Ian Renton

Adventures in Belgium

Freshly back from a work trip to Bremen at the end of May, they sent me off again for two weeks in Belgium at the start of June, to the exciting seaside destination that is Zeebruges—a town famous for its commercial port, its 1980s ferry disaster, and very little else. By and large our days there were long and consisted of “hotel, naval base, pub, hotel, repeat”, but the event turned out a great success.

This Week's Helpful Advice: Don't Help the Poor?

Our local newspaper, the Bournemouth Echo (beware of annoying ads & trackers), is as ever a font of useful advice. This week it comes from the police, who are letting us know that helping the poor is a bad thing. Now I’m not too upset with the usual idea trotted out, of offering food and drink to beggars instead of money lest they spend the money on booze and drugs. But apparently even that is now discouraged.

Anxiety!

This isn't a particularly easy post to write, but with it being Mental Health Awareness Week (at least, it is in America), I thought I'd give it a go anyway.

Mental Health, particularly my own, isn't something I talk about much. I have family and friends with much more serious problems than mine, like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and they're likely to be taking medicine to counteract the worst effects of those conditions for the rest of their lives. Not only do I have to be mentally strong enough to sort my own life out, sometimes I need to care for them too.

But I do, now and again, have problems with anxiety. In particular this raises its head when I'm required to do something out of the ordinary, even if it's something like seeing friends or going out for dinner that's otherwise actually enjoyable.

A Quick Change of Comment System

One of the reasons why I’ve recently been simplifying the number of things I run on the web is the difficulty of it all—not that I’m incapable of running mail servers and Minecraft servers and a dozen websites, but that I can achieve 99% of the benefit with only 10% of the effort by using other services instead.

Farewell to Facebook

My blogging history has not been lacking in posts where I consider deleting my Facebook profile. It’s been a common thread throughout that time that Facebook has its advantages (having become my sole practical means of contacting many old friends) and disadvantages (that it is a privacy-devouring monster). In the main, we have been willing to make a deal with the Devil in order to use the vast network of communication possibilities it opens up for us.

Planning the Wind-Down

It’s been five years now since, full of enthusiasm and convinced that SuccessWhale might make it big, I bought myself a server in London somewhere, and moved my web presence over from its previous shared hosting.

A Sea Battle Update?!

“Sea Battle” was a casual 2D real-time strategy game that I put together in a few days back in 2010, and documented in a series of blog posts at the time. It’s lain dormant ever since, but I picked it up again today while bored and made a couple of tweaks.

Made in Shenzhen: One Week with a Weird Chinese Phone

I’ve held onto my Galaxy S5 for 2½ years, until at last the battery has stopped holding more than 8 hours’ charge, the compass no longer works, and the “metal” paint is starting to peel. I had two requirements for a replacement: it must be the same size or smaller, and its battery must last significantly longer. Ideally also: cheap. Unfortunately, most popular manufacturers seem to have stabilised on 5.5 inches as the ideal screen size, having long forgotten how the tech media mocked the Dell Streak as a “phablet” for its ridiculously huge 5-inch screen, a lifetime ago. (2010.) Most smaller phones fit into major manufacturers’ “budget” lines, with poor specifications, including the all-important battery size.

The Open Source Disadvantage

Three years ago, Google shut down its popular RSS reader web application. The decision angered many users, and I penned a long rant about how horrible proprietary services are as they can be taken away from the users at any time without their consent.

How I Blog Now

It’s fifteen years today since I first posted something—specifically, terrible teenage poetry—on what would become my blog. Back then my website was a purple-and-black exhibition of my poor teenage sense of humour, and I started posting snippets of poetry to it under the category of “Thoughts”.