Emulators fancinate me. The idea that you could run a computer within another computer feels like some sort of arcane vodoo magic. Playing Gamecube games on a PC? MegaDrive games on an Xbox 360? Insanity, but awesome nonetheless.

I’ve been been working with DynamoDB for a while now. I want to share some of my findings about it’s little quirks with you all as well as summarise my thoughts and learnings about how it works for my own future reference. It’s a really great system for storing per user information and in situations where you don’t particularly want to query across multiple tables at a time. This is going to be quite a high level overview but I’ll try to link more detailed articles as I go so you can research the topics raised here further.

I’ve been using Discord for a while, primarily to chat to friends while playing games. It’s replaced TeamSpeak and Mumble entirely for pretty much everybody I know online - for good reason! It’s easy to use and simple to administer, requiring only a web browser.

I’ve had a problem for a while, and that problem was that this website was getting rather dusty. I originally wrote it way back in 2010 as a WordPress website straight after university and it looked, well, pretty basic. I ported it to ASP.NET in 2012 to allow me to make it more flexible. I wrote everything from scratch including the css and scripts the page used. This site looked OK but it didn’t age well and it was left to rot for far too long.

I’ve wanted to create a robot for a long time and with the help of the wonderful Mr Andrew Brixey I have finally been able to do so, for the Big Draw at Cranleigh Arts Centre back in October.

Now and then a bit of technology comes out that really catches the attention of the interwebs and the media in general. The bit of technology doing that currently is the rather amazing Raspberry Pi Zero.

I promised last time that I wouldn’t leave it so long before writing again but it looks like I did. Whups. I apologise but life has been so busy that I really haven’t been writing as much as I should; I hope to change this.

UPDATE 28-10-2013 - Due to the fact I will be moving house at the end of the week the Minecraft server will be down, for how long I don’t know. I have been planning to put this entire site on my pi to save money, but then again this server has been far more popular than I originally expected thanks for the Pi Foundation et al. We’ll see what happens over the next few weeks but whatever the outcome I thank all of you heartily for playing on my server.

UPDATE: ezDoom has been updated substantially as of August 2013. These updates may require you to uninstall any previous versions of the program you may have. You can now select multiple PWADS and PK3 files to run with the game and the underlying engine has been shifted from ZDoom to GZDoom. Mods you specify will be run in the order shown in the application so make sure you add them in the correct order if need be. These changes enable support for many more mods, including the awesome Brutal Doom which I can’t recommend enough. It’s one of the best Doom mods ever made. Enjoy!