The Technocolour Dreamcoat, v3.0-release After putting in a whole lot of work (roughly 2h/panel × 8) over late winter/spring sewing another ~700 pixels, plus re-numbering and re-wiring everything, I finally finished the Technocolour Dreamcoat hardware a couple of months ago. With the deadline of the first festival of the summer season looming, I then sat down to the part I dreaded most: (re-) mapping all 1400 pixels in the PixelBlaze software. Theoretically the pixels are laid out in an (iso...| Frabjous Dei
A recommended setup for a craft cocktail bar without running water Having taken up making them at home as a pandemic hobby, I was disappointed at the quality of cocktails available at Burning Man the last couple of years. So in the spirit of radical self-reliance I started putting some thought to how I might be able to achieve something better within the constraints of the playa, notably the lack of running water. I speculated a bit about how I might run a glass rinser (for the mixing tins) w...| Frabjous Dei
I took up making cocktails at home as a pandemic hobby. I love making cocktails for my friends (and they seem to like it!) but I never had the aspiration to be an actual barman doing it down to a price and up to a pace. Smacks of hard work. But maybe it’d be fun to do it for a bigger bunch of friends? Like, 70,000 of them? There are logistical issues. Making cocktails uses a lot of ice and produces a lot of waste water. You kind of need a sink. But what if I can’t have a sink and running ...| Frabjous Dei
The Technocolour Dreamcoat 3.0 beta After ten years of faithful service, the Technocolour Dreamcoat 2.0 finally kicked the bucket. The silicone potting over the LED strips hardens over time and when the strip bends, the hardened silicone grips the LED chips and lifts them off the copper substrate. I replaced one glitchy strip and then identified the same problem in the neighbouring one, at which point I worked out was going on and realised it was futile. So it was time to think about a redesi...| Frabjous Dei
I needed a new toothbrush. My gums are a bit screwed up and my wife’s cousin (who is a dentist) recommended I get one of the new Oral B “iO” models, because it would be good for the specific problem I have. But they’re expensive and so was the old Oral B I already had, so I couldn’t justify it until my existing one broke. Which it did quite suddenly, so yay! And I started researching. The only two features I wanted were the vibration action intrinsic to the “iO” line and a trave...| Frabjous Dei
I have been thinking about this for years but only recently came to a nice pithy expression of it, so I’m writing it up now. This is not to say everything gets worse when it gets slightly bigger, but after a certain point, scale ruins everything. From hamburger restaurants to retail stores to technology companies to countries: scale ruins everything. Would you prefer McDonalds to In ‘n’ Out? Scale ruins everything. Would you prefer genuine choice and competition at specialised retail ou...| Frabjous Dei
I’m feeling a little bit of malaise regarding the computer industry right now, I have to say. And I’m not the only one: https://twitter.com/ctp/status/1098734532386148353 All over the place I see people who got their start programming with “view source” in the 2000s looking around at the state of web application development and thinking, “Hey wait a minute, this is a mess”: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1098222731861012481 (That one might not be the best example but it’s one ...| Frabjous Dei
Fifteen years ago, Apple delivered a fast, good-looking, easy to use operating system with a solid Unix foundation that ran on great hardware. Developers flocked to it and evangelised Macs and OS X wholeheartedly to friends, family and colleagues. This toehold in the market was a significant contributor to Apple’s now near ubiquity outside the enterprise. What if Apple’s developer tools developed a reputation for being slow, awkward, capriciously broken, unfixable—and getting worse, not...| Frabjous Dei
I’m really looking forward to the Xcode 7 GM release, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m looking forward to it because I hold on to some shred of hope that the egregious bugs in Xcode 6.4 will be fixed. Like the one where it crashes every time I attempt to print a variable in the debugger. Like the test runner randomly deciding doesn’t want to show me my test results. Like the iOS docset that is distributed with Xcode 6.4 (not, incidentally, a docset that was regenerated for iO...| Frabjous Dei
Stop building shitty web “apps”. It is impossible to build a cross-platform app as fast as a native app. Even if you succeeded, you would end up deep in the maddening “uncanny valley” of UI where your users get to play “guess what this custom control does?” and two finger swipe zooms instead of scrolls like it should. Building with the platform-supplied toolkits and libraries means you have to go out of your way to make those kinds of mistakes. The original reasons web apps made s...| Frabjous Dei
It was the “Nobody got fired for buying IBM Microsoft” attitude of corporate IT departments that got us the Windows hemogony in the 90s. The security nightmare precipitated by the Microsoft monoculture (remember Word macro viruses?) led those same IT departments to lock plebs’ desktops and networks down tight. The Cambrian explosion of the web in the early/mid 2000s was in part an end-run around corporate security policies which made it impossible to get any interesting or useful softwa...| Frabjous Dei
There are many problems with the way we’re doing one-to-one and one-to-many short message communication over the Internet right now, but making a bunch of slimy venture capitalists rich isn’t one of them. So try and understand what the real problems are before writing another VC-funded, walled-garden messaging platform: If it’s not cryptographically secure, end-to-end, everyone from the NSA to 4chan is going to fuck with your users. This is not acceptable in 2015. If it has investors, c...| Frabjous Dei
Consider the sequence of events: From the point at which Steve Jobs returns to Apple, the company begins minimising its developer ecosystem’s dependence on external suppliers. Metrowerks CodeWarrior is deprecated in favour of Xcode; Xcode’s underlying gcc compiler is switched out for LLVM, the PhD project of one Chris Lattner, now Apple’s Director of Developer Tools. Moore’s law begins to break down generally while benchmarks such as MIPS per Watt become more important, especially in ...| Frabjous Dei
Just about every bar in Singapore has automatic-flush urinals. My brother visited while I was there, and coming back from the toilet one time he quips, “That little flashing light is Lee Kwan Yew watching me pee, isn’t it?” He’s a funny bugger my brother, but there’s more than a little ring of truth to it. Having lived previously only in Australia and the UK I wasn’t prepared for the profound sense of unease that subtly pervades your day when you live in a surveillance state. I us...| Frabjous Dei
… or, “How I nearly burned down the truck that was taking our camp to Burning Man.” One of my side projects for this year’s Burn was some bike underlights, the BikeBlinder. Pretty simple construction, just some WS2812B 144 LED/m strips mounted to RHS aluminium channel, controlled by a DFRobot Beetle, powered off a 125W DC-DC 5V buck converter and a 12V sealed lead acid battery. I had some SLA batteries in the blinky box my friend was going to send up to me from Vegas. He’s a champio...| Frabjous Dei
So, what did my 640-pixel Technocolour Dreamcoat’s shipment of fail arrive in at Burning Man this year? I’m glad you asked! There were two main problems, plus a couple of annoyances. Power Due to the PITA (and expense) of shipping lithium batteries around, I had four Limefuel L130X batteries delivered to meet me at my friends’ place in Seattle, so I’d never hooked it all together on the eventual power source (I’d been running off a mains-wired 100W PSU during development.) The speci...| Frabjous Dei
When @kluivers pointed out @klaaspieter’s post on using the Builder Pattern in Objective-C I took note, as this is something I’d used quite extensively doing TDD in Java. I thought I saw a way to finesse it slightly and finally having had the time to do it, I’m happy to say it’s worked out like I’d hoped. The idea was to use an Objective-C category to hide the builder-related code and prevent it from “polluting” the original implementation. This gist has an example. Say I have s...| Frabjous Dei
Up until the advent of the iPhone App Store you could split the problems you needed to solve to produce a software product into three broad categories: development, marketing and distribution. The App Store solved problem number three in an effortless and comprehensive way—anybody who could possibly use your software is able to buy it instantly, wherever they are, at no up-front cost to the developer. The misconception was that the App Store solved problem number two as well. For a short ti...| Frabjous Dei
Software engineers joke that the first ninety percent of a programming task takes ninety percent of the time and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. The idea is that once you’ve got a program working for the majority of “happy paths”, there’s always a bunch of edge cases you need to take care of. (Daylight saving changeover? Unreliable network? German translation where all the strings are three times as long and muck up your interface?). Tying up these loose ends typi...| Frabjous Dei
A bunch of different people have said something along the lines of, “In order to become a writer, you must write.” Well, about two years ago I decided I wanted to become an App Maker. Now I am. Thank you to everyone who’s helped beta test and translate, helped me with questions about iOS and Objective-C and suffered through me banging on incessantly about this little project. I owe you a beer.| Frabjous Dei