A couple of weeks ago I introduced the concept of replacing basic Unix equivalents with modern Rust alternatives with the example of Bat - today I want to introduce Amber, a modern alternative to awk and sed. I recently migrated to Fastmail and switched my email address from arranf@gmail.com to arran@arranfrance.com in an effort to avoid sharing too much information with Google and ensure people can contact me at the domains I own.

The state of images on the web is pretty rough. What should be an easy goal, showing a user a picture, is actually complicated. Good websites deliver the right resolution to the right device, perform lazy loading, support ‘retina’ (or high density pixel) devices, serve new image formats like WebP to the correct clients, and show placeholders whilst images load. It’s messy, hard to get right, and requires a lot more effort than a user might realise behind the scenes.

Joel and I spent the Summer of second year playing The Witcher 1: Enhanced Edition, a game I’ve wanted to play since 2007. This year we’ve decided to pick up The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, the game famously presented to Obama by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and I intend to blog my thoughts and feelings about each chapter of the game. WARNING: THIS SERIES WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Joel and I have booked a trip to Tokyo this Summer. I’m looking forward to visiting a city I’ve wanted to see since I was a small child.

Rust is a language which has fascinated me since I was first introduced to it at the end of my first year of undergraduate. Since then Rust has evolved at a frantic pace and I feel like I’ve forgotten a lot of the subtleties of Rust syntax so I’ve decided to do a number of small projects in Rust to brush up. The first project I’ve tackled is replacing an outdated an abandoned npm package, hugo-lunr.

My website was overdue a facelift, it was bland, outdated, look bad on mobile, and missed some key information. Not only that, it was an obscure Jekyll/HTML mashup with a horrible Gulp/Travis build process - not at all friendly to maintain. I decided that to add my CV to the website it was time for a rewrite. I considered writing the whole website in regular plain HTML and CSS but I wanted some things to ‘just work’ like routing and a basic theme but the power to go ‘under the hood’ when needed to define a unique layout for the CV.

Any frequent user of a Unix operating system will find themselves using the same command line utilities over and over again: rm, mv, ls, cp, grep, and cat to name a handful. A lot of these utilities are old and are written in C. C is a great language for high performance work but it’s long in the tooth and it’s speed often comes at the cost of reliability and/or security.

In preparation for my new working from home reigeme I spent a lot of time looking for a new keyboard. I knew I wanted a mechanical keyboard, known for their robustness and customisability, and I ultimately settled on a TADA68. The TADA68 hit a number of my key wants including customisable mechanical switches, QMK firmware to reprogram the keyboard, and a small 65% profile. Most important of all the TADA68 is available in the standard UK (ISO) layout unlike most other mechanical keyboards which are only available in the US (ANSI) standard.

My friend Joel and I have been playing through CD Projekt Red’s original Witcher game for a month or so now by sitting in front of my PC with a mouse and keyboard. Now I’ve moved in with Catherine I wanted to take advantage of the sofa, my larger TV, and my Steam Link. As an older game The Witcher doesn’t work out of the box with anything other than a keyboard and mouse by default but fortunately the Steam Controller is capable of remapping itself to correspond to mouse and keyboard controls.

A long time ago I spent a Christmas trying to figure out the best way to solve the problem of documenting my plugins for Rock RMS. I’d decided I wanted each to have a standalone website and that I wanted them all to look and feel similar by using a common template. The documentation would live alongside the code by using Github Pages but I was still struggling with one problem - how do I update all of my plugins if the template changes?