iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/08/2026

Nothing quite like brushing up on my operating systems knowledge with good coffee. A bit of light Sunday reading?

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 26/07/2026

Photographs from a recent walk in Lancaster. Quality... variable. flickr.com/photos/tr00s...

flickr.com

Lancaster City Walk - 2026-07-19

Explore this photo album by James Cheese on Flickr!

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 18/06/2026

Just for a moment, I thought I'd come up with a unique joke... Well played.

000

Reposted by James Cheese

Agustin Capeletto @lowpoly.gg · 16/06/2026

I'm porting Quake to 3D CSS, so it runs in the browser without WebGL. It's open source 👹 Play it! cssquake.com Repo: github.com/LayoutitStud...

1223162

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 25/05/2026

Bonus points if you can spot the mistakes I make every time I use #define...

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 25/05/2026

Current pastime - finding pleasant places to perch down with a laptop and a coffee to code for a couple of hours. Today - understanding page tables in x86. I'm thinking 4MB pages are going to simplify this in the short term...

Photograph of a laptop, with C source code visible onscreen. A paper cup of coffee is next to it, with a coffee machine visible in the background.

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/04/2026

I absolutely love this whole category of digital adapters for analog tech. Tape adapters, CCD retrofits for digital cameras... Feels like a wonderful mash of tech, and a way to theoretically reduce waste too (as long as the devices are actually any good...)

000

Reposted by James Cheese

LGR @lgr-yt.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

New LGR Oddware! youtu.be/19_OMV2P33I Looking at the Digisette Duo MP3 from 2000, a standalone MP3 player built into a compact cassette shell letting you play digital audio through a tape player. And it syncs to a Windows PC using the parallel port! Nifty stuff, and it only gets better from there.

youtu.be

Digisette Duo - Odd Cassette Tape MP3 Player from 2000

YouTube video by LGR

1831760

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 15/04/2026

Kobo seem to offer the closest experience as far as I've seen - can't vouch for their devices personally, but they've got some good looking options. At very least, they've got equivalent services and a decent selection in their first party store. Check reviews though - I'm definitely not an expert!

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 13/04/2026

Anything's an acronym if you're brave enough with pronunciation.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 12/04/2026

Personally it's something I do now and then for a few hours of hobby coding. However I'll almost always put through several coffees and a bite to eat, and avoid it during busy times. I think there's a balance to be had, and respecting the business and staff is important either way.

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 05/04/2026

That's this year's attempt at gardening done. Couple of planters - one with seed potatoes scavenged from an old potato bag that had been abandoned for years, and one with carrot seeds that were found in the bottom of a cupboard. Minimum effort, minimum expectations.

Two planters with dark soil, one of which has some shoots growing out of it.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 29/03/2026

The rain let up, and the build works. No progress on the actual code, but hey.

Photograph of a laptop showing build outputs and simple console output, alongside a cup of coffee

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 29/03/2026

It's a rainy afternoon. As such, I'm sat in a cozy café, drinking good coffee and enjoying the ambiance. Also, putting together Docker containers for cross-compiler toolchains. Because the best way to work on a hobby OS project is to rebuild the build toolchain over and over.

110

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 29/11/2025

Can't have user guides that only cover the basics if you don't have user guides...

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 20/08/2025

Very much on the list of "things I want for no good reason and absolutely cannot justify purchasing". (it's a long list)

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 15/08/2025

I'm beginning to lose count of the number of times I put a warning in place telling people to never to do something... ...and increasingly finding that I absolutely need to do exactly what I've told other people not to. I don't regret putting the warning up though. Still made me question myself.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 11/03/2025

Given the recent coffee supply crisis, I've probably picked the wrong time to double down on coffee... But I'm on the lookout for "reasonable" decaf beans - got a current favourite roaster, but not sure I can justify £0.80 per cup for *every* cup of the day...

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 04/03/2025

Personally, I had a "I'm not like that!" moment, followed by a series of "Oh god, I'm just like that..." moments. I'm now back dabbling with RSS aggregators and the like, and trying to catch myself when I'm just scrolling for the sake of it.

050

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 25/02/2025

That's really nicely put together. Nice, simple and readable layout. I've been loathe to push too much logic to the backend on my own projects, but you're making me rethink that...

200

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/02/2025

Still. Screw you people and your happiness. I'm looking forward to an evening on a couch watching TV with leftover pizza. And it will be glorious.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/02/2025

Don't dwell on something, focus on it. There are some things in life that you may not do now, in the next decade, or ever. But if you dwell on the fact that you can't, rather than focusing on finding a way that you may have missed, you will waste your life.

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/02/2025

Life may be throwing shit at you right now, but that doesn't mean it'll keep going forever. And trust me, I know saying "be positive" doesn't help all that much. But... Be positive.

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/02/2025

First posted this 8 years ago. Valentine's/Singles Awareness Day sucks for some people. Today we'll all see lots of adages being thrown around: "better lonely than let down", "better to have loved and lost"... Screw that. I'd like to propose instead: "Whatever sucks now: Things change." ...

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 26/01/2025

The Covox Speech Thing comes to mind - mildly interesting solution to an old problem. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_S...

en.m.wikipedia.org

Covox Speech Thing - Wikipedia

130

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/01/2025

Well, that's an annoying typo.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/01/2025

The smug sense of superiority I get to feel as I'm forced to spend hours resolving a dodgy kennel upgrade.

100

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/01/2025

My preference is a mixture personally - I'd prefer to see everything from my subs, but a smattering of new and interesting. I appreciate BlueSky's discover feed and the utterly unexpected stuff that can pop up some times.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 22/01/2025

I love the oxblood hilt, but I'm more of a fan of round pommels myself.

Blunt sword on top of scabbard, laid on the ground

020

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 22/01/2025

Fun side effects of a lighter touch algorithm, I guess - I for one enjoy the WTF factor of discovering something totally unexpected, but I get why others wouldn't...

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 20/01/2025

Well now I want one to go alongside my printed headphone hook... Might wait until I replace the whole desk though. (and here's assuming replies boost "trending" stats...)

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 15/01/2025

Had this with my work laptop - pretty sure it's mild overheating... Some i7s have *terrible* thermals.

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/01/2025

TIL paid web browsers still exist. www.aol.com/products/bro... And AOL still exists as a way to access the web? Kind of makes me want to revisit some old web browsers. IE4, pre-chrome Opera, Netscape Navigator, pre-Firefox Mozilla... There's some gold out there.

aol.com

AOL Desktop Gold | 30-Day Free* Trial | AOL Products

Experience AOL Desktop Gold, a faster and more secure way to navigate the online world. Try it free* for 30 days!

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/01/2025

If I were made of money, I'd be tempted these days to look at monitors instead of TVs. Slap a smart switch on the side, and pair it with a dedicated device for media that you can actually power off. Probably janky as hell, but would be an interesting project.

110

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 10/01/2025

I was about to criticize him for not recognizing the bin men, but last time I moved, I was stressed enough to tap out and have a friend take over telling me what I needed to do. So, on reflection, that's the kind of thing I could easily have messed up...

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 10/01/2025

Oh, I'm so tempted right now... Are you guys making this as a limited run, or longer term? Too much money going out at the moment, but I'm a couple of months once things have quietened down a little, I might swing back around...

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 10/01/2025

If it falls off your desk hard enough, you won't need to copy the files off it... No judgement here.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 07/01/2025

Remote access usually lasts ;) But realistically, it depends on whether a new class of component appears - things line GPUs, AI coprocessors and the like would be the biggest blockers. It's when a fundamentally new function appears that you never realized it would. Beyond that, lots of cores & RAM.

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 06/01/2025

No Shadow the Hedgehog in a list of great 2005 releases? That's... OK, yeah, that's fair.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 03/01/2025

Another reason I'll cite for using git hashes as build IDs. And for anyone who disagrees because they're not human-readable, I say: 13fbd79c3d390e5d6585a21e11ff5ec1970cff0c

040

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 03/01/2025

During the week, I wrote software. At the weekend, I take part in medieval reenactment. This gives me a very specific understanding of the tenuous place technology has in society. The potato though - that's a winner.

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 26/12/2024

I don't understand the concept of temperature, please express things as energy density (obviously not taking into account just capacity).

040

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 25/12/2024

Some *really* nice socks...

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 25/12/2024

Merry Christmas! Hope your year has been a wonderful one!

121

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 23/12/2024

Dropped into Arcade Club in Blackpool. It's always a lot of fun, but I swear the games are getting harder... ... definitely not my skill levels not being up to scratch.

010

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 22/12/2024

Another set of photos from a pleasant day - this time, Skipton, North Yorkshire.

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 21/12/2024

This knowledge is one of the reasons I love coding for microcontrollers. 20MHz and 512KB of RAM? Now that's a real challenge to code for. ...I should brush up on my assembly again.

030

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 14/12/2024

Morecambe, England, 2024-12-14

000

James Cheese @tr00st.co.uk · 12/12/2024

I've got a Windows 98 machine for retro gaming - the USB 1 ports on that get used for almost nothing. Far less time and hassle to drop a USB CD burner onto a modern machine (or even a floppy drive...) It's amazing how far USB has come since those days.

030