Content? What content?

My site is boring isn't it? Having done the obvious cosmetics, content is thin on the ground, and more worryingly, dated. Too much resting on very old laurels.

I'll seriously have to dig out my more recent work, which actually doesn't amount to much, if only because my work is limited to only a handful of sites.

I made another book purchase, The Zen of CSS Design which examines some of the best submissions to the CSS Zen Garden. A very good read indeed.

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Polymer Picker, and why 8-bit programming matters to me

Late last year, I released a BBC Micro game, Polymer Picker . Realising that 2022 marked the centenary of the BBC, as well as the 40th anniversary of the release of the BBC computer (which was designated as one of the BBC's 100 Objects ), I wanted to work on something that related to the BBC's mission of being able to 'educate, inform and entertain' . So what better way than to release a game for the BBC computer, that in a sense, fulfils those values? But, with video games being so widely available, and playable on all kinds of devices, why did I decide to create my own game for such a niche platform? Video games are big business. They have been for a number of years. In May 2023, it was reported that Nintendo's latest edition of The Legend of Zelda sold in excess of 10 million copies in three days . However, there remains sustained interest in video games from yesteryear. Children who grew up in the 8-bit computer revolution are now into their 40s and 50s, and

Rough guide to building UK election maps for D3.js

During my time at CITY A.M. I helped to build an interactive British General Election Map . This blog outlines how I created it. Let's see the map then Here's a simplified version of the map, hosted at Codepen. See the Pen D3 Election Map by Stephen Scott ( @sassquad ) on CodePen . Here, the map looks rather small, as it has been resized to fit the page. You can use your mouse wheel (or double-click/double-tap) to zoom in or out of the map, and click constituencies to view more detailed results on the left hand side. Each constituency is coloured according to party livery. This blog post gives a very general guide as to how that map was created. I'll be adding further detail about the creation of the map in subsequent posts. Acknowledgements This project was the work of several people, in addition to myself. Here are the other former colleagues who collectively made the election map possible: Michael King (back end programming of data capture system) Bill

Using Beebasm for BBC Basic games programming (Mac & Windows)

In August 2021, I released Androidz Redux , a remastered version of my 1994 game Androidz . This process started a year ago, with a couple of days spent playing around with the original code, far away from a real BBC computer. The original game was published in a magazine called Acorn Computing, and has been available to play online for a number of years now. Because I wrote the game on an actual BBC Micro, I used what tools I had at the time, namely some graph paper to create the graphics, and the computer itself to do the actual coding. This is a world away from the tools we now have at our disposal. Fully rounded IDE's such as Visual Studio Code (my current favourite) make it an awful lot easier to program games. Even editors such as Notepad++ offers some ability to edit BBC Basic code. One of the difficulties with editing old games on modern systems is ensuring that you are able to ensure that the BASIC code is properly tokenised before running on an emulator/system, and indee

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