Development
105 postsGame Idea 33 - Consensu (Theme: Technically Children's Content, but Would be Banned in Many Jurisdictions)
A game idea for a Jackbox-style voting game that eliminates players who vote differently from the group, so the best play is to get knocked out early.
Read postGame Idea 32 - Local choir (Theme: Hello sir, would you like to join our cult?)
A comedy game idea where you join a local choir to meet people and find out it is a cult, though its members are decent drinking buddies.
Read postGame Idea 31 - Scale (Theme: Science Fiction Horror)
A game idea for an eco-horror where bridges between two identical Earths are used for dumping and mining until the mass imbalance wrecks the planet's orbit.
Read postGame Idea 30 - The perfect cup of coffee (Theme: Precursor or The perfect cup of coffee)
A game idea for a clicker where you guide early humanity toward one goal, the perfect cup of coffee, with technology as a side effect.
Read postGame Idea 29 - The old man's magic (Theme: Elderly people with super powers)
A game idea about the last magic user, an immortal who absorbed everyone's powers, and the boy who sets out to defeat him and release magic back into the world.
Read postGame Idea 28 - Bird Hunt (Theme: Lens or eye piece or sight)
A Duck Hunt style browser game about the frustration of photographing small songbirds through a telephoto lens.
Read postGame Idea 27 - Regrets (Theme: Trashy Horror)
A horror story of forced backwards time travel in a fated universe
Read postGame Idea 26 - Robot (Theme: Something that takes 10 years (3650 days) of daily work to do)
A robot crossing the country over 10 years, controlled by daily votes from Patreon contributors
Read postGame Idea 25 - Flowers shop (Theme: Unsettlingly wholesome)
Sell flowers to townsfolk who love you, while harvesting the flowers from the town, making the town gloomier and the demand higher.
Read postGame Idea 24 - Child Actor (Theme: What's next after the hero's journey?)
An interview with the washed up hero who publicly saved the world from an evil most foul at sixteen
Read postGame Idea 23 - One wish (Theme: Cryptozoology)
Every child in the world gets one wish. Sometimes that wish creates a monster
Read postGame Idea 22 - AI Aztecs (Theme: What is in that mysterious black box of Doom?)
A galactic religion feeds human consciousness into an AI black box of Doom in exchange for technology. This is the story of the resistance
Read postGame Idea 21 - Cocktail party (Theme: A Strange Fetish)
A Jackbox style masquerade party game where players talk to NPCs and use magnetic poetry words to build a strange fetish.
Read postGame Idea 20 - Good taste (Theme: Otherworldly Chef)
A puzzle game where you are a lifeform building up your senses from scratch, until you can cook a meal for an otherworldly being
Read postGame Idea 19 - Pooper scrolls (Theme: A mysterious illness)
A man discovers his stool samples contain embroidered scrolls that accurately predict his future
Read postGame Idea 18 - The symptoms (Theme: A mysterious illness)
Fool the doctor into giving you a sick note. A Fibbage style bluffing game of fake symptoms
Read postGame Idea 17 - Detective (Theme: Detective)
You're a detective hunting a Time Looper bomber
Read postGame Idea 16 - Expanding Body Platformer (Theme: Body Horror)
A puzzle platformer with a snake style expanding body. Eat enemies to gain their powers, but every meal makes your body bigger and more unwieldy
Read postGame Idea 15 - Road Trip Map (Theme: Road trip)
A Jackbox style road trip game with a shared half-missing map and each player's hidden, competing goals.
Read postGame Idea 14 - Road Trip Radio (Theme: Road trip)
A Jackbox style mini game collection about who gets to pick the radio station on a road trip.
Read postGame Idea 13 - Jazzy vibes (Theme: Jack Box Games #1)
A Jackbox style game where each player controls one off-key instrument from their phone and the group works to sync up key and tempo.
Read postGame Idea 12 - Tiny machines (Theme: Small, Micro, Minuscule, Teeny, Tiny, Itty-bitty, Infinitesimal)
A Micro Machines style racing game with tiny cars on oversized tracks like a breakfast table.
Read postGame Idea 11 - DNA Monster Hunter (Theme: Contemporary Epic Fantasy)
Hunt monsters, take their genes, make new monsters, repeat
Read postGame Idea 10 - Thing explain guess - Web game (Theme: The Fablebound Five)
A web game where you describe a complex object like a dam using only the most common words, in the style of Up Goer Five.
Read postGame Idea 9 - Monster Guess Who - Field Guide Game (Theme: Urban Legends)
A game idea for a Guess Who-style party game played with a field guide of 100 cryptids and urban legend monsters.
Read postGame Idea 8 - New Job for a Kill bot - Story (Theme: Overqualified)
A story idea about a 10,000 year old AI war machine trying a string of ill-fitting jobs in a post-scarcity universe, until it finds work as a metal recycler.
Read postGame Idea 7 - Potion maker (Theme: Cooking)
A game idea for a dialog-driven potion shop where an apprentice wizard serves customers and makes judgment calls from incomplete recipe information.
Read postGame Idea 6 - One of us! (Theme: Joined Together)
A game idea for an XCom-style strategy game where you play a hive mind assimilating the population of Earth's cities while rival hive minds compete.
Read postGame Idea 5 - Trains but in space (Theme: Wormholes/Teleportation)
A game idea for a Ticket to Ride-style board game where corporations send generation ships to build a wormhole network between star systems.
Read postGame Idea 4 - Mini Golf 'It can't be this easy' (Theme: It can't be this easy)
A game idea for a puzzle mini golf game where every hole must be a hole-in-one, guided by ghost lines of every other player's shots.
Read postGame Idea 3 - Necessary (Theme: Medical Procedures)
A game idea for a rhythm game where a strong, tired hand drags a terrified inky mass through the environment, ripping its tendrils free on the beat.
Read postGame Idea 1 - Seek and Find (Theme: Loop)
A Seek and Find game set in a living town updating in real time. Spot what the cultists are changing and stop them before they summon their evil god
Read postGame Idea 2 - Reverse Katamari Damacy (Theme: Medical Procedures)
A top-down game where you drag your kid to a doctor's appointment, like Katamari Damacy in reverse.
Read postMigrating from Jekyll to Astro
On June 21, 2026 the site moved from Jekyll to Astro with a theme rebuilt from scratch. Here's why.
Read postWebsite theme update
Why blog.abluestar.com moved to a fresh Jekyll theme, plus a 20-year history of CMS choices from plain HTML to static sites.
Read postDomain names and registrar
Notes on consolidating 100+ domains across 6 registrars into one, with a short list of Gandi, EasyDNS, and name.com compared.
Read postRaspberryPI - Find the MAC address and change the host name
How to find your Raspberry Pi's MAC address and rename its hostname so you can pick it out on a shared network.
Read postWorking with Open Data, Maps and data.gov.bc.ca
Building a bathymetric map of the Salish Sea in TileMill from BC and US open data, planned as stacked plywood layers.
Read postAcrylic puzzle test 1
First test of laser-etched acrylic jigsaw puzzles, with silhouette animals and a paired laser-cut box.
Read postAcrylic Ornaments - Design thoughts an research
Research notes on Koch snowflakes, Processing scripts, and slotted paper designs for the next ornament run.
Read postAcrylic Christmas Ornaments version 1
First cut of acrylic Christmas ornaments at VHS, with notes on letter counters and font choices to fix.
Read postProgramming Competition Prisoners Dilemma
A Prisoner's Dilemma tournament in C with bots like Snitch, Copy Cat, and Forgives, built for a VHS hack night.
Read postI got a RaspberryPI (a few months ago)
First impressions of the Raspberry Pi a few months after getting it, plus thoughts on the 35 dollar price point and case options.
Read postNiceDog nano php web framework
Trying out NiceDog, a single-file PHP nano framework, fixing a few bugs and writing the missing example project.
Read postWordpress Post via email (wp-mail.php)
Switching from the abandoned Postie plugin to WordPress built-in wp-mail.php for post-by-email, with notes on the rate-limit hack.
Read postHow do you talk to someone over a common, instant message client (Gtalk, MSN) securely, with encryption
How to set up Pidgin with the Off the Record plugin to hold encrypted, verified chats over MSN or Gtalk.
Read postRGB LED POV Globe - Status update and mechanical issues
Twelve days before Maker Faire the 6-foot POV ring bent under stress, so the build shrank to a bicycle rim.
Read postRGB LED POV Globe - Research other peoples projects.
Research notes on other POV display projects that influenced the RGB LED globe build.
Read postRGB LED POV Globe - Research LED
Picking the right through-hole common-anode RGB LED for the POV globe, comparing prices across Adafruit, SparkFun, and Alibaba.
Read postStatus update Feb 15
Mid-February update: Ray Gun Revival launched, a Maker Faire spin-art rig in planning, and the outdoor sensor logging sunrises.
Read postColor survey
A color-naming survey borrowed from XKCD to find common ground on how people label the same swatches.
Read postIn search for a bug tracking system
Comparing Mantis, Redmine, Bugzilla, and Trac for a new development project, and why Trac won on simplicity.
Read postLooking for a new host
Personal review of past web hosts (Hostgator, Dreamhost, Media Temple, Hasweb, GoDaddy) and a wishlist for the next one.
Read postIdeas on how to advertise your stories
A list of ways writers can promote a short story before and after publication, from blogs to social media to forums.
Read postRPXnow and Windows live ID, problems signing out
Why RPXnow users see scary Windows Live ID sign-out errors, with a link to the Google Groups support thread that explains it.
Read postCakePHP - Disable validation in controller
A one-line CakePHP trick to skip model validation in a controller so you can update legacy records full of bad data.
Read postCakePHP - Search bar
A CakePHP snippet that wires a search box to an index action, matching the query against story titles and author names.
Read postCakephp - Session->setFlash is not working any more.
Fix for missing CakePHP setFlash messages after 1.2: the template needs an explicit session check and flash call.
Read postCakephp - Using the same view for multiple controller functions
How to reuse one CakePHP view across multiple controller actions by disabling autoRender and calling render() with the template path.
Read postwinnt.h(5545) : error C2146: syntax error : missing ; before identifier ContextRecord
Fix for the winnt.h C2146 ContextRecord compile error: add #include windows.h.
Read postArduino + Maxsonar EZ1 + Processing
Processing sketch that draws Arduino MaxSonar EZ1 distance data as coloured arcs whose hue changes with range.
Read postARDUINO and MaxSonar EZ1
Hooking a MaxSonar EZ1 ultrasonic rangefinder to an Arduino, debugging noisy readings, and finding the wiring mistake.
Read postArduino Robots
An Arduino with an Adafruit motor shield on an old RC car, driven by a simple API; sumobot videos got it started.
Read postinternet robot zombies
A plain-language take on form-spam bots, the botnets that run them, and why people buying the spam keeps it alive.
Read postHow to find the text column header of a CListCtrl in MFC
Short MFC helper that pulls the text of a CListCtrl column header by index using the underlying CHeaderCtrl.
Read postAdd/Remove operation is impossible, the code element Cxxx is read only
Fix for the Visual Studio error when adding a control event handler: delete the .ncb and .suo files, then rebuild.
Read postDump a CListCtrl
C++ snippet that walks an MFC CListCtrl and writes every row and column out to a CSV file.
Read postHow to create a menu and submenu on right click in MFC
MFC snippet that builds a right-click context menu with a nested submenu using CMenu and TrackPopupMenu.
Read postTroubleshooting CakePHP
A running list of CakePHP 1.2 fixes, starting with HtmlHelper::file moving to FormHelper.
Read postTesting writing from Windows Live Writer
First impressions of Windows Live Writer as a desktop blog client for WordPress, with categories, live preview, and source editing.
Read postWhat time is it
A PHP script that auto-generates 79,206 timezone-comparison pages for cities like Vancouver, Paris, and New York.
Read postWhy is everything so plain?
After 15 redesigns, the 16th strips the site down to a clean simple template that just works.
Read postThe procedure entry point_except_handler4_common could not be located in the dynamic link library msvcrt.dll
Notes on fixing the msvcrt.dll _except_handler4_common error caused by a Vista DLL landing on Windows XP.
Read postHow to install PHPBB 3.0.1
Step-by-step install guide for phpBB 3.0.1 on an Apache/MySQL host, written for COMP2920.
Read postHow to block spam on a wordpress Blog
Five-step walkthrough for turning on Akismet in WordPress to kill almost all comment spam.
Read postNSIS - Tips
A growing snippet library for NSIS installers: opening folders, registering ActiveX files, checking if a process is running.
Read postWHAT IS reCAPTCHA
How reCAPTCHA reuses the time people spend solving CAPTCHAs to OCR words from scanned books.
Read post403 - An arrogant initiative in defense of the web
A rant on Internet Explorer and an experiment with the 403day.org script that nags IE users to switch browsers.
Read postVS6 SP6
A mirror of the Visual Studio 6 Service Pack 6 installer for anyone still stuck on VS6.
Read postTwitter vs Tumblr
Side-by-side score of Twitter and Tumblr on popularity, domains, themes, posting, and data ownership.
Read postIf you build it they will come mentality...
Notes on why a new website needs promotion, with tips on search engine submission, AdWords, and outreach.
Read postHow to access Facebooks data
Walkthrough of the Facebook REST API using PHP to pull friends, check pairs, and look up user info.
Read postHow to make a facebook application.
Step-by-step build of a hello-world Facebook app with the PHP5 API, from app registration to login.
Read postFlower plug
A bathtub plug shaped like a flower that shifts from pink to deep purple once the water hits a safe temperature.
Read postWastbasket for the bathroom
A bathroom wastebasket from SnowTone with a lid you seal by dropping in a magazine, made for toilet readers.
Read postKeeping track of your comments
Comparing Subscribe-to-Comments plugins against coComment.com for tracking replies on the blogs you comment on.
Read postEvery Day Fiction dot com
Every Day Fiction publishes a new sub-1000-word story each day, delivered by email or RSS, short enough to read on a lunch break.
Read postWhen big people steal small guys ideas
Adobe Kuler looks a lot like ColourLovers.com, and small site owners have no real way to push back on big copycats.
Read postInternet explorer (IE) caching AJAX requests.
Fixing IE's aggressive AJAX caching by appending a timestamp query parameter to the request URL.
Read postDefeat your Google twin
Plotting how to outrank my Google twin, an engine-casting site also named Steven Smethurst, by Christmas.
Read postMistakes I have made
Ten blogging and web design mistakes I made over the years, from subdirectories and subdomains to too many RSS feeds.
Read postWhere I went wrong
Reflecting on my offline games niche blog and where the original niche-picking calculation went wrong.
Read postRemoving the Nofollow link
Why the WordPress DoFollow plugin and its public user list make blogs an easy target for comment spammers.
Read postTechnorati faves
Joining a Technorati favourites cross-linking experiment, with the rules for faving each other's blogs.
Read postJohn Chow - How to make money online
Trimming a 200-feed RSS list down to 10, and why John Chow's make-money-online blog made the cut.
Read postWhere does this IP Address come from
A PHP script that looks up an IP against ISP allocation data to guess the visitor's rough geographic location.
Read postThe Eden project - Artificial ecosystem
Design notes for an artificial ecosystem sim with creatures that age, mate, eat, and inherit traits from their parents.
Read postWhat happened to the design?
The site is stripped of CSS for CSS Naked Day, a yearly nudge toward clean semantic HTML.
Read postImageManager 2.0
ImageManager 2.0 is a Wordpress plugin that lets bloggers resize, crop, rotate, flip, or scale uploaded images in place.
Read postExtracting the IPTC data from an image in PHP
How to pull Picasa captions and other IPTC metadata out of an image in PHP using iptcparse and iptcembed.
Read postPhoto Gallery that does not require a MySql database
An IPTC mod for Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery so it reads Picasa titles, no database needed, just upload and go.
Read postSubscribe to Comments
A Wordpress plug-in that emails readers when someone replies to a post they commented on, installed with two file uploads.
Read postThe Importance Of Deep Linking
Why John Chow recommends deep linking inside blog posts: SEO benefit and traffic back from RSS scrapers that copy your content.
Read post12 Rules for Choosing Domain Names
Twelve rules from SEOmoz for picking a domain name: keywords, dot-com only, easy to type, no hyphens or numbers.
Read postY-105 USB to RS 232 Converter (DB9)
A mirror of the Y-105 USB to RS 232 DB9 converter drivers so they stay findable when the vendor page disappears.
Read post