Picked up from Ebay for £12.50, the fault was "Console turns on but doesn't load ds games, and touch screen doesn't seem to work,". Makes me a bit sad, but this fix was literally clean the DS cart port with IPA, and run a DS cart in and out. There was also some gunk inside the de … | Continue reading
Like jq but for postgres databases (or sqlserver, csv or even xlsx). What's neat is that you register a database with the system, then you can query against that particular database. Very nice that I can use this on the command line and then pipe into jq for more data manip. Sour … | Continue reading
Two joycons for the Switch and though the thumbstick worked fine, none of the buttons worked. I had assumed it was a loose connection, but it turns out that the shoulder buttons - L and R - had been crushed (from heavy usage), which looked to have caused a short which knocked out … | Continue reading
A long read, but a worthwhile one - in my head their voice was definitely just shy of shouty! :) Being a JS developer first and foremost since pre-Node days, it puts me in a funny spot that I absolutely agree with everything said in this article, whilst also considering that I pi … | Continue reading
I have a little Etsy store for gameboy repair (though it's currently just carts at the moment), and I had a Pokémon Crystal come in. It didn't load at all and I found corrosion around the cart pins. Carefully scratching away the solder had it loading up again, but the far right c … | Continue reading
As part of a joblot, and because I wanted to play Metroid: Return of Samus, I got hold of this 3DS with multiple faults. Firstly, it wouldn't always power up (it would flick on power then go off), and when it did the bottom screen was severely corrupted. The bottom screen require … | Continue reading
Bought faulty - only the thumb sticks and start/select worked. I figured there was a broken trace in there somewhere and something that would be simple to fix. Or perhaps a build up of carbon on the silicon pads that "just" needed cleaning. It turns out that these controllers, in … | Continue reading
I had an old and very, very corroded copy of Super Mario 2: The Golden Rings for the Game Boy. I'd previously restored it but as one commenter suggested, the corrosion will continue to eat away. So the other night, using hot air and a lot of flux, I transferred all the parts to a … | Continue reading
A useful web page to show visually what the mobile assistive keyboard looks like given different input types. Specifically, and TIL - the inputmode can be different, i.e. using a type="text" field but inputmode="url" to help with partials like ".com" (if the i … | Continue reading
I don't particularly use this pattern, but I ran across it recently and it took me a while to work out what was happening (it does make sense if you think about it, but running through code it's not easy to spot). In the following example you won't see any errors nor any logging. … | Continue reading
It's because Vercel has blocked my account under "fair usage". I had all of 12 hours on a Sunday to prevent people from using the source of the spike - but I suspect they would have blocked my account either way because normal traffic would have tipped me over their limits. The t … | Continue reading
As I enter the year 2023, I started to collect more and more mini hardware based projects that I wanted to try out. So far, it's been 100% failure, so I figured I'd make a note here - in the hope I wouldn't repeat the failings! | Continue reading
Arduboy walkthrough with larger screen and great looking shell. Source: www.hackster.io | Continue reading
If you're a causal player or casual buyer of retro stuff, particular the Game Boy, it's easy to end up with a fake, or reproduction cart. This is a really short guide on what to look for if you want to be sure if it's original or not. This is a non-exhaustive guide, intended for … | Continue reading
Finally feeling like society around me has settled into it's stride, even many normal things have happened, but as I write my last blog post of the year (as I've done for over a decade), I'm not entirely happy with how I feel like my blog has been neglected. Work Since the pandem … | Continue reading
I'm not even that old and I've been hit with this stupid UX from iOS (thankfully it was a one off for me as I'm primarily an Android user) Source: gist.github.com | Continue reading
Often I'll want to share a screenshot and over the years I've used a number of different tools, but I'm always beholden to when they eventually become unsupported or the company "pivots" and the pricing model goes silly. So after all this time, I finally worked out how to roll my … | Continue reading
ffconf is now behind me and it was, as it always is, an amazing experience. I've tried to capture some of what it was like for me, but I suspect words will mostly fail me in the long run. Still, here's my own experience of: The Return. | Continue reading
2nd most active maintainer of Emotion writes on why they're leaving CSS-in-JS. Mostly this is written documentation and proof of what I've been seeing and feeling every time I have to use a CSS-in-JS library. Via Bruce Lawson https://twitter.com/brucel/status/1582787411469533184 … | Continue reading
I've been looking at enhance.dev and their docs and though I've not tried it in anger yet, I think it's a framework to developing that's leaning on something that's been on my mind: there are two JavaScripts. One for the server - where you can go wild. One for the client - that s … | Continue reading
Originally I used TextMate (well, "originally" I used GWD, but let's not go back that far). Then, I don't know why, I jumped ship to Sublime Text (which is still excellent), I dabbled with Brackets and Atom but eventually landed on VS Code. I've been using VS Code for a lot of ye … | Continue reading
Tia's 12th … birthday. Not a birthday, but 12 years after she was born, or came into our lives. She died too. Our first. The oldest that we don't have at home. I don't know if I have a meaningful blog post in me this year, though I've written words about Tia for a number of years … | Continue reading
As much as this sounds like a new webapp (and indeed over a decade ago I owned the domain Kajinka - can't remember what it was though), no, this is the start of my multiple sclerosis (MS) drug treatment which, I guess lasts as long as I do. | Continue reading
This week I released the first round of tickets for ffconf 2022 an in a last minute change (literally 20 minutes before the tickets went live), I decided to add a live countdown which would switch out and then show the "Buy Now" button at 10am. Except, of course, Safari didn't wo … | Continue reading
We've had Missy for 17 years, she was part of a litter that her brothers Dizzy and Ninja came from. She died early this morning at home. Thankfully it was quick for her. There's been a lot of tears today from all of us, and I know I'll miss her dearly, she was a great friend. I w … | Continue reading
In the last couple of years (rather slowed by the pandemic), a number of new browser APIs have started to land that I had wanted over a decade ago. That's not to say that the process is slow, more that the technology simply didn't exist a 10 years ago, and now the APIs exist, it … | Continue reading
What seems like only a few months ago, I wrote about being diagnosed with MS, and yet that was over 2 years ago (and the diagnosis was actually December 2019). As it's MS Awareness Week 2022 and MS was on my mind (literally and figuratively!) I thought an update blog post would s … | Continue reading
I booked myself a week off work in late Feb and leading up to that date I started to get (back) into Gameboys. As a kid I grew up with a ZX Spectrum in the home and as a teen I had a Gameboy. I actually managed to use paper-round money to buy myself a pretty nice collection of ga … | Continue reading