Following on from designing my own shelves and stands for prints off the A1 Mini, I’ve finally sat down and learned some proper CAD rather than just cobbling shapes together — first project is TinkerCAD, and the thing I picked to design is a shelf to hold my Unifi WiFi router.

It’s a simple, practical brief for a first go: something to mount the router flat and tidy rather than leaving it balanced wherever it’ll fit. TinkerCAD’s block-based approach made it an easy on-ramp — nothing like the intimidation of opening a full parametric CAD package for the first time — and it was enough to get a properly measured, functional design done in an evening.

Flickr album collecting prints off the Bambu Lab A1 Mini — a running photo dump alongside the write-ups, updated as new prints come off the bed.

A follow-up to my first impressions post on the Bambu Lab A1 Mini — I’ve moved past calibration cubes and benchies now, so here’s a look at the first useful things I’ve actually printed with it.

First up is a phone stand, printed in blue — one I designed myself. Nothing fancy, but it’s exactly the kind of small, practical thing that makes owning a printer worth it, and there’s something extra satisfying about it being your own design rather than someone else’s model. There’s now a permanent stand sat by the printer holding my phone up at a useful angle.

I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a 3D printer — a Bambu Lab A1 Mini. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time, years of watching other people’s prints show up online and thinking “I should really get one of those” before actually doing anything about it.

Went with the A1 Mini over the bigger models mainly for the price and the smaller footprint — it doesn’t take up much desk space, and it felt like a sensible way to dip a toe in without committing to a huge enclosed printer before I know how much I’ll actually use it.

doomheaven.uk is moving house.

It started life as a Doom fan site back in the late 90s — WADs, screenshots, whatever bits of Doom nonsense felt worth putting on the web at the time. It’s sat online quietly ever since, hosted the whole way through by teamhellspawn.com, who’ve now let me know they’re winding things down.

I want to say a proper thank you to them for that. Free webspace for the better part of three decades is a genuinely long time to keep something ticking over for no reason beyond being decent about it, and rather than just switching it off, they gave me the chance to get everything off in one piece before it went. Not everyone bothers with that on the way out, so it was appreciated.

More fun playing with BBC Twitter Bot.

https://tco/ks0jhudxdM

https://t.co/xBabCMPWCX

https://tco/jVpUMLBa8D

https://tco/Rt3DOf1FOh

Got a new Mac with Catalina pre-installed, so had to compile my own version of Beebasm for the 64 bit OS.

BeebAsm.zip

BBC Micro machine code take on C64 10 Print one line random pattern generator.

Code at Github 10print.asm

\ 10 PRINT
\ Using BeebASM assembler
\ (c) Alastair Montgomery

INCLUDE "../lib/constants.asm"
seed = &70

ORG &2000

.start
    LDA #23
    STA seed
    LDA #63
    STA seed+1
    LDX #0
.char
    LDA chartable, X
    JSR oswrch
    INX
    CPX #23
    BNE char
.loop
    JSR random
    BMI two
.one
    LDA #224
    JMP print
.two
    LDA #225
.print
    JSR oswrch
    JMP loop
.finish
    RTS
.random
    INCLUDE "../lib/random.asm"
.chartable
    EQUB 22,0
    EQUB 23,224,8,8,12,7,224,48,16,16
    EQUB 23,225,16,16,48,224,7,12,8,8
.end

SAVE "MyCode", start, end

BBC Micro take on C64 10 Print one line random pattern generator.

10 MODE 0
20 N=RND(1):IF N > 0.5 THEN PRINT "/"; ELSE PRINT "\";
30 GOTO 20
RUN

Twitter Post

New retro game, looks worth getting a Amstrad CPC emulator setup to play it.

Video Source Retro Collection

Juan’s games: (https://www.usebox.net/jjm/)

Buy physical copies of these games:

Golden Tail

Kitsune Curse

Mr. Ee from Micro Power for the BBC Micro nice variation on the Pacman theme.

Play Online at BBC Mirco

New retro game, looks worth getting a Commodore emulator setup to play it.

This style of game is one of my favorites, loved Boulder Dash and Repton.

Video Source Retro Collection

The Pit Download

Play Online

One of the games I loved playing in my youth on my BBC Micro, I’m still rubbish at it to this day.

Links

Play Online at BBC Mirco

Game FAQs

Something I’ve been meaning to do for years, finally done: my old Blogger blogs are moving in here, one by one.

Before this blog, and running alongside it for years without me really thinking of them as related, I kept separate Blogger sites for whatever I was into at the time — fractal art, tech links, photography. They mostly went dormant, but they never got deleted, and every so often I’d think “I should really pull that lot into 0x32 someday.” Google Takeout finally made “someday” easy: it exports a Blogger blog as an Atom feed with every post’s original title, HTML body, labels, and publish timestamp intact, so nothing needs backdating by hand. A Claude Code session parsed each export, converted the posts into Hugo front matter with their real dates, and mapped Blogger’s labels onto tags — three separate imports, one per blog.

The first post on this blog went up on the 8th of August 2020, two sentences long:

Welcome to my new blog 0x32 started as I reach the age of 50.

That was six years ago. I genuinely had to check the git log twice, because it doesn’t feel like six years — it feels like I set this thing up a couple of years back at most. Where did the time go.

One positive thing that’s come out of the COVID-19 situation is that I’ve had more time to read than before.

So much so I’ve already smashed my GoodReads reading challenge for this year.

0x32 (50) years old

So it’s happened, 50 years, where did they go.

I don’t feel any different (mentally) that when I was younger, maybe a bit more grumpy and opinionated, but that’s the benefit of getting old surely?

My First Post

Welcome to my new blog 0x32 started as I reach the age of 50.

I’ve got a small repo, ContextFree, that I keep coming back to whenever I want the specific kind of fun that comes from writing a handful of lines of code and having something unexpectedly pretty fall out the other end. It’s a collection of Context Free Art scripts — a tiny grammar for describing images as recursive drawing rules — plus a Docker image wrapping the cfdg renderer so I can run them without installing anything locally.

Squid doodles.

Sidney feeling the heat today, he has melted.

Started a new doodle sketchbook with some sticker inspired doodles.

Some robot sketches I’ve been working on in my sketchbook.

Work in progress sketch of our youngest dog.

Sketchbook Album

Trying to keep the Inktober mojo going.

Inktober 2024 Album

Inktober 2023 22, Scratchy

Inktober 2023 21, Chain

Inktober 2023 20, Frost

Inktober 2023 19, Plump

Inktober 2023 18, Saddle

Inktober 2023 17, Demon

Inktober 2023 16, Angel

Inktober 2023 15, Dagger

Inktober 2023 14, Castle

Inktober 2023 13, Rise

Inktober 2023 12, Spicey

Inktober 2023 11, Wander

Inktober 2023 10, Fortune

Inktober 2023 9, Bounce

Inktober 2023 8, Toad

Inktober 2023 7, Drip

Inktober 2023 6, Golden

Inktober 2023 5, Map

Inktober 2023 4, Dodge

Inktober 2023 3, Path

Inktober 2023 2, Spiders

Inktober 2023 1, Dream

Had a great day on my blacksmith course making a Ram’s head fire poker at Adrian Wood’s Forge, I would highly recommend it.

I went back for a second course after making a dragon coat hook last year, course which was part of my 50th birthday presents.

Tentacle sketch

Flickr Album for Inktober 2022

Inktober 2022 12, Forget

Inktober 2022 11, Eagle

Inktober 2022 10, Crabby

Inktober 2022 9, Nest

Inktober 2022 8, Match

Inktober 2022 7, Trip

Inktober 2022 6, Bouquet

Inktober 2022 5, Flame

Inktober 2022 4, Scallop

Inktober 2022 3, Bat

Inktober 2022 2, Scurry

Inktober 2022 1, Gargoyle

Walk to the office last Thursday morning in Leeds.

Flickr Album from Weekend break to Seaham in County Durham, England.

Rectangle Filling

Packing with Rectangles using the Open Processing website.

Source Code

Circle Packing

Been watching some more old Coding Train Videos so have written a basic circle packing script.

p5* Script output

Source Code

Online p5* Editor

Inktober 2021 52 Week 17, Waves

Inktober 2021 52 Week 16, Stand

Inktober 2021 52 Week 15, Star

Inktober 2021 52 Week 14, Shield

Inktober 2021 52 Week 13, Brave

Inktober 2021 52 Week 12, Microscopic

Inktober 2021 52 Week 11, Spaceship

Inktober 2021 52 Week 10, Powerful

Inktober 2021 52 Week 9, Egg

Inktober 2021 52 Week 8, Camping

Inktober 2021 52 Week 7, Dragonfly

Inktober 2021 52 Week 6, Monster

Inktober 2021 52 Week 5, Remote

Inktober 2021 52 Week 4, Ancient

Inktober 2021 52 Week 3, Reflection

Inktober 2021 52 Week 2, Home

Inktober 2021 52 Week 1, Fresh

My picture on Flickr which have been liked by four or more people.

Short code for embedding Flickr albums easily. Here demonstrated with my Inkotober 2020 album.

Short code defined like this

<a data-flickr-embed="true" data-header="true" data-footer="true"
href="{{ index .Params 1 }}"
title="{{ index .Params 0 }}">
<img src="{{ index .Params 2 }}"
width="800" height="600"
alt="{{ index .Params 0 }}">
</a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

First parameter is the album title. Second parameter is the album URL. Third parameter is a URL to an image to use for the album.

Inktober 2020 Flickr Album

All my drawings from Inktober 2020

Photos from recent trip to Hornsea.

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Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

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Code can be found at Shapes

Further modification produce different results for Shapes Colours

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Created with Processing

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Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Fractal application running on my Amazon Kindle 10

Testing a Flickr shortcode I found here flickr-hugo-embed and tweaked for my own needs.

After watching Speed Cubers documentary on NetFlix decided to start back trying to learn to solve the cube from memory rather than following the instructions.

So far I can get upto the middle layer without refering to the online walk through instructions.

Cubes

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Rediscoverying Inkscape vector drawing application after a few years, its even better than before.

Had a lot of fun converting some of my doodles into vector line art.

Rainbow Light

Testing including pictures from my Flickr Account

Rusty sculpture in Valley Gardens Harrogate

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Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Note: 1 of this post’s 2 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.