Home from travels

I just got back home from my trip to Germany. I had planned to post some updates while over there, but for some reason the password manager on my iPad/iPhone didn’t share the saved password from my desktop machine, so I couldn’t log in. Sorry about that! I’ll post a fuller daily update a bit later today.

Stranger Things!

Here are some photos as promised yesterday of the Stranger Things Lego set that I finished building.

Stranger Things: Where's Will?

Stranger Things: The Upside Down

Stranger Things: Byers House

Stranger Things: Christmas lights

It’s incredibly cool. The whole set can be turned upside down, to display either the real word or the Upside Down more prominently. And there’s a light that projects onto the Christmas Lights. There’s a whole lot of other wonderful detail that you probably can’t see very well in the photos. This is the definitely biggest and possibly the coolest Lego set that I’ve ever owned.

Today I spent most of the day writing another one of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe, this time about walking around the world in a straight line. And a bit of time doing more prep for my Very Special Magic Draft. Oh, and I decided to remove the “latest posts” thing in the sidebar of this blog and replace it with a tag cloud, now that I have an interesting number of tags that I use for posts.

New content today:

And we’re live!

Hi everyone! I’ve been thinking for quite a while about making a new portal page for people interested in following my creative work and other stuff. Yesterday I decided to knuckle down and make it, and I previewed it early to my Patreon patrons to get some feedback while I was fiddling with the graphic design.

(Techy details: I had to dig pretty deep into WordPress custom CSS to get the design working how I wanted, removing a lot of excessive negative space in the sidebar. And then it turned out I’d stupidly installed the code into a sub-subdirectory rather than a subdirectory of my web root, so I spent another couple of hours moving directories, editing config files, and trawling through the WordPress database to edit all mentions of the sub-subdirectory. And then hack the .htaccess file to change the default landing page for the web domain. Thankfully it all seems to be working, but it’s possible there’ll be a glitch somewhere.)

TL;DR: It took more work than I’d expected, but we’re up and running!

The other thing I did today was write a new Proof that the Earth is a Globe: #21. Zodiacal light. I started about 9am and worked on that to about 2pm, so that was most of the day. But I’m pleased with this one. How often do you get to cite Brian May’s Ph.D. thesis in a piece of scientific writing?

Then I took Scully (my dog) out for a bit of walk, and spent the rest of the afternoon getting this new home page up and running. Here’s a photo of Scully (taken a couple of days ago):

Scully on a bushwalk

Isn’t she cute?

New home page

Welcome to my brand new home page, and portal to all the stuff I do online. After literally decades with the same static personal home page, I’ve shifted to a blog-like front page to allow frequent updates to let you know what I’m working on, and for you to comment on things. I plan to post here pretty much daily, so I hope you stick around and enjoy the regular updates!

If you liked the old vintage 1990s home page, never fear, it is preserved for posterity here.