A desk. Sans Monitor: This week I had a very minor problem with the monitor at my desk, it has developed, suddenly, a small light bleed, or bright spot, across the right edge. I could almost ignore it. Then last night my dock started failing to process USB input, something it has done in the past. These two minor …

The micro mirror miracle. (Micro.hexdsl.com): You can skip this entire article and just click here, if I’m totally honest. If you would like to know, slightly more, keep reading… Micro.Blog has come up on my radar a lot over the last few years, mostly by being supported a supported publishing target by a bunch of writing software I …

Time cant split. Projects eat time.: No matter how productive I can become, and no matter how skilled I become, I still have twenty-four hours in a day. Much like nothing exceeds the speed of light, no productivity pipeline will break the time barrier. This has never been more evident to me than when I started drawing. I have been in …

Time, the secret eBay offset: As I said in my last post, I have been using eBay recently for the first time in many years. I have even made a pretty reasonable amount of money in exchange for the things which were on my shelf gathering dust. On paper, it’s gone quite well. Let’s have a look at a sample here: I …

Download: Tales of the Denoumeverse – Week (A book I wrote): Starting a little after the events of ‘In Her we trust’ (Denouement 2) this story, for the first time gives us a look at the adventure from other characters. This novella is split into five parts, each part a different day of the week. We get to experience the world though the mind of …

Ejecting things: The things. It has recently come to my attention that a lot of the stuff in my office has dust on it. This isn't because I fail to clean my house (I mean, in part it is. Who 'dusts'?) but it is more that the things in my office are so infrequently used that dust builds up. The last time I sat down …

Ejecting things: The things. It has recently come to my attention that a lot of the stuff in my office has dust on it. This isn’t because I fail to clean my house (I mean, in part it is. Who ‘dusts’?) but it is more that the things in my office are so infrequently used that dust builds up. The last …

Download: In Her We Trust (A book I wrote): This is the second book in the Denouement series Still reeling from the events of the first Denouement adventure, Jon and his unwilling group of friends slowly get pulled into a war for control of reality itself. Can the charming cult that their old associate controls really be trusted? does the …

Download: Denouement (A book I wrote): Aliens, robots, non-organic life forms, space ships and neon skies are the backdrop to a mystery about reality, family, time, love and the memories that define us. What would you do if you woke up with no memory of your life, but you had everything you wanted? All you have to do to keep it, is not …

Download: Nancy & Holmes (A book I wrote): When Nancy first meets the detective who lives in her head, she assumed he was a symptom of her drinking, trauma of her parents’ death or just a homeless ghost. Then the first corpse turns up on the beach outside of her flat. That, coupled with the monster hunters, news reports and the sea monster …

Download: Chronicles of Ned – Space, to Breathe (A book I wrote): This is the first short story in the Chronicles of Ned. Ned is like you and me, but his friends are far stupider, and he somehow attracts a lot of oddness to his life. Ned occasionally gets abducted by aliens, meets bug people and rides in a camper van… through space. This tongue in cheek …

Nebula got me: A few weeks ago, I tried the Nebula streaming service. I even wrote a blog about it. At the end of writing that post I noted that my thoughts on Nebula were complicated. Once my week long Guest Pass was expired I was again thrust back into the arms of YouTube, a service that I have many gripes with …

Productivity – The Value Problem (A rambling self-indulgent post): People get annoyed with me. They get annoyed with me a lot. When I think about time spent doing things, I think in terms of a productivity enthusiast. I think in terms of ‘value.’ This is the thing which annoys people. They get annoyed because they don’t think that hanging out with …

I tried Nebula (Video streaming service): For those who are not aware, Nebula is a pretty interesting streaming service which, according to Wikipedia, has been around for five years (this sounds wrong to me though, as I literarily heard about it last year! – but that maybe a ‘me’ problem.) Nebula has been on my periphery …

Niceferatu Comic now has a proper link.: Those who follow me on various places such as Discord, or Bluesky, or Void will know that I have a great time making a silly little comic called Niceferatu about a nice Vampire fella and his friend 'Stalk,' and cat 'Goblin.' The comic features them doing all sorts of generic, normal, …

Back on Wordpress (I know, I know.): I didn't like how Quartz looked on mobile, one thing led to another and BOOM we're on WordPress now.... I'll put content back on here over the next few days (weeks) ❤️ The main issue with Quartz was the way mobile navigation worked. Then, while doing a video the other day, I realised that there were …

Art is easy but good art is hard: Art more like... no I got nothing. Long-time readers likely know that I have had a not so secret desire for a long time to draw my own comic. I have a few ideas for things like plot, visuals and tone. I read comics as, basically, my primary pass-time when I was going through some rough times a few …

Some iPads, and, The Revolution: The revolution will not be on desktop. A tale of of two iPads, which ends in revolutionary musings. For a long time, I owned a terrible XPS13 (1250U CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB Storage) which had major cooling issues. It throttled to the point of unusable and even general Windows navigation was a chore. I …

DEVONthink, a notes forever home?: DEVONthink, the final form? I made a video, I'll link it at the bottom of this post, but the main thing to take away here is that DEVONthink is great. It's Scrivener for notes. While I still need to deep dive into it, as I'm still at the 'import stuff' phase, I am blown away by it. At this time, …

What's on my desk: Over the past few years my desk has changed. Here, i chronicle it. I lost the dates when i left my last web platform, but i kept the pictures.

Hexmark Showdown 2023: Merry Christmas one and all. This year due to time restrictions, my friend and I were not able to have a script showdown, like last year. With this in mind, I present to you my own script offering. A time to be married. Please enjoy... or don't. I don't mind. This was written by HexDSL (that's me) …

Regrets and realisations: WARNING! Please warned this is a personal post that I felt I needed to share. It's not about writing, technology or anything else I usually muse about. I have been thinking a lot about my father recently. You should know the following as a minimum: My dad was an honest man who, I am pretty sure, …

Fangs - Book Club: Fangs (by Sarah Andersen) I think this maybe the first "comic" book that I have written about in the book-club section of the website. Fangs started life as a web-comic on a website that everyone except me has heard of called Tapas.io. Fangs is about a vampire and a werewolf who date. It’s …

Pattern Recognition (by William Gibson): Yes, I am aware of Mr Gibson's opus. This book was published in 2003. William Gibson wrote it (I know, Blowing your mind with FACTS!) The last time I read a new William Gibson novel was about 15 years go. Maybe more. It's odd to me that I don't seek out more of his work considering that Neuromancer …

Groff - Links. For print.: Originally posted on reddit - Links. For print. I was asked about embedding link into groff documents a few weeks ago, I wrote this outlining how that is accomplished and while its still the ideal way to deal with clickable links there is a better way of dealing with links for printed documents (my …

Groff - Links for PDFs: Originally posted on Reddit Clickable web Links in your final PDF! Today I was asked how you create clickable links in a PDF document, the truth is I had NO IDEA! I use groff for long form documents and it had never occurred to me that this is something I would want. So I went and found out! The …

GROFF and man page doesn't go far enough: Originally posted in Reddit - Looking for Information about GROFF an man page doesn’t go far enough? (info groff) Its a struggle to find good information about GROFF, guides/examples and help files are few and far between but fear not the GNU project has your back… I had been working …

Groff - GROFF and man page doesn't go far enough: Originally posted in Reddit - Looking for Information about GROFF an man page doesn’t go far enough? (info groff) Its a struggle to find good information about GROFF, guides/examples and help files are few and far between but fear not the GNU project has your back… I had been working …

Groff - Basic TABLE (including examples): Originally posted in Reddit - Basic TABLE (including examples) Tables are a little confusing at first (mostly due to example files being terrible) The below is an easy to understand example of a simple table. this one uses ‘;’ as a separator and is all encased in boxed borders, both …

Groff - A Basic guide to formatting: Originally posted on reddit - A Basic guide to formatting (babies first groff) Groff Guide The following is a very slimmed down list of basic groff commands using the MS macro set and Table pre-processor Examples of usage follow. COMMAND Explanation .TL Title .AU Author .NH N Heading (N = …

Timebound (by Rysa Walker): As spoiler free as I am able to be. I have not before ready any Rysa Walker. I didn't even know who she was until I stumbled over this book when searching good-reads for recommendations. Her writing style is wonderfully verbose when required by more sparse as the action set in. A literary tool that …

Miyoo Mini Plus: I recently had the urge to play some old Megadrive (Genesis) games. I dusted off my old Retoflag GPI Gameboy style handheld and, well, just sort of blinked at it for a moment. It was big and chunky, like a Gameboy, which was great but it has over a minute boot up time, and takes AA batteries. …

The opening line - Stranger in a Strange Land: I love this novel, I think its one of Robert A Heinlein’s finest offerings. I have wrote about it in great depth in the past, but were only here to talk about the first line today. “Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith." Once upon a time is a …

Storm Front (By Jim Butcher): Storm Front (Dresden Files 1) by Jim Butcher. In my discord group there is a room (are they called rooms?) called #book_club where us bookish folks exchange recommendations and thoughts on, you guessed it... Books! It was there that someone reminded me about the Dresden files. It had previously been …

The Kaiju Preservation Society - Book club: The Kaiju Preservation Society (by John Scalzi) The Kaiju Preservation Society is the most fun thing I have read in a long time. It is literally joy, in the form of a book. John Scalzi himself writes a little letter to the readers at the end, and he refers to it as the book equivalent of a pop song. …

Amazon book reviews: I know this sounds like an odd question and more of a tweet/toot than a blog post, but seriously, what happens in people’s brains when they go to write an amazon book review? Most products have this sort of review “Product was excellent, delivered fast and works as described, would buy again.” – See …

Dune - Book club: Book: Dune Series: Dune (Series 1) Written by: Frank Herbert As much as this is out of character for me I am going to try and keep this brief. The reason is that there is no way anyone hasn't heard of this book and most people who give a shit will have already read it, or bounced on it already. I …

The opening line - Foundation: There are two opening lines in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. The first is the extract from the encyclopedia Galactica (the fictional book that chronicles the universe. Asimov uses it to fill in the gaps for the reader) and then the actual first “in universe” line. It feels a little …

The Opening line - Neuromancer: I had a conversation with a friend today. He was talking about writing and how its done, I went off on my usual rant about how I think the opening line of a novel is the scariest moment any writer is faced with. It is in my opinion the act of looking at all of the infinite possibility that a story …

Iliad - Book club: Iliad (By Homer) I don't have the classical education required to actually write a review of the Iliad. I'll be honest, while I enjoyed it a great deal I'm pretty sure that I missed a lot of smart culturally loaded stuff that would have made it way better. I don't have very much in the way of …

Deaths End - Book club: Deaths End (by Lui Cixin) Does it ever end? Death's End is the third instalment of 'The Three Body Problem' trilogy. The trilogy is not an easy read, its at times an oppressive slog. It's not cheerful. Its not bright and its not optimistic. But it is wonderfully well written. Obviously the credit …

Benvari Mountains - Book clud: Benvari Mountains (By Michael Chatfield) For Emerilia! I accept that at this point, I'm hooked on this crap. Honestly. Its like the author is manipulating me some how. I know its easy reading LitRPG crap. But... God, I love these characters. I read this one, the second volume of the Emerilia series …

The Trapped Mind Project - Book club: The Trapped Mind Project (By Michael Chatfield) LitRPGS are my Jam! There is a category of book called the Literature Role Play Game (LitRPG) the basic premise is that a character is either stuck in a video game or reality is a video game and our hero figures it out. Some times its neither, its just …

The City and the Stars - Book club: The City and the Stars (by Arthur C Clarke) Proof that big ideas can be boring. I don't read much Arthur C Clarke because I read Rama and it was boring. I'll call him ACC because I consistently forget how to spell Arthur. About a week ago, I decided that given how much I have recently been enjoying …

A Stranger in a Strange Land - Book club: Thou Art God. I have just finished it and I have things to say. Grok. The word "Grok" is the reason I read this book. The word Grok is taken to mean either "understand" or "know." You may have encountered this word if you spend any time with "high end" ass hats. You see, casually dropping a foreign …