Staying Alive
Staying Alive
Last month, I booked an appointment with the dentist.
What's surprising about that? Well, about three years ago, I decided that as I don't like dentists, and as my teeth — those that are left of them — are in reasonable condition, and as I wasn't planning to live much longer, I'd give up seeing the dentist. I thought, next time I get toothache, that'll be time for an early bath.
Thoughts on bent cycles
Thoughts on bent cycles
I'm getting old.
I've decided to give up my car, mainly for environmental and political reasons, but also for economy, so these days I'm largely dependent on bicycles for transport. In an environment with a lot of wet and windy weather especially in winter, I find that bad weather is a deterrent to cycling. Also, as I age, my balance is getting noticeably worse — I regularly fall. Thus far, it doesn't seem to affect me on a moving bicycle, but I particularly often fall when getting on and off bicycles.
On fuel wood
On fuel wood
We live in a burning world. As we record, there are record wildfires across the Americas, record temperatures around the world, falling oxygen levels in the oceans and however much supposedly renewable energy we produce, Jevons' Paradox means we keep on burning fossil fuels. This is not a great...
when you mill trees into structural timber to make buildings out of (as I'm doing at present with trees blown down in Storm Arwen) more than half the tree is 'waste'. In industrial sawmills, a great deal of that waste can be converted into oriented strand board...
The election, and after
The election, and after
The Losers
The first thing to say about the 2024 General Election result is this: Labour lost, and lost badly. They lost, in fact, half a million votes compared to their 2019 result; they lost three million votes when compared to their 2017 result. They also failed to win anything remotely resembling a majority of the popular vote.
3D file formats
3D file formats
I'm going to be doing a lot with programatically manipulated models. Therefore there's a benefit to me in using a file format which is human-readable, and also easily parsed. Compactness is also a virtue, but it's a virtue I can achieve by compressing human readable files, I think.
Loading time is an issue, but I will be loading relatively few models and manipulating them in memory to produce large numbers of variants, rather than loading a new model for every asset I wish to place. So both from the point of view of total disk space and from the point of view of performance, I think that formats which are optimised more towards my needs as a developer than to raw performance or storage size are probably justified.