Saturday, December 23, 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) using Fade-In Pro. All questions welcome, email address at the bottom. 💋 This years (2023) A Time to be married
Saturday, November 4, 2023
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, was as close to a good guy as one could possibly be.
Saturday, August 12, 2023
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 light hearted and far deeper than it first appears. The two characters have genuine warmth for each-other.
Monday, July 31, 2023
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 is one of my favourite books ever. I should really to a “Book Club” post about Neuromancer specifically.
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 use case) The result of this code will be TEXT(URL) the URL is (by default) is a very well defined Currier like font
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 Documentation should be found in a PDF file called ‘pdfmark.pdf’ in ‘/usr/share/doc/groff?
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 with GROFF for weeks before I found an entire text book with the command info groff Its a great book with a bad interface but you can
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 with GROFF for weeks before I found an entire text book with the command info groff Its a great book with a bad interface but you can
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 columns are left aligned. .TS tab(;) allbox; l,al. HEADER 1;HEADER 2 BIG; Feet Small; DOG Cheshire; Cat Sexy; Duck .
Monday, July 24, 2023
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 = Subheading number) .SH Sub Heading (not numbered) .
Thursday, July 13, 2023
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 many writers simply don't use, or are unable to use. The pacing of this book is excellent.
Friday, July 7, 2023
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. Knowing a few years had passed since I picked it up, I had a quick google and to my absolute shock, stunningly, there’s been quite a bit of movement in this space.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
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 classic opening for many a good fairy-tale. It is the author telling the audience explicitly that he does not for a moment think that the events outlined will ever become real.
Sunday, July 31, 2022
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 recommended to me a friend which is why it was already on my kindle. When something is recommended to your by two unrelated people its usually a good sign that at the very least its well written.
Friday, March 25, 2022
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. That could not be truer. The story starts with a character who gets fired from his job just as the pandemic starts, you know the one, the real one, the one we had.
Saturday, March 19, 2022
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 nice, direct, simple and does the job. “I cannot believe that product is this shit! Bad value for money.
Thursday, November 4, 2021
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 tried to read Dune once before, in the late 90’s.
Friday, October 15, 2021
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 like cheating that Asimov gets two cracks at an opening line but we have to consider that Asimov is one of the greatest science fiction story tellers of all time; he’s not cheating here, he’s just smarter than us.
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
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 has, and then deciding that THIS, this one sentence will be the one you from all of creation that is best for this story.
Friday, July 16, 2021
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 interest when it comes to history to be honest and I'm quite aware that that's a failing on my part.