The Curious Engineer

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DamienG's Blog

damieng.com

Damien Guard on software development, typography, vintage computing, and .NET.

C# / .NETZX Spectrum / SinclairRetro computingDev tools / editors / IDEs

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
43 from 5 May 2020 to 31 May 2026
Posting
monthly (15 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://damieng.com/atom.xml

2026 8

  1. VTX5000: Part 5 - Rendering
  2. VTX5000: Part 4 - Communications
  3. VTX5000: Part 3 - Software ROM
  4. 8 June 2018JUN82018TechnologyRevisiting my BBC Micro - display, speech & moreRecent upgrades to my BBC Micro including a Commodore 1942 multi-sync CRT for proper RGB, speech-chip restoration, and other modifications made since the earlier revitalising post.
  5. VTX5000: Part 2 - Hardware
  6. 27 March 2019MAR272019DevelopmentAzure Pipeline Build VariablesAzure Pipelines has been interesting to me especially given the generous free open source tier and seemingly instant availability of build agents. The setup is easy if you're building .NET targets with lots of useful starters available.
  7. VTX5000: Part 1 - Prism, Prestel and Teletext
  8. 22 May 2019MAY222019DevelopmentWordPress to Jekyll part 6 - A faster buildMy site goes back to 2004 and is reasonably sized but not massive even with the comments, so waiting 30 seconds for a change to reflect is disappointing.

2025 15

  1. Sell to Guernsey - An Overlooked Opportunity for UK Sellers
  2. 3 June 2019JUN32019TypographyZX Origins - free 8-bit fonts for gamesI started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led Paul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Win
  3. HTML5 Video Cheatsheet: Optimising videos for the web
  4. 19 December 2019DEC192019DevelopmentSemVer is an intent - not a promiseWhy semantic versioning can never truly guarantee non-breaking changes, with concrete examples of how a 'safe' addition can still break consumers, and an argument for treating SemVer as an aspirational intent rather than a contra
  5. The Art of Amiga lettering
  6. 8 February 2020FEB82020TechnologyDDR4 memory information in LinuxGuide to reading DDR4 SPD memory information on Linux using the ee1004 driver — the older eeprom driver doesn't work on DDR4's EE1004 SPD chips — to inspect timings, manufacturer, and die details.
  7. 14 February 2020FEB142020DevelopmentMy own Delphi story - celebrating 25 yearsIt's 1995, and a wiry-looking engineer in need of a haircut is working at a tech services company in the Channel Islands. The island is Jersey (you can see the French coastline on a clear day), and he's over here for a wee
  8. Transactions in the MongoDB EF Core Provider
  9. 5 May 2020MAY52020TechnologyNotes from my Spectrum +3 manualI've recently been working on a full HTML5 conversion of the Sinclair Spectrum +3 manual with full canvas-drawn screenshots and diagrams for smooth scaling/high res displays as well as some close font matching and layout as well as cross-re
  10. Queryable Encryption with the MongoDB EF Core Provider
  11. 21 September 2020SEP212020DevelopmentFrom CircleCI to GitHub Actions for Jekyll publishing
  12. Lazy Loading with EF Core Proxies
  13. 2 March 2021MAR22021DevelopmentCreating OR expressions in LINQAs everybody who has read my blog before knows, I love LINQ and miss it when coding in other languages, so it's nice when I get a chance to use it again. When I come back to it with fresh eyes, I notice some things aren't as easy as they
  14. Enhancing content articles in Nuxt3
  15. 21 March 2021MAR212021TechnologyMac OS System 9 on WindowsI'm often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity—and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc.

2024 4

  1. 29 March 2021MAR292021DevelopmentShipping breaking changesBreaking changes are always work for your users. Work you are forcing them to do when they upgrade to your new version. They took a dependency on your library or software because it saved them time but now it's costing them time.
  2. Generated Excerpts for Nuxt3 Content
  3. Nuxt Content v1 content.db database & file size
  4. Email form sender with AWS Lambda, Brevo & reCAPTCHA

2023 9

  1. A blog comment receiver for Cloudflare Workers
  2. 22 July 2022JUL222022DevelopmentSoftwareWriting computer software is my passion in life and I've been lucky to work on some incredible projects and technologies over the years.
  3. Email form sender with Nuxt3, Cloudflare, Brevo & reCAPTCHA
  4. 25 November 2022NOV252022TypographyAdvent of Fonts 2021In December 2021 I tweeted a 24-day calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts.
  5. Extracting files from Tatung Einstein disk images
  6. 10 December 2022DEC102022TypographyAdvent of Fonts 2022Through December 2022 I again produced a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts this time primarily on Mastodon.
  7. Rendering content with Nuxt3
  8. A quick primer on floppy disks
  9. Adding reading time to Nuxt3 content

2022 2

  1. Estimating JSON size
  2. 29 December 2023DEC292023TypographyAdvent of Fonts 2023December 2023 saw the third year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 25-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts on Mastodon.

2021 4

  1. Using variable web fonts for perf
  2. Migrating from OpenTracing.NET to OpenTelemetry.NET
  3. Developing a great SDK: Guidelines & Principles
  4. 1 December 2024DEC12024TypographyAdvent of Fonts 2024December 2024 saw the fourth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 25-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts on Mastodon.

2020 1

  1. 1 December 2025DEC12025TypographyAdvent of Fonts 2025December 2025 saw the fifth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 25-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts on Mastodon.