Inktober 2026 23, Dapper Out of the dust sky it came. We had stopped looking up. Hours of waiting under that bruised yellow haze, SOSi still chirping away on its hilltop, and then a shadow slid across the wreckage and the dust began to part. Something was coming down through it. It had answered our beacon. Clean lines, smooth, silver. No flames, no roar, none of the howling engines we’d braced for. It settled onto the plain with barely a noise, as though it had all the time in the world, and the dust drifted back around it like nothing had happened.

Inktober 2026 22, Beacon It took hours. Cutting torches, pry bars, and the hero’s bare hands on the worst of the beams. Finally the debris shifted and there it was, wedged under a collapsed bulkhead: SOSi. Bashed, scorched, one panel hanging by a hinge, a long scrape down its flank. Nobody dared say it out loud. Then the status lights stuttered on, one by one, and the little unit gave a groan of servos and hauled itself upright. It shambled off across the wreckage on its four stubby legs, limping on the left rear, and climbed to the highest ground it could find.

Inktober 2026 21, Hero Scream of metal. Deck plates buckling underfoot. The hull is tearing open and the air is going, and someone is screaming for a medic, and it might be me. Then through the smoke and steam, a shape. Massive. Unmoving. Power armour, scorched but standing, the skull on its chest glowing through the haze. We’re not dead. He came. The hero came. Hero. Inktober 2026 21 Hero

Inktober 2026 20, Lounge Mission log, Day 20 Fourteen crew sealed in the lounge, behind a corridor of twisted girders. Atmosphere holding. Morale holding. Whisky holding, but not for long. There are worse places to be trapped, and they appear to have found the best one. Cutting teams are working the debris around the clock. Estimated time to clear the corridor: two days. Estimated time for the lounge to drink itself dry: one and a half.

Inktober 2026 19, Confused Captain’s log, Day 19 Impact. Then nothing. I came round hanging in my harness, the deck over my head, the ceiling underfoot. Alarms are screaming but I can’t tell which are real. Smoke in the cockpit. Instruments reading everything at once: climbing, falling, dead. The lights cut out and I couldn’t tell up from down. Through the cracked glass: mountains, and a column of smoke rising from the wreck.

Inktober 2026 18, Flightless Captain’s log, Day 18 It’s gone. We won, if you can call it that. The hull is torn open. The power is dead. The ground is coming up fast. We paid for this in lives I’ll have to name later. Everyone aboard is still breathing. Nobody is leaving. We are flightless. Inktober 2026 18 Flightless

Inktober 2026 17, Contraption Captain’s log, Day 17 The engineer hasn’t slept. Neither have I. We have to get rid of the thing. A sealed bulkhead won’t hold it for long. So the engineer built something: welding mask, oxy-acetylene tanks and torch, deck plating riveted into armour, and a cargo claw for an arm. A contraption. Protection. Hopefully safe. Somebody has to wear it. We’re drawing straws… Inktober 2026 17 Contraption

Inktober 2026 16, Gangly Captain’s log, Day 16 Movement in the corridor outside Medical. Gangly. Jerky. Too many joints, none of them bending the right way. Then the noises: nothing a human throat should make. It was coming from the medical unit, and the unit was meant to be sealed. I saw it clearly for three seconds. That was enough. Never unsee this. It will live in our nightmares forever.

Inktober 2026 15, Hooray Captain’s log, Day 15 The rescue is complete. Against every odd, the crew is home, and for the first time in weeks the cargo hold rings with laughter. Banners hang from the bulkhead. Glasses are raised. And somehow, impossibly, there are balloons. We are light years from anywhere, and I will never know where they found them. For one perfect hour, nobody is afraid. Then the alarm sounds…

Inktober 2026 14, Lady Medical log, Day 14 Pod survivor recovered. Unconscious. Vitals steady, which is more than I can say for me. The rope held. Just. I keep checking the knot. The crew are calling her “the Lady.” She looks human. Almost. Something about the eyes sits wrong, and nobody will say it out loud. How did she get into a sealed rescue pod? Nobody launched it. I don’t know what we’ve brought aboard. We’ll find out when she wakes. If she wakes.

Inktober 2026 13, Flimsy Captain’s log, Day 13 Rope takes the strain. We’ve started hauling the unidentified survivor out of the pit, hand over hand, with the engineer on the line. Then the rope starts to fray. It’s a flimsy old thing, rated for cargo and not for people, and every strand that parts is one fewer between them and the dark. Nobody says it, but we all hear it. Keep pulling.

Inktober 2026 12, Toss Captain’s log, Day 12 Something moved in the pit. An unidentified survivor in a rescue pod emergency suit, no ID and no comms, just a gloved hand reaching up out of the dark. Our engineer’s arm has always been good, and the rescue line went out on target. Hauling them up now. Lander crew standing by. Inktober 2026 12 Toss

Inktober 2026 11, Rescue Mission log, Day 11 RESCUE POD TRANSMISSION [AUTO-RELAY, SIGNAL DEGRADED] …mayd—mayday. Pod touch-do█n confirmed. Landed. Hull ch@rred, aft sect-on b-rnt thr█ugh. Hatch popped on impact, seals gone. Cabin open to the e█terior. Passenger g0ne. Repeat: passenger GONE. Couch empty, straps cut. No tr_ce. Beacon s-ill ping█ng from the pod. Air 4% and f█lling. Power 11%. Ne-d re-sc– rescue… resc█e… [TRANSMISSION ENDS] Inktober 2026 11 Rescue

Inktober 2026 10, Mystical Captain’s log, Day 10 The mystical signal brought us here, and I wish it hadn’t. At its source stands a structure so old that the land has grown up around it. The trees lean toward its walls like they are listening. The rock has folded itself around its base. Nothing about it feels abandoned. Two enormous fins rise from the roof, tearing the air into plasma and forcing the signal upward in long, shuddering lines. It is not leaking out. It is being sent.

Inktober 2026 9, Ram Cargo Chief’s log, Day 9 They call it The Ram. Earned it. Ten tonnes of scarred alloy that goes through a bulkhead door like it’s an insult. Cargo droid. Generation AI, the kind with opinions. Mouthy, sulks, glitches hard enough to freeze mid-lift and stare at the wall. I’ve requested its decommission three times. Never filed one. Bay Six went at 0300. Hull holed, air gone, the whole deck screaming. Nobody ordered it. The Ram put its own chassis in the breach and held it there while we dragged eleven people out.

Inktober 2026 8, Stinky Engineer’s log, Day 8 Stinky. Always stinky. Everyone else gets new planets and starlight. I get the waste recycler. Elbow joint split open overnight, and the deck reeks. That recycler has never played fair. It chokes and cracks when it feels like it. I’m knee-deep in it again, clamping and swearing. Somebody has to deal with the filth so the rest of you can keep breathing. Space plumber. Not glamorous. Just necessary.

Inktober 2026 7, Stinky Engineer’s log, Day 7 Stinky. Always stinky. Everyone else gets new planets and starlight. I get the waste recycler. Elbow joint split open overnight, and the deck reeks. That recycler has never played fair. It chokes and cracks when it feels like it. I’m knee-deep in it again, clamping and swearing. Somebody has to deal with the filth so the rest of you can keep breathing. Space plumber. Not glamorous. Just necessary.

Inktober 2026 6, The OGRE Engineer’s log, Day 6 Main plant went down again at 0340. Three subsystems threw errors I’ve never seen, and the diagnostic AI asked me to “please restart the universe.” Not helpful. So I went aft and woke the OGRE. The Oxygen Gas Recycling Engine is older than the ship’s paint. No firmware, no network, no software updates. It has a hand crank, a dial with one needle, and a flywheel the size of a dustbin lid. The brass plate on the front says D9, and nobody knows what that means. The pipe fittings are held on with bolts a child could undo.

Inktober 2026 5, The Smack Log entry, Day 5 Captain’s log. Day 5 out. Space is empty. That’s the whole point of it, and I’d got used to it. Four days of nothing on the scope, and the crew had started saying the odds were with us. At 02:14 ship time, they ran out. It was a hard knock, felt through the deck plates, then the alarm. Something small and fast hit the port nacelle housing and went through the outer skin. The scope shows a vapour trail where it came in. We’re venting coolant from the damage.

Inktober 2026 4, Cactus Scrubbers at 87%. Cactus at 100%. Chief Engineer’s quarters are the only place on the ship with a plant, and technically it shouldn’t be there. The mass allocation sheet lists it as “personal effects, 0.4 kg, non-essential.” The pot is a standard-issue ceramic planter, orange from the factory, bolted to the desk with two repurposed cable clamps. The cactus is a prickly pear. He’s had it longer than the posting. It’s flowered twice, and both times it was a surprise. Nobody has ever been able to tell him why it flowers now and then.

Inktober 2026 3, Miniature Captain’s personal log, day 3 Tea’s gone cold again. The Pennywhistle is parked next to the mug, where she’s sat since we left dock. She’s about as long as my forearm, and she’s held together with solder and stubbornness. She was my first command, a Class-4 cargo tug. Eleven years of hauling ore pods through the belt in a hull that rattled and leaked and stank of coolant and old coffee.

Inktober 2026 2, Relic Mission Log, Day 2: No Signal Required Chief Engineer Okafor’s family has carried this phone for six generations. It has no battery and no signal, and it’s held together with gaffer tape. She keeps it in her pocket for luck. When the long-range array died again, she spliced it into the comms trunk. The signal came back clean. Nobody can explain it, and she isn’t taking it out.

Inktober 2026 1, Apple Mission Log, Day 1: Last Fresh Fruit One apple, already bitten, sits on the console beside the launch checklist. It’s the last fresh fruit aboard before we leave the ground behind. After launch it’s freeze-dried and foil pouches for the duration. The cables are strapped down, the gauges are alive, and the ship is ready. I’m giving the apple a few more minutes. Inktober 2026 1 Apple

Quick update with a couple of things I’ve put up on Flickr today. First, a close-up of the 3D printed fidget cube from the latest prints. It’s still the thing I reach for most often. Close-up of my 3D printed fidget cube Second, a doodle I did during a Teams call this morning. Most of these end up in the bin, but I liked this one enough to keep.

This follows on from my post about the Omarchy/DHH controversy — I went down a much longer rabbit hole than I expected. I went looking for a Linux distro. I came back with a headache and a much longer reading list. It started simply enough. I’d been eyeing my old Lenovo laptop — an i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, nothing special — as a candidate for a proper Arch + Hyprland setup. Omarchy kept coming up: slick, popular, well-documented, built by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the guy behind Ruby on Rails. Obvious choice, right?

I’m an experienced programmer, and I’ve worked in many different languages. Sometimes being a programmer is a two-edged sword. You want to accomplish something, and you can do it easily …read more

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.

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.

A Hugo repo hadn’t been looked at properly in a while This blog is just Hugo content and a vendored theme — no app code, nothing exciting — which is exactly the kind of repo that quietly accumulates small rot nobody notices because nothing ever actually breaks the build. Spent a session pointing Claude Code at it to find and fix that rot. Started with a straight status check: a couple of generated CSS cache files showing as deleted (build artifacts that shouldn’t have been tracked in the first place) and a stray uncommitted edit sitting inside the ananke theme submodule from as far back as November 2024. Both restored/reverted to get back to a clean tree before touching anything else.

Vibe coding a Mandelbrot renderer Spent today “vibe coding” with Claude, just describing what I wanted and letting it drive, to see how far that gets you on a small self-contained project. The result is fractalPy, a small Numba-accelerated Mandelbrot set renderer. It started as a single script — render the set to a PNG, colour it, done — using @njit(parallel=True, fastmath=True, cache=True) to JIT-compile the escape-time kernel so it’s fast enough to iterate on interactively: