Blog

Reanimator revived

Over a year ago, I hit a dead end on Windows 10 with David Himmelstrup’s reanimate package. I returned to the package with a simple animation in mind. In the interim, things had moved on. I had no difficulty creating the animation and rendering it to a GIF image: Dependencies On Windows 10, the Haskell […]

Kiln shelf stacker

Kiln shelves are brittle and should be stored standing on their edges. Some furniture was required to store three circular kiln shelves. I built it using scrap wood. Design I had some rough-sawn softwood boards of width 12 cm and thickness 25 mm, recovered from a palette. The circular shelves were of diameter 350 mm and thickness 10 mm. […]

Wedging table

Wedging is the process of kneading clay to remove air bubbles before use. A wedging table is a low, study table with an absorbant surface (a concrete paving slab can be used) for wedging. A wedging table was required. I built one using softwood timber which had been found free on Freecycle. Design Five key […]

gnuplot and Excel, scratching the surface

Microsoft’s Excel is ubiquitous in finance. The current version (version 2105) provides the Surface chart type, with four varieties of the chart: 3-D Surface, Wireframe 3-D Surface, Contour, and Wireframe Contour. The underlying data is provided as a rectangular grid or, rather, a list of series of data. The names of the series provide the […]

Mortal engines

Over forty years ago, my late father brought a Mamod steam engine into the home, screwed it down onto a strip of chipboard, and made it run. I can not remember now if it was a toy for me or a toy for him. Eventually, like childish things, it was put away, in a shoe […]

The big blue

On 9 July 2020, I received a new Dell XPS 8930. From about 13 August 2020, I have had a series of BugCheck events (Event ID 1001), logged in the System log. All of them, except two, were code 154. Could I find the cause? I thought I had but it was a false dawn. […]

Road to partition

The home PC (a Dell XPS 8700) failed, leading to the painfully slow backup and recovery of Windows 8.1, the upgrade again to Windows 10 version 2004 and, luckily, the recovery of data. A few weeks later, it failed again, the lock screen and mouse frozen at 3:06 am on a Tuesday morning, rebooting only […]

Locale hero

I was interested in the internationalisation (‘i18n’) of Haskell programs. The Haskell wiki has a page on the subject, referring variously to: using the constructors of a Haskell type to represent messages, GNU’s gettext, or the Grammatical Framework programming language. A starting point was identifying the user’s locale. As is often the case, that was […]

Logjammin’

Discontent with the verbose output of version 2.3.3 of the Haskell Tool Stack when using a Solarized Dark terminal theme took me down the rabbit-hole of logging with the rio and monad-logger packages. RIO.logDebug The RIO module exports logDebug: In respect of the RIO env a type, RIO env is an instance of MonadIO and […]

The matrix

I thought I had built the hmatrix package on Windows 10 version 2004, but that was a blue pill illusion. The red pill reality was more complex. MSYS2 The Haskell Tool Stack comes with a version of MSYS2, in a folder of the folder returned by stack path –programs. Currently, that folder is msys2-20180531. A […]