Inktober starts next month, and this year’s prompt list is out! Very excited to get started on this year’s topics.

After designing my first shelf in TinkerCAD, I wanted a project that actually needed a proper enclosure rather than a mounting bracket. I’d been building a small self-contained WiFi scanner around this cheap ESP32 dev board — an ESP32 module with a built-in 1.14 inch LCD — paired with a small rechargeable battery, and it had been living on my desk as a loose tangle of board, wires and cells. Time to give it a case.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back when I wired GoatCounter into this blog, the honest answer to “does any of this actually get read” was a shrug — no analytics meant no way to know. It’s been running for a couple of weeks now, so pulled the first export and had a proper look.

Rather than paste a wall of numbers, here’s the breakdown as an actual chart — daily pageviews, top pages, referrers, and where the hits are coming from:

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.