DamienG's Blog

In part 4 we followed data to and from the TI modem through the Intel 8251 USART landing in our buffers.

In part 3 we saw how the VTX5000's 8K ROM is structured and how the BASIC program drives the terminal.

In part 1 we covered the history of Prestel and Prism, and in part 2 we cracked open the VTX5000 to examine the hardware.

With the design spec in hand, Prism Microproducts contracted O.E.

The Prism VTX5000 for the ZX Spectrum and the first modem I ever owned.

If you're an online retailer in the UK you probably want to maximise your market but a lot of retailers don't realise their store is configured not to ship to the British Channel Islands (Guernsey and Jersey) or the Isle of Man as the defaults in some onl…

Creating videos for your page can be tricky, especially if you ensure your videos load quickly, play smoothly, auto start, and work across all devices and browsers.

A gallery of remarkable title-screen and demo-scene logos hand-plotted in Deluxe Paint, celebrating the typographic artistry of the Amiga era.

Database transactions ensure that multi-record (or in our case multi-document) operations either all succeed or all fail together.

MongoDB's Queryable Encryption lets you encrypt sensitive database fields while keeping them searchable.

With the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Proxies NuGet package you can use to traverse navigation properties.

I've already covered reading time and generated excerpts for Nuxt3 content but there are still a couple more things you can do to enhance your content articles.

Nuxt3 has been my stack of choice for a while now and it was time to port my site over from Nuxt2 - an exercise in itself I should blog about - but more concretely is the idea of excerpts.

An examination of Nuxt's content.db and how to shrink it for performance.

In this article I'll show you how to use AWS Lambda to send an email with Brevo using their API while being protected by reCAPTCHA.

A number of years back I switched to a static site generator for damieng.com, firstly with Jekyll, and then with Nuxt when I wanted more flexibility.

I've been using Nuxt quite extensively on the static sites I work on and host and use Cloudflare Pages to host them.

Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3" disks containing source code to various old commercial games and once they were imaged with a high quality process (a Kryoflux) it was time to write some tooling to get the files out of the corresponding DSK file.

I've been a big fan of Nuxt2 and Nuxt3 is definitely a learning curve and I have to admit the documentation is a bit lacking - lots of small fragments and many different ways to do things.

I've always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create - and break - copy protection recently popular…

I've been using Nuxt2 quite a bit for my sites (including this one) and am now starting to use Nuxt3 for a few new ones and am finding the docs lacking in many places or confusing in others so hope to post a few more tips in the coming weeks.

I've been working on a system that heavily uses message queuing (RabbitMQ via MassTransit specifically) and occasionally the system needs to deal with large object graphs that need to be processed different - either broken into smaller pieces of work or s…

Webfonts are now ubiquitous across the web to the point where most of the big players even have their own typefaces and the web looks a lot better for it.

OpenTracing is an interesting project that allows for the collection of various trace sources to be correlated together to provide a timeline of activity that can span services for reporting in a central system.

A good SDK builds on the fundamentals of good software engineering but SDKs have additional requirements to consider.