It looks like some clever chap as build a fully functioning four bit adder inside an unmodded Cities: Skylines. The best part of this simulated circuit is that it’s partly powered by simulated in-game poo.
Category: Uncategorised
Northern Lights at York Minster
I had a good but long weekend. Saturday was, of course, filled with watching England’s hard-fought victory against New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup. Beer was drunk (to excess!) and a good time was has by all.
Sunday was a little more highbrow; I popped up to York and spent a very enjoyable 30 minutes watching two showings of Northern Lights at York Minster – a fantastic laser, lights, and audio installation in York Minster’s Nave. I thoroughly recommend it and would suggest that you either see one of the few remaining shows of this season or jump in early when it (hopefully!) returns next year.
Here’s a short documentary I found about it:
The Power of Telemetry
The online backup company Backblaze – of which I am a reasonably satisfied long-term customer – makes statistics about the hard drives they use public. A chap called Ryan Smith took this telemetry and, with a little data wrangling and some educated guesses, worked out large parts of their business model – including important elements of their asset replacement cycle.
Telemetry is creepy. Turn it off.
Oh Zippy… you naughty, naughty Dalek!
Dalek Zippy is always an amusing little watch on a lazy Sunday morning.
Backlinks
This is kinda cool; the rather agriculturally-named BacklinkShitter datamines the Common Crawl dataset to find out who links back to your site.
This should show the links to Chrisrcook.com and this should show the links to this page!
How did that happen?
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The Camera Always Lies…
This is non-trivially creepy. While the impressionist is a professional, the actual face swap appears to have been done by an enthusiastic amateur and so, with more time and resources, could probably be improved.
Blessed by the gods of SSL
After putting it off for some time, I have now set up Let’s Encrypt on this little toy web server and it all seems to work! Now to see if it keeps working…
The Sunrise over the Minster
A pleasant little video of the sun rising over York railway station. Towards the rear left you can see the permanently-lit York Minster towering over the rest of the city. The large yellow crane in the centre of the image is part of the building site on the former Hudson House plot and sits just in side the city walls. And, of course, prior to that this plot of land had been the original York station.
Message in a Bottle
This is neat – it’s a selection of message-in-a-bottle messages that a modern Thames mudlark has found and recorded. Some are neat and some – the cut-out picture of the couple – just strike me as terribly sad.