Posts from August 2026

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

Airwave - an ATC Sim-Game¶

Flight sims have been my thing for decades. It might be fun to play at being the voice on the other end at some point.

CrashAtlas - Aviation Accident Database & Crash Map¶

I didn't know I needed an atlas of aircraft accidents. I'm not sure I do, but now I know there is one.

Snowflow¶

Someone's vibe-coded gaming experiment which, weirdly, is kind of satisfying to mess with.

Terminal graphics protocol¶

I should really get this into my Textual applications; there's a couple where this could work well.

Losing my heart to the rogallo smolnet browser¶

Someone had nice things to say about Rogallo.

The team is the product¶

A good take on something I've thought for a long time, and which is more important now than ever. The idea that a team of people is an unfortunate requirement to get stuff done is wild and short-sighted.

Whitby's Whale Bone Arch to be replaced by bronze replica¶

It turns out that I've walked through two different sets of whale bones at Whitby, and some time soon I'll encounter my third (albeit replicas this time).

Apple brings AppleCare One to the UK¶

I'm going to have to look into this, this might save me a couple of quid.

Don't be a meat proxy¶

I'm going to remember the phrase "meat proxy". In fact, I'm tempted to ask the question "Are you being a meat proxy?" the next time someone sends me something, a question or a reply, that is so obviously just a copy/paste from their chatbot.

LLMs reward expertise¶

Too many people who are pushing for LLMs and agents in a business environment seem to fail to understand that you can't replace expertise with them.

I feel many organisations will find this out too late.

AI is a bubble, just like dot-com¶

I do believe that AI is a bubble. I guess the question is: is it a crypto/NFT kind of bubble, or a dot-com kind of bubble?

Grid Bike¶

The first game I ever wrote, and the first bit of code I ever got paid for, listed on some random Vic20-oriented website!

After a short break to do some fossil hunting, I'm back tinkering with Rogallo. The main change in v1.5.0 is the addition of support for custom themes.

Before I get to that though, there's a small number of other fixes, additions and tweaks. The first is a small change to the Gopher support. As of this version, if there's a type 8 item in a Gopher menu, it will now be turned into a telnet:// URI rather than being left as a gopher:// URI. This should help in handing off such an item to the correct application in your environment.

I've also added a new command: PipeDocument. This is bound to Ctrl+Shift+p by default. If you're viewing a document and run this command, you'll be prompted for a shell command that the source of the document will be piped through. This could be useful for transforming the source and passing it on elsewhere. For example:

One small fix in this release is the correction of a typo in the code that resulted in a misspelled item in the configuration file. The bookmarks_visble configuration setting has been changed to bookmarks_visible (the spelling of visible was wrong). Technically this is a breaking change but, because the impact is almost zero, I'm running with it. The worst possible outcome after installing v1.5.0 is that the bookmarks aren't showing in the sidebar when they were before; calling them back up will fix the issue.

Now on to the main change: custom themes. Rogallo has always had theme support, and the themes that were made available were most of the themes built into Textual. There was a request to be able to create additional themes, and so, here's that feature. Using this, if you want to have Rogallo look just so, you can now follow the documentation, or look over the examples, and have a play. So if you fancied a version of Rogallo that looked like it was running on a good old green terminal:

Or perhaps an amber terminal is more your thing?

Maybe you hanker after the days of MS-DOS and those Turbo IDEs?

Even better: perhaps the CBM64 was your thing back in the day?

Note that none of these themes are part of Rogallo itself, and don't ship with it; they're just examples of what you could do if you wished. I don't even offer them as good examples of what you could do (for example: I can see that I've managed to end up with the jump labels being far too dim to be readable). I'm sure other people with more talent for design than I have will be able to do far better. If anyone wants to make their own themes and share them, I've created a spot just for that.

One last thing: while it's not a feature of this version of Rogallo, I've also done some work on the site to try and add a little more detail about using Rogallo. This process will be ongoing. The main additions here are some background on the supported protocols and some help on the key UI elements.

The documentation is also greatly improved with better examples thanks to smolserve -- this is a little helper project I've been tinkering with. Note that this is not and will never be intended to be an actual small web server; it is and always will be a tool to help development and to support the production of Rogallo's documentation.

If you've ever visited my main web site you might have stumbled on Grid Bike. This was a game that teenage me wrote on my VIC-20. I was bold enough to submit it to Personal Computer News, and ended up having it published in the December 21st 1983 edition.

I still have my copy of that magazine. I've also kept a copy of scans of that page on most versions of my website. What I haven't done, since the early 1980s, is play the game.

I suppose, at some point, I could have grabbed a VIC-20 emulator and typed it in. Or, if I didn't want to type it in (and I don't), I suppose I could have tried to OCR it and get it into an emulator¹. But of course I never did.

Then, a week or so back, I got to thinking: if I threw the two images at an agent, asked it to OCR the code, and then build me a web-based version of the game... could it manage it?

So, on a whim, yesterday evening, sat on a bed in a hotel in Whitby, I threw a prompt at Antigravity:

In this directory you will find grid-bike-page-1.jpg and grid-bike-page-2.jpg -- these are two scans from a magazine from the early 1980s, that contain a game I wrote for the VIC-20. I want you to OCR the images to pull out the code, understand the code, and then create a faithful recreation of the game as a standalone webpage, with the game written in JavaScript, so that I can play the game once again.

Initially it wanted to install PIL globally and kick off the work that way; I wasn't allowing that so I had to tell it to use uv instead and make a virtual environment in which to work. After that it didn't take too long to OCR the code, comprehend it, and write the website. The first version ended up looking far better than I was expecting.

What followed was about an hour of refinement as I got it to fix some visual problems (the characters it used for the lines didn't quite line up on the corners, for example), some audio problems (trying to get it to recreate the sound of the bike I had going on the VIC proved tricky, and it's still not how I remember it), and also a handful of playability issues when it came to mobile devices.

Eventually though it got to a point where, without question, I had a version of the original game, as I played it on my VIC, running in my browser -- both on desktop and on my iPhone.

I suspect it still needs some more refinement. The placement and layout of the opening text isn't quite right, I don't think, and the audio could still be better. Also, I'm finding the sound toggle button doesn't quite work as I think it should (depending on when you turn it off, it seems like it might or might not actually turn off the sound). I'm also not convinced the "Keyboard Controls" panel is as readable as it could be.

Without question though, it's playable and it's my original game, brought back off the page.

If you fancy having a muck about yourself, it's at grid-bike.davep.dev.

Today was a wonderful day of fossil hunting on the east beach in Whitby. We were ready to get down onto the beach before the tide was out enough to let us on, and got off not too long before it would have been back in again (but with more time to spare than the last time). Fossils were found. Rock pools were studied. Fun was had. Donuts and candy-floss were consumed on the way back to the car.

It was a pretty ideal day.

Here's a small assortment of photos.

We're all happy-tired now, and full of dinner. Back home tomorrow. But, all being well, only after a quick trip to the Whitby Lobster Hatchery.

Back in Whitby. Fossils will be hunted. Food will be eaten.

Easily my favourite place to visit.