Lego Tardis

Posted on January 09, 2009 in Lego. - Comments [2]

The BBC have just announced that the new face of Doctor Who will be Matt Smith, once David Tennant finishes his tenure at the end of the year. It was while watching the announcement that I thought about building a little Lego Tardis for my young son. He was spoilt over Christmas and got lots of Lego, and was very excited about Doctor Who.

It became quickly apparent that building a Tardis out of Lego, especially one that has more details than just a plain blue box with a light on the top, was going to be more complicated than I thought – and would require more bricks of different designs than we had.

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Little Green Men BBS

Posted on January 07, 2009 - No comments

Many years ago I used to run a small BBS called “Little Green Men”. With the advent of the internet the idea of dialing-up individual computers running in the bedrooms of like minded sysops seems rather quaint.

The Little Green Men BBS hosted a large amount of Amiga shareware (mainly from Aminet), demos and tracker modules. There was also an obligatory celebrity pictures areas, but the main focus of the BBS, hence it’s name, were a large archive of UFO related material.

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Simplifying common section content in Textpattern

Posted on November 04, 2008 in Web Design and Textpattern. - No comments

It’s pretty common to have common content that is specific to each section. Often this takes the form of different side-bar content. This is easy to accomplish in Textpattern by creating a form for each section and then including the following code in your page template:

<div id="side"
<txp:if_section name="articles">
	<txp:output_form name="side_articles" />
</txp:if_section>

<txp:if_section name="features">
	<txp:output_form name="side_articles" />
</txp:if_section>

<txp:if_section name="default">
	<txp:output_form name="side_default" />
</txp:if_section>
</div>

This is obviously rather long winded, and as you add more and more sections to your site, it becomes increasingly clumsy. Textpattern 4.0.7 promises us the ability to include tags within tags which would provide a solution along the lines of:

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Discovering Zenith

Posted on November 03, 2008 in Gaming. - No comments

Back in the 80’s my good friend James Good introduced me to a game that was to occupy far too many of my teenage evenings. One reason I spent so much time playing it was that the game ran pretty slowly on the Commodore 64 the other was that it was one of those games that manages to create a strong atmosphere that draws your in to it’s alternative reality. Of course, the fact that it had 10,000 levels to work through also helped!

Sentinel was originally written by Geoff Crammond of REVS and Grand Prix fame and was totally different from everything else around at the time. Sentinel was one of the first “virtual reality” style games.

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Blazer tricks and tips

Posted on March 27, 2008 in Palm and Software. - No comments

Palm’s Blazer is far from everything you’d hope a web browser would be and it looks extremely unlikely that the situation is going to get any better any time soon. There are, however, a number of tricks and tips that can improve your user-experience.

This article contains information about using Optimised mode, Fast mode, disabling javascript, using Google’s mobile search, compressing webpages using transcoder websites, general Blazer maintenance, offline content and what to do when Blazer freezes while trying to access a website.

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