If you drive from Cambridge (UK) to Wimpole, you'll see some impressively large radio telescopes that belong to the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO).
However, there's much more that's not visible from the road. Hidden behind the trees, MRAO has a prototype SKA-Low array (from before the full installation in Australia), and three dishes from a HERA prototype.
The MRAO itself has a fascinating history, notably including the discovery of the first pulsar by Jocelyn Bell using the wonderfully named Interplanetary Scintillation Array, which consisted of over four thousand dipole antennas spread across nine acres. In WWI the site was a mustard gas factory, with train station and sidings. The train tracks have long since gone, but the station building remains. Inside hangs a large, coloured but faded image titled "GALACTIC RADIO EMISSION AT 38 Mc/s". This appears to be a coloured visualisation based upon the black & white figure in pages 654-655 of a 1957 paper [0].
The above 1957 paper illustrates a survey of half the celestial sphere at 38 MHz. In comparison, this specific MeerKAT image from the article [1] appears to be a 1.28 GHz measurement focusing on the galactic center (6.5 square degrees) [2]. So it's not a 100% like-for-like comparison, but interesting nonetheless to see how much the detail has improved in the past ~70 years!
There is a wild bald eagle that has taken up residency in Woodland Park Zoo, and has constructed a huge nest in the tree on top of the hill in the Elk enclosure. You can see it from the "Elk Overlook" at the end of the trail.
It's quite convenient that the bald eagle chose the Elk enclosure as its home because that's part of the Living Northwest Trail, so it blends in seamlessly alongside all the other native, but captive, PNW animals!
I like that metric. If we instead consider "time to cows" then Cambridge does quite well. Midsummer Common, Stourbridge Common and The Backs have (seasonal) cows.
I've been considering getting a Playdate as a means of having a constrained environment to develop a small game in. I didn't realise there has been such a long wait to get one, so perhaps I should place my order soon?
I like your suggestion of time-capping the development time. It's definitely easy for small, personal gamedev projects to grow in scope. In the past, when I've "finished" making a game (it always feels like there's more I could do), it's typically been because there has been an external deadline (e.g. a competition; or in one unusual case many years ago, advance warning on an upcoming change to the Apple App Store developer ToS, which threatened to only permit apps made directly in Xcode and potentially meant my WIP Unity app would not be approved).
Here are the two main packaging issues I run into, specifically when using Poetry:
1) Lack of support for building extension modules (as mentioned by the article). There is a workaround using an undocumented feature [0], which I've tried, but ultimately decided it was not the right approach. I still use Poetry, but build the extension as a separate step in CI, rather than kludging it into Poetry.
2) Lack of support for offline installs [1], e.g. being able to download the dependencies, copy them to another machine, and perform the install from the downloaded dependencies (similar to using "pip --no-index --find-links=."). Again, you can work around this (by using "poetry export --with-credentials" and "pip download" for fetching the dependencies, then firing up pypiserver [2] to run a local PyPI server on the offline machine), but ideally this would all be a first class feature of Poetry, similar to how it is in pip.
I don't have the capacity to create Pull Requests for addressing these issues with Poetry, and I'm very grateful for the maintainers and those who do contribute. Instead, on the linked issues I share my notes on the matter, in the hope that it may at least help others and potentially get us closer to a solution.
Regardless, I'm sticking with Poetry for now. Though to be fair, the only other Python packaging tools I've used extensively are Pipenv and pip/setuptools. It's time consuming to thoroughly try out these other packaging tools, and is generally lower priority than developing features/fixing bugs, so it's helpful to read about the author's experience with these other tools, such as PDM and Hatch.
As a young child, one day at school we had to fill in a "travel to school" questionnaire. I remember finding it funny that one option was "hovercraft", when the only one applicable to me was "walk".
Years later, I lived on the edge of Southsea Common in Portsmouth, and would regularly walk past these hovercraft terminals. The hovercraft do make quite a roar, as the article says, but were always fun to watch. I especially enjoyed "take-off" (if that's the right term?) when they would slide back off the beach into the sea and do a 180 simultaneously.
They do like to advertise the Portsmouth hovercraft service as being "unique", and say that no where else has such a service. So it's interesting to read that hovercraft are being used for regular services elsewhere in the world, such as in Japan, "to deliver passengers straight to the doors of the airport terminal across the Oita Bay without the need for a quay or even a connecting bus." Clever!
Several times I got the hovercraft in Portsmouth across to the Isle of Wight. One time I recall seeing a group of school children, presumably on their way back home to the Isle of Wight after a day of school on the mainland, and it brought back memories of my childhood questionnaire. I guess that option wasn't quite so ridiculous after all.
There's a lot I could say, but for now I need to keep it brief. The practical side of the transition (visa, bank account, social security number, renting, etc.) was a lot of work, but it was worth it. The area around Seattle is vastly different to Cambridge (for starters, it's not flat), and there's so many outdoor activities to do, such as hiking and skiing. It's not as wet as people make it out to be, but you'll want to layer up, and it is wetter than Cambridge. It's generally quite cyclable within the city, and there are good cycle trails further afield. The bike lanes are improving, but it helps to have an ebike for the hills. There's more board game shops, and surprisingly it's easier to get a good cup of tea. I'm actually back in Cambridge now, but feel free to reach out if you have any more questions.
In 2019, after six years living in Cambridge, I moved to Seattle. A few weeks before the move I stumbled across these pictures as postcards in a local shop. They perfectly captured life in Cambridge, everything from punts on the Cam watching fireworks to jogging past cows on the green. I bought a dozen, and kept them on my desk in Seattle for a while as a reminder. Thanks for the memories!
Mostly tech stuff, and some games. Recent topics have been:
Python, Django, C, CMake, SDL2.
These days I generally use it as a place to write up notes on whatever I happened to be working on recently. This is sometimes useful for me to refer back to, and hopefully useful for others too.
On one occasion I searched on Google to try and help solve a programming problem, only to find a post from myself published 8 months earlier, in which I had solved that exact same problem:
Before becoming a full time software engineer I used to develop video games for fun, initially in Game Maker but then later in Unity and other languages. Over time I'm aiming to (re)publish them on my website, rather than just leaving them to rot on my hard drive. None were particularly big hits back in the day, though the most successful was probably Dominos 2: Winter Edition, a physics based platformer with level editor. You can play it here:
I'd suggest looking into Netlify, which I use to host my hugo powered website. The free plan works well for a personal website, and they have good documentation on setting up hugo.
I mostly use it as a place to write up my notes about whatever I was working on that day, with typical topics covering things such as embedded software, TrueNAS and Python.
One time I was searching online trying to solve a programming problem, when the 2nd result was a post by myself from 8 months earlier, in which I wrote about how to solve that exact problem!
Ideally I'd like my website to be useful to others too. In recent years I've received one email from an individual saying they found one of my notes helpful, which made my day. It makes me think I should drop a note of thanks next time I find someone else's personal website useful.
In future I plan to use my website to host the video games I made when I was younger. I've just put one up so far.
The "incentive trap" has also been referred to as the "incessant obsolescence postulate", in this paper from 2011 titled "Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions":
However, there's much more that's not visible from the road. Hidden behind the trees, MRAO has a prototype SKA-Low array (from before the full installation in Australia), and three dishes from a HERA prototype.
The MRAO itself has a fascinating history, notably including the discovery of the first pulsar by Jocelyn Bell using the wonderfully named Interplanetary Scintillation Array, which consisted of over four thousand dipole antennas spread across nine acres. In WWI the site was a mustard gas factory, with train station and sidings. The train tracks have long since gone, but the station building remains. Inside hangs a large, coloured but faded image titled "GALACTIC RADIO EMISSION AT 38 Mc/s". This appears to be a coloured visualisation based upon the black & white figure in pages 654-655 of a 1957 paper [0].
The above 1957 paper illustrates a survey of half the celestial sphere at 38 MHz. In comparison, this specific MeerKAT image from the article [1] appears to be a 1.28 GHz measurement focusing on the galactic center (6.5 square degrees) [2]. So it's not a 100% like-for-like comparison, but interesting nonetheless to see how much the detail has improved in the past ~70 years!
[0] https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1957MNRAS.117..652B ("RESULTS OF A SURVEY OF GALACTIC RADIATION AT 38 Mc/s")
[1] https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-02-...
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541 ("The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic")