Open...

Recently I finished The Gate of the Feral Gods, Book 4 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. DCC is real success story, starting out self-published by author Matt Dinniman before...

It has been on my todo list for years but I have finally gotten around to implementing dark mode in the default theme for the static site generator that runs...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I was experimenting with blocking HTTP1.1 requests to my site. Here are some observations, in case anyone is thinking of following in...

Update: I have a followup post with some updates and results.Most of the traffic I get on this site is bots - it isn't even close. And, for whatever reason,...

Travel brings up amazing contrasts. Sometimes you are eating croissants on a high-speed train zooming through Europe. Sometimes you sipping wine in a huge metal tube flying over Greenland's icecaps....

A recent post on one of the C++ subreddits caught my eye. It has since been deleted but I thought it illustrated an interesting point.Paraphrasing from memory:These are good questions...

This post advocates minimizing dependencies in web pages that you do not directly control. It conflates dependencies during build time and dependencies in the browser. I maintain that they are...

(Click to go fullscreen)This is nothing more than an physics-based desk toy - watch the battle play out. Who will win? Part of the fun trying to figure out the...

We recently stayed in London for almost a week - I've been to London before but only as a stopover to somewhere else. This time I had the opportunity to...

Is there a more welcome refuge from the troubles of modern life than the laundromat - that electromechanical chapel of enforced contemplation? I find them very relaxing.I haven’t had occasion...

They say traveling broadens the mind. I am on an extended vacation in Europe, seeing wonderful new vistas, trying new foods, meeting interesting people, connecting to strange Wifi networks...... and...