Like a lot of people I had been looking forward to No Man’s Sky for some time. However I didn’t preorder it, and when it was announced that it would not be a multiplayer game I decided it wasn’t for me. During the week of launch a friend of mine bought it. Having seen the opening of the game and then reading some articles online my wife thought it sounded like something she’d enjoy, something akin to minecraft in space. So I bought it for her as an anniversary gift (‘cos I’m romantic like that) and she’s been playing it on and off for the last week. ...

I’ve been playing with blender for a while now and I’ve reached the point where my laptop is just not up to the job. I have increasingly found that I abandon projects as adjusting materials and lighting requires hour long renders to see the difference. Having considered all the options; Buying a newer Mac This doesn’t really make sense as it may not actually be an improvement as Apple tend to use AMD graphics cards and Blender seems to work best with NVIDIA cards. Buying a secondhand Mac Pro and upgrading the graphics card(s) Having spent some time researching this route there doesn’t seem to be much useful information available. It seems that the graphics cards might need flashing to make Mac OS recognise them and the risks involved were too large. Plus the cost of a recent, pre-dustbin, Mac Pro and a good graphics card was equivalent to building a new PC from scratch. Building a Hackintosh There’s tons of information out there for people that want to go down this route. I had a very cheap netbook running Mac OS X a few years back and it mostly worked fine but there were enough issues that made me not want to rely on it. ...

I’ve been having an on and off love affair with Blender for three years now. While it’s true that the interface is bordering on user-hostile once you begin to understand the Blender way of doing things it is an incredibly capable piece of software. Recently I stumbled upon Mineways, a free open-source program which allows you to export sections of your Minecraft worlds for rendering or 3D printing. Being quite a fan of Minecraft (my wife and I had our Minecraft avatars on our wedding cake) I thought I’d have a play with it and see what I could make. ...

Recently I’ve begun experimenting with things I would have thought impossible a few years ago. The python script I wrote last week and the data scraping project that I’ve yet to write about have both made me realise that none of this stuff is witchcraft. With my hosting renewal coming up I started wondering about moving from shared hosting to a VPS. For the last decade my personal sites and email accounts have been hosted with the same shared hosting company. They have always provided me with excellent service for a reasonable price and I’ve always been happy to recommend them to my clients. Now that my requirements have reduced a little and I’ve been seeing VPS offered for a fraction of the cost I thought it worth investigating. ...

I have finally backed a kickstarter campaign for the first time. It’s a 3D printer called Tiko and I’m really excited about receiving it. So excited in fact that I would really like to get it earlier than the February ETA I originally pledged for. Some of the early backers have been concerned about the lack of updates, photos and videos from the Tiko team and have been cancelling their pledges. This has opened spaces in the pledges with earlier estimated shipping dates. The other day I was fortunate that I refreshed the page at just the right moment and managed to change my pledge to one with a January shipment. That got me wondering if I could come up with something that would alert me when the slots opened up. ...

Why am I writing? I wanted a new project, I have an interest in the web and I wanted to improve my writing. I had been thinking about learning a new programming language for a while and it occured to me that perhaps I could do that and write about it as I went along. I mentioned the idea to one of the Ruby developers at work. I was fairly sure that as I’m a newb I would have nothing useful or interesting to say. His response inspired me to write everything on this site. He said, “There is always someone that started learning a week after you”. ...

Note: This post was originally published on iamianwright.com it’s been moved here for archival purposes. For a few years now I’ve run a Mac Mini as my main source of media. Originally I just used it as a server and had a jailbroken Apple TV running Plex for the front end. Recently I’ve found that I watch a lot more content online and it’s more convenient just to connect the Mac Mini directly to the TV although this raises the issue of controlling it. Screen Sharing does a good job but for convenience I wanted a dedicated remote. Apple’s wireless keyboards and trackpad are insanely expensive so I turned to the web for a cheap HTPC remote. DX.com had me covered, always a bastion for cheap chinese electronics they have a veritable smorgasbord of bluetooth keyboards and trackpads available. ...

Note: This post was originally published on iamianwright.com it’s been moved here for archival purposes. Having played through Tekkit Classic, Voltz, YogCraft and Tekkit my friends and I decided it was time for a custom mod pack. This of course meant that I had to figure out how to build it. After reading a bunch of tutorials of differing quality and reliability I was left under the impression that I would need to use a PC. Fortunately for us Mac users with Minecraft 1.6.2 and the new Forge installer this is not the case. ...

Note: This post was originally published on iamianwright.com it’s been moved here for archival purposes. Following on from my previous post I wanted to write a little more about the issues I found trying to get all of the Tekkit Classic mods working with Minecraft 1.6.2. Having discussed everyone’s requirements, my friends and I agreed that we wanted all the features of Tekkit Classic with the additions of Stargate, Twilight Forest, Archimedes Ships, Useful Foods, Treecapitator and a few others. I read a lot of guides and figured out how to set up a custom Forge server for Minecraft 1.6.2. ...

Note: This post was originally published on iamianwright.com it’s been moved here for archival purposes. What is a Pebble? The Pebble smartwatch connects to your Android or iPhone handset via bluetooth and displays text messages, emails and other configurable alerts on it’s e-ink display. It’s the result of the most successful kick-starter project since the site’s launch. Pebble were originally looking for $100,000 but wound up raising a staggering $10 million during their campaign. ...