I never noticed it growing up but I see it now, TOS is profoundly flakey. My ST has a TOS 1.62 ROM built in and it does not play nice with hard drives.

There’s a simple solution to this, use the wonderful open source EmuTOS instead. Now I’m not resourceful enough to go writing EmuTOS to a flash ROM but my ST does have enough RAM that I can easily get away with loading it up from the hard drive.

I couldn’t find a single-page cheat sheet that summarised SOLID software development principles, so I made one. For each of the letters in SOLID (Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion) there are a couple of bullet points explaining the benefits of adopting them and the smells that betray their violation.

Today I spent a bit of time fighting with certificates in an ASP.NET application I’m working on. The scenario is we have Blazor Server communicating with a Minimal API. Debugging locally I was struggling to get the two to communicate, with errors like:

The remote certificate is invalid because of errors in the certificate chain: UntrustedRoot

A quick tip here for when a bluetooth mouse takes a moment to react after not being used for a few seconds. Bluetooth autosuspend can be disabled with a negligible power consumption penalty by setting a kernel parameter on boot.

I’ll talk more about why I think the Godot game engine is a good alternative to Unity as part of my alternatives series of posts, but for now I want to share for posterity’s sake how to use SQLite.NET in Godot. Skip to the end to add the one package necessary to get SQLite.NET working in Godot. For the uninitiated, SQLite.NET is an ORM for SQLite, similar to Entity Framework. SQLite is a good fit for games and I’m fond of using an ORM where possible.

There are a lot of questionable ethical behaviours going on with big technology companies these days. Hearing horror stories from Meta (formerly Facebook,) Alphabet (Google,) Amazon, Microsoft and Apple has left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth. I’ve personally been stung by bait-and-switch campaigns like when OneDrive revoked large amounts of free storage and LastPass nerfed their free tier subscription. The former was ultimately reversed with a workaround but I was shook; these big companies can make drastic changes to these services I rely on at a whim.

It’s been a whole number of years since I owned an Atari ST. Well over 20. In my youth I (and by “I” I mean “my family”) had two, both of which packed in after some time, the last kicking the bucket in the mid to late 90s. Ever since then I’ve longed to have another, even as I moved briefly to the Amiga before joining the PC train in 1999.

Hello! I’ve started a new blog. For my first post I’m going to share a Git configuration trick that I often use to work around this dang ol' error message when trying to push a locally created branch to a remote repository: