Happy New Year 2022

Wishing everyone a happy new year 2022! 2022 is already shaping up to be an interesting year, with the current spread of Omicron COVID virus. Thankfully I’m fully vaccinated and already had a booster shot for maximum protection. Its a good opportunity to bunker down and focus on some tasks. Introverts unite (in your own space)! Some of the things I want to achieve this year are: Blog more, and with more pictures!...

January 1, 2022 · 1 min · Phil Howlett

End of year 2021

2021 has been a tough year. I’ve been absent from working on my own personal projects during the later half of 2021. This has mainly been due to other family members' health issues and dealing with the aftermath. 2021 has been hard on a lot of people given the current COVID-19 circumstances. Anyway, I thought I’d look back and see how I went with sticking with my original goals and plans for 2021....

December 31, 2021 · 3 min · Phil Howlett

Mars Lander Game - Update

Well that was a short lived project. After a month of development, the Mars Lander project is already ‘dead’. So why did it die so quickly? It seems to suffer the same fate as many beginning open source projects that I’ve come across. You can’t just ‘wing it’. If you don’t have a plan, goals or direction on where you want a project to go then it will ultimately fail by indecision....

November 22, 2021 · 1 min · Phil Howlett

A Mars Lander Game

I’ve been meaning to get back into some game programming again, but I didn’t fell like starting doing something new. I wanted to help someone else and join a project and be part of a team again (kind of like when I was working on pioneer space sim). This weekend I came across a post on the LÖVE game development forums. It is a game being written that is loosely based on a the 1979 Atari classic Lunar Lander but with a Mars Lander theme....

October 24, 2021 · 2 min · Phil Howlett

Blog automation

I’ve been running my website since 2012. Originally I was running Wordpress software for the backend. I found it was slow and cumbersome and to be honest I felt it was a bit risky from hackers (too many moving parts, requires php, with a mysql backend database, and with so many security exploits with vulnerable plugins). It wasn’t until last year that I came across static site generation and I promptly switched to using Hugo instead....

October 18, 2021 · 2 min · Phil Howlett