When I originally set up this website during the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to use the “Academic” theme from Hugo Blox (or Wowchemy Hugo Academic, as it was known back then). It was a tiny bit of a pain to get self-hosted, rather than through their solutions via Netlify, but it was manageable and I loved the colour themes, the multi-language support (because I vastly overestimated my amount of free time), and that the themes were both desktop- and mobile-friendly. However, a consistent pattern with Hugo Blox – other constantly changing the org’s name, don’t know what’s up with that – has been that updating the theme to its latest version is a chore.
Thu, 8 May 2025
Hey, it’s been a while. I’m still here. It just turns out that even though I do enjoy tending to this little corner of the internet which I’ve decided is mine, writing up a PhD really tires you out. Especially so in terms of wanting to write any text at all ever again.
Fri, 7 Mar 2025
The Monster Hunter Wilds open beta ran this weekend. And not only does it actually run on the Steam Deck, it does so surprisingly decently!
Fri, 1 Nov 2024
The “Tildagon” is the badge which was first available at EMF 2024 (which went to and also wrote enthused about). It has an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, two USB-C ports, 6 “hexpansion” ports, and a bunch of buttons and LEDs. Time to see what we can do with it!
Wed, 5 Jun 2024
EMF is a bi-annual event in the UK where a bunch of tech enthusiasts, tinkerers, creative folk from all over meet up in a field and hang out for 3-4 days. I first found out about it from friends around the end of 2018 / start of 2019, when it had just been and thought “Wow that sounds amazing! I’ll definitely come along to the next one! See you all at EMF 2020”. Yeah that didn’t happen. And then I was away in 2022. But after 5-6 years, I finally got to go! And it. was. incredible!!
Mon, 3 Jun 2024
Well, there we go. Just shy of four years after I started my PhD, I’ve finally submitted a research paper to a workshop. In this case: “The Workshop on Type-Driven Development” – abbreviated TyDe – 2024. Papers aren’t a requirement for passing your PhD here (and I know several successful people who never did as part of their PhD), but it still feels good to at least have submitted something (I’m so not counting my chickens yet!). The title of it is “Type-level Property Based Testing”.
Tue, 28 May 2024
It all started yesterday morning, where I booted up my laptop and found that the greeter (the visual login prompt) was not displaying anything: I had a cursor and a black screen.
Thu, 9 May 2024
About a year or so ago, I made a post mentioning that past me was very into cryptography and encrypting just about anything which could be, and how this was a bit of a headache for current me to deal with (and it has nearly cost me a lot of data at least once). At the time, it was in the name of “everyone is watching, no company is trustworthy, no data of mine shall be useful off-device!”. Which I still believe to some extent, although I’m now slightly more in the “you’re still gonna be Mossad’ed upon” camp.
Sat, 20 Apr 2024
Procrastination time! By inspiration from my supervisor, who told me he did a similar thing to procrastinate his thesis writing, I’ve decided to write a tiny thing that automatically plots the word count of my thesis on a nightly basis. In addition to being a fun little exercise, it’ll probably also serve as a good motivator / guilt mechanism to keep me writing ^^;;
Mon, 18 Mar 2024
With the increased commercialisation of universities in the UK, one of the things that the Computer Science (CS) department unfortunately lost access to, by command from “up on high”, was the providing of publicly accessible web hosting.
Mon, 11 Mar 2024