Category Archives: Computing

Crap website design

Posted on April 9, 2024 by james

My, I am having a ranty evening. As well as the issues with the BT website highlighted in an earlier post today, I’ve just been reminded of another totally thoughtless piece of design that is common to many sites. That … Continue reading →

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Hifi wifi

Posted on March 12, 2024 by james

Last week my wife and daughter started complaining that they were seeing quite poor performance from our Internet connection, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with it and from the desktop PC in my office I was not having a … Continue reading →

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Another C++ fail

Posted on February 29, 2024 by james

Oooh! C++20 has std::format that would allow me to easily format file modification times from std::filesystem/chrono. Oh, allegedly it does in MSVC and Clang, but not in the C++20 support with the GCC that’s part of Mint 21.3 or the … Continue reading →

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Fun (and irritation) with Qt Designer

Posted on February 23, 2024 by james

I’ve been lining up a possible new project today, thanks to stalling a bit on the work I was doing on Deep Sky Stacker. It’s more C++/Qt development, but in this case I thought I’d try to create the entire … Continue reading →

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Next piece of Linux DSS done…

Posted on February 16, 2024 by james

I’d pretty much gone as far as I thought I could with my Linux Deep Sky Stacker port for the moment, but then realised that some bits that still didn’t compile were actually simper to fix than I thought, and … Continue reading →

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Design by committee

Posted on February 14, 2024 by james

Back when I used to work with COBOL, there were jokes about “design by committee”. These days I’m not always sure that C++ isn’t going the same way. So many little bits and pieces have been stuffed into the language … Continue reading →

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Fun with Qt Help and CMake

Posted on February 14, 2024 by james

As a Windows application, Deep Sky Stacker stores all its help text in .chm files, but I need to get rid of the Windows dependencies. Fortunately I have the HTML and images that make up those files, and there’s the … Continue reading →

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A job-hunting I shall go…

Posted on February 12, 2024 by james

The time has come. I really need to sort out getting a new job now. I’ve not done any full-time paid work for ages and whilst I’ve achieved an awful lot with the time I’ve had free, the mortgage has … Continue reading →

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Stacking on Linux, deeply

Posted on February 10, 2024 by james

Pretty much anyone who is into amateur astrophotography will be familiar with Deep Sky Stacker (aka DSS). It’s a great application that takes combinations of light and dark frames (amongst others) and merges them to produce a single stacked output … Continue reading →

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A blast from the long-distant past

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

Back when I was at school (slates, chalk, that sort of thing, you know…) the BBC Micro was a thing: one of the first home computers, based around the 6502 processor. Quite likely it’s responsible for setting the future direction … Continue reading →

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