Ben Griffiths

• the gaslighter - moves your furniture by a tiny amount every time you're out so you're just a bit unsettled all the time
• the anthropologist - hides behing houseplants and narrates your life like a David Attenborough documentary
• the nordic noir - is convinced that you're involved in some terrible crime but must investigate you without you getting suspicious

Maybe it would be good if it could do the laundry, though. like

• escape room - every day it hides your house keys and leaves cryptic clues you have to solve before you go to work
• the foley bot - watches what you do and adds outsized sound effects
• the ghost car - gets dressed beside you at the speed of your personal best getting dressed time ...

I know people say they want a home robot to fold clothes and do cleaning but that's just a lack of imagination.

Here are some better ideas:

• the weeping angel - the robot only moves when you're not looking
• the cato bot - attacks you randomly to keep your martial arts skills fresh
• the butler - writes out your notifications on little cards and delivers them to you on a silver platter
• the ceremonial guard - stands in the kitchen, salutes you when you walk past ...

@da_667 when I was in consulting there were a few times we uncovered huge security problems in systems. We'd get very serious, tell the client, say something doom-laden like 'this is an existential risk to your business'. No-one really believed us and, honestly, they were right not to. There's genuinely no accountability for any of this.

@mxp@mastodon.acm.org was playing this with my eleven-year-old yesterday. We've got six of the treasures we think. We were so excited when we did the lift puzzle. Not entirely sure what I think of the game yet.

Youngest came round yesterday. He's been playing Wishbringer all week using my site https://planedrift.app . I am beyond delighted that he likes these games. However, he told me I needed to add a cyan theme because the 'unc colors hurt my eyes, bro'.

@nick@amok.recoil.org so many options, right? Not that I don't appreciate the ideas, but I'm just building this for myself. Maybe, in which case, I shouldn't have posted about it!

@nick@amok.recoil.org yes, that would make a lot of sense. That or some kind of sparse encoding. We did that at Makielab for doll configurations - I remember writing the code and I think I just used zip deflate or some other standard compression. Can't quite remember.

I haven't quite managed to capture the aesthetic of the original interface. Red on Cyan. Quite the choice.

@nick@amok.recoil.org I'm also trying to decide whether I want to add an assembler to it or whether that ruins the nostalgia. It's not really a practical thing!

@nick@amok.recoil.org yes, it would be nice to add some kind of sharing. I can definitely put the whole memory in a query fragment. Might look at that tomorrow.

@nick@amok.recoil.org all things are possible! I wanted to remake it exactly as it was so it's mainly keyboard-driven. I um'ed and ah'ed about making anything clickable at all! Press ? for the keyboard shortcuts.

One of the programs that came with my BBC micro was a CPU simulator called Peeko Computer.Think Human Resource Machine for an era where we had attention spans but no graphics. I remember learning a lot about machine code from it. So, forty years later I've found a manual for it and I've remade it in the browser. Mostly for nostalgic interest only: https://peeko.whitebeard.blog/ But, enjoy!

@sandersch@mastodon.online yes, that's right. My understanding (and it's limited) is that they're passing a new act to lift some of the planning restrictions that have prevented building local energy storage and distribution. But, yes, the grid is an issue.

Most people don't know that between 1968 and 1976, the uk converted 40 million appliances in 14 million homes away from 'town gas' to methane. It was a huge undertaking that was state-led, centrally planned and free. Thousands of engineers were trained at a dozen ad hoc dedicated training schools. All in the age before computers were common. A way bigger deal than the Y2K work that gets cited a lot. I had relatives that became plumbers because of this transition. We could do it again.

If I was a green (which I am) and my surname was Denyer, it would be very hard not to name one of my children 'Climate Change'.