Grrr… they’ve done it again

For the third time, I’ve headed to my local Maplin to buy something I noticed a while ago in their catalogue, only to find that they’ve discontinued it. The more that bricks-and-mortar stores do this kind of thing to me, the more I turn to shopping online… where I have found a similar product, but […]

Wounded cat

Last thing last night, one of the tame outdoor cats, Pangaroo (named from Pangur Bán, a white cat in an early Irish poem, and Rua (red), as he is mostly white with ginger patches), appeared after an absence of a couple of days, with a big open wound on his tummy, just above one of […]

Real registers to emulated ones, in C on x86

My work project involves generating machine code and running it, and to make debugging the code generator easier, I wrote an emulator for the subset of the x86 that we output for. To make the emulation run in the same context that the real CPU would see when running that code, I put some inline […]

My postillion has been struck by lightning

My landline phone at home became crackly recently, then stopped working altogether.  I moved a phone to the original Eircom-provided socket, and found that worked OK and it was just my extension wiring that had gone dead.  So I opened up the connection box, and found one of the contacts was a little corroded.  Then […]

Good geeks and nasty geeks

Again and again I’ve noticed that there seem to be two main kinds of geeks.  Obviously, there are many ways that one could classify members of a group of people: in the case of geeks, it could be software geeks and hardware geeks; or those with more or less experience or expertise; those who use […]

The Big Bang happened in 1947

In today’s BBC News, there’s an article about Heligoland, mentioning that after the second World War, Britain tried to blow the island up with nearly 4000 tons of explosives planted (and according to the newspaper account, 8500 tons altogether, presumably including the Nazi ammunition stores that were being disposed of) — one of the largest […]

Bread — my best yet

I’ve never learnt much about cooking, but a few months ago I bought a home breadmaking machine, and after a bit of experimentation I got the hang of it (I hadn’t known about “strong flour” when I first tried it; that seems to be the main key), and have hardly ever bought shop bread since. […]

Sonin saikhan baina

An uneventful week. The tame mummy cat has moved her kittens to somewhere safer; the feral mummy cat has moved hers to somewhere where I can’t tame them, evidently humans are a bad influence.  I have at last identified what I’ve been finding uncanny about one of my favourites of the farm cats, Pangaroo: there’s […]