Stuff What I Made

I’ve always had a passing interest in cars I suppose, but I wouldn’t really call myself a “car nut” or similar. I’m not one of those people that obsesses over all the new models and can name all the engine codes; as a general rule I’m more into the underlying technology – the how it works. Having said that, as I was growing up the one car I really liked was the Volkswagen Corrado and I convinced myself that one day I would own one. [Read More]

It will surprise no one who knows me that I was quite into computer games as a youngster. Like most of my contemporaries, I played all the embryonic FPS titles of the time, in particular the ones from id Software; Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. Let’s not talk about how we got copies or their respective age ratings. But I got really into them, not so much actually just playing but in making add-ons and modifying them. [Read More]

I got this bike during university, probably 2002, using my student loan (obviously, what else is it for?). It’s a Giant MCM-D 990, an eBay find (£500!) and clearly about 2 sizes too small for me, but it was quite a distinctive thing and always got lots of questions and comments out on the trails. The front triangle is carbon fibre, which was very unusual at the time. [Read More]

In the final year of my degree, we were required to do an individual project chosen either from a prescribed list of possibilities or optionally your own idea (staff approved). The ones I fancied on the list were taken by other students so I ended up choosing my own. At the time I didn’t really know my way around graphics (who am I kidding, I still don’t), so as a vehicle to learn a bit about OpenGL I endeavoured to write a tool that would render the call graph of an arbitrary application in real time. [Read More]

I’m not really sure why, but aged 16 or so I got it into my head that I’d make an electric guitar. Somehow I ended up with the book Make Your Own Electric Guitar, by Melvyn Hiscock. I genuinely can’t remember if the book ownership or the idea came first, but regardless even at that age I could be single-mindedly stubborn when it came to making things, and the seed had well and truly been planted. [Read More]