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To save myself an hour next time I need to install JupyterLab (the latest 2020 version of Jupyter) here's a step-by-step install from scratch on self-hosted AWS, warts-and-all. Key points:

• We want to use jupyter-lab instead of the legacy jupyter-notebook
• The notebooks/labs must be private, it's absurd to think otherwise
• We want online / cloud access to our work
• We want the minimum of effort to install and get working with Jupyter
• We want the minimum complexity to maintain the installation

I’ve always found ContentSizeFitter a source of great hope … and bitter disappointment: often it’s the only way to “solve” a problem in UnityUI, but half the time when you try it messes up your UI and breaks the UnityEditor Undo function. You have to delete your UI elements and […]

Centers of tiles Edges of tiles Pros and cons Centers gives you STRAIGHT things (on a hex grid, it’s the only way to get straights!) Roman Roads Canals Large rivers Edges gives you meandering things (on a hex grid, centers only give wiggles at very large scale) River valleys Realistic […]

In the FPS roguelike I’ve been working on, a core feature is that each ability modifies how you interact with the world – you see things differently, you move differently, etc. Night Vision I’m working on a tiny level demo to show some of my ideas together. I want one […]

Experimenting with shorter Entity Systems articles This post is an experiment: rather than write massive, heavily-edited articles, I’m writing “shallow” versions first, which takes me only an hour or so. Then I’m saving the in-depth, detailed versions of each topic for future subscribers to my own Unity3D Entity System. This […]

(a summary writeup of the things I tried – based on this Unity blog post: blogs.unity3d.com/2014/06/24/serialization-in-unity/ – to get Unity 4.5 to correctly serialize/deserialize simple object graphs) UPDATE: I belatedly discovered that EditorUtility.setDirty() is fundamental to Unity; if you have even one single call of this missing, Unity will corrupt […]

3D printers are almost unique as a product: they can upgrade themselves. The Rep2 is one of the most popular/successful “production ready” printers out there. This post looks at what to do when you get a new one to upgrade it to the latest, bestest it can be.

UK train companies have an expensive fare (“Peak”) for early morning commuters, and a normal fare for everyone else. Each company has unique rules on time/validity. Southern Rail’s section on fares on their website recognizes this, but refuses to say when their normal (“Off Peak”) fares are valid. (see below […]

Just don’t use it, whatever you do. It’s hopelessly buggy, it is the worst possible git client you could use. And … for the third time, it just corrupted a git repository. This time I know it wasn’t user-error, it was just SmartGit. Totally unforgivable.

EDIT: no results on shopping sites, no results on Amazon … until someone told me to search for “keyboard 5000” or “keyboard 6000” – and suddenly appears this thing of awesome beauty: small, light, and Bluetooth! I can’t find them. All I can find is a MONSTROUS thing from Microsoft […]

Walk gently upon this earth For we are but passing through In our eyes the pains of life And in our hearts true love But all it is to be Is covered in a signal phrase: The meeting in ice and fire Of what we are and what others request […]

I’ve long felt this intuitively to be true, but the weight of opinion and accepted “evidence” has made the idea laughable: Copyright has no social benefit. So this article in Spiegel Online is fascinating: No Copyright Law – The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion? (I’ve been in hospital recently, […]

This post shows how to fix one of the biggest time-wasting aspects of Xcode: the default project. Every time you start writing a new app, you first typically waste 15-30 minutes “un-****ing” Apple’s defaults. The defaults are terrible. e.g. they are effectively unusable with Apple’s own SVN integration (Apple clearly […]

…I’m really.Sorry, just very very busy right.now! Welcoming some new people to Red.Glasses (my iPhone development / agency company), and lots of projects all happening at once. Given how many people I see out of work, I’m delighted to.be bucking the trend, but until.our new people get.up.to.speed, its a bit […]

Oh dear. Did someone ignore their “please renew your domain” warnings?

(Third and final Thunderbird post (promise!)) I had an idea; maybe if I deleted TB, then restarted it, and forced it to go offline first, THEN configured folders, THEN allowed it to connect, it might. just. work. Of course, doing so discovered some obvious bugs in TB. Sigh. I got […]

It’s a REALLY short review (but bear with me on this): they wouldn’t allow me to play. That came as a major shock. I didn’t set out to write about EE, I just wanted to have a look for myself, but this changed my mind. I’m probably not the target […]

I was too busy to post at the time, but Apple recently approved an update to my first ever iPhone app [iTunes Store link]. I’m using this app as a personal experiment in designing educational and learning games. Unfortunately, this update took something like 4 months to get through submission […]