HTML5 Video Cheatsheet: Optimizing videos for the web
Creating videos for your page can be tricky, especially if you ensure your videos load quickly, play smoothly, auto start, and work across all devices and browsers.
The Art of Amiga lettering
I originally posted a version of this article on Twitter in April 2020.
When digging through old games and demos, sometimes truly remarkable art and lettering emerges from the pixelated depths—typically hand-plotted with meticulous care in Deluxe Paint.
Advent of Fonts 2025
December 2025 sees the fifth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
C# 14 breaks LINQ - how to work around it
Now that .NET 10 and C# 14 are out lots of people are finally realising that C# 14 and .NET has broken them - and quite badly.
Transactions in the MongoDB EF Core Provider
Database transactions ensure that multi-record (or in our case multi-document) operations either all succeed or all fail together.
Queryable Encryption with the MongoDB EF Core Provider
MongoDB's Queryable Encryption lets you encrypt sensitive database fields while keeping them searchable. Unlike traditional encryption-at-rest that renders data unreadable to the database, queryable encryption supports equality and range queries on encrypted fields without requiring decryption first.
Lazy Loading with EF Core Proxies
With the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Proxies NuGet package you can use to traverse navigation properties. This is often preferable to joins and includes such as when using one-to-many or only exploring a subset of the navigations based on client-side logic or for providers that don't support include yet.
Enhancing content articles in Nuxt3
I've already covered reading time and generated excerpts for Nuxt3 content but there are still a couple more things you can do to enhance your content articles.
Advent of Fonts 2024
December 2024 sees the fourth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
Generated Excerpts for Nuxt3 Content
Nuxt3 has been my stack of choice for a while now and it was time to port my site over from Nuxt2 - an exercise in itself I should blog about - but more concretely is the idea of excerpts.
Nuxt Content v1 content.db database & file size
An examination of Nuxt's content.db and how to shrink it for performance.
Email form sender with AWS Lambda, Brevo & reCAPTCHA
In this article I'll show you how to use AWS Lambda to send an email with Brevo using their API while being protected by reCAPTCHA.
Advent of Fonts 2023
December 2023 saw the third year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
A blog comment receiver for Cloudflare Workers
A number of years back I switched to a static site generator for damieng.com, firstly with Jekyll, and then with Nuxt when I wanted more flexibility. I've been happy with the results and the site is now faster, cheaper, more secure and easier for me to maintain.
Email form sender with Nuxt3, Cloudflare, Brevo & reCAPTCHA
I've been using Nuxt quite extensively on the static sites I work on and host and use Cloudflare Pages to host them. It's a great combination of power, flexibility, performance and cost (free).
Extracting files from Tatung Einstein disk images
Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3" disks containing source code to various old commercial games and once they were imaged with a high quality process (a Kryoflux) it was time to write some tooling to get the files out of the corresponding DSK file.
Rendering content with Nuxt3
I've been a big fan of Nuxt2 and Nuxt3 is definitely a learning curve and I have to admit the documentation is a bit lacking - lots of small fragments and many different ways to do things.
A quick primer on floppy disks
I've always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create - and break - copy protection recently popularised by 4am.
Adding reading time to Nuxt3 content
I've been using Nuxt2 quite a bit for my sites (including this one) and am now starting to use Nuxt3 for a few new ones and am finding the docs lacking in many places or confusing in others so hope to post a few more tips in the coming weeks.
Advent of Fonts 2022
Through December 2022 I again produced a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts this time primarily on Mastodon.
Advent of Fonts 2021
In December 2021 I tweeted a 24-day calendar of 8x8 pixel fonts.
Software
Writing creating computer software is my passion in life and I've been lucky to work on some incredible projects and technologies over the years.
Estimating JSON size
I've been working on a system that heavily uses message queuing (RabbitMQ via MassTransit specifically) and occasionally the system needs to deal with large object graphs that need to be processed different - either broken into smaller pieces of work or serialized to an external source and a pointer put into the message instead.
Using variable web fonts for perf
Webfonts are now ubiquitous across the web to the point where most of the big players even have their own typefaces and the web looks a lot better for it.
Migrating from OpenTracing.NET to OpenTelemetry.NET
OpenTracing is an interesting project that allows for the collection of various trace sources to be correlated together to provide a timeline of activity that can span services for reporting in a central system. They were competing with OpenCenus but have now merged to form OpenTelemetry.
Developing a great SDK: Guidelines & Principles
A good SDK builds on the fundamentals of good software engineering but SDKs have additional requirements to consider.
Privacy Policy
This privacy notice for Damien Guard ('we', 'us', or 'our'), describes how and why we might collect, store, use, and/or share ('process') your information when you use our services ('Services'), such as when you:
Shipping breaking changes
Breaking 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.
Mac OS System 9 on Windows
I'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. out of them.
Creating OR expressions in LINQ
As 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 should be - and this time is no exception.
From CircleCI to GitHub Actions for Jekyll publishing
I've been a big fan of static site generation since I switched from WordPress to Jekyll back in 2018. I'm also a big fan of learning new technologies as they come along, and now GitHub Actions are out in the wild; I thought this would be an opportunity to see how I can port my existing custom CircleCI build to Jekyll.
Notes from my Spectrum +3 manual
I'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-reference links all over the place.
My own Delphi story - celebrating 25 years
It'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 week or two for training from his nearby Guernsey home.
DDR4 memory information in Linux
If you've built a PC desktop in the last few years, you've probably been exposed to the confusing array of DDR4 information when it comes to buying RAM.
What it comes down to is not all RAM is created equal. Once you get past pin size and memory capacity, you'll have to filter down by speed. Speed isn't a simple one-figure number - you may see a rated speed like 2400MHz, but you may also see another bunch of numbers like 16-16-16-39 indicating the necessary clock cycles to perform certain types of memory operations.
SemVer is an intent - not a promise
Semantic versioning is a simple agreement on how packages should be versioned.
Semantic versioning (SemVer) gives package developers a framework to version their software and provides consumers of packages an expectation of how changes will be handled over time.
ZX Origins — free 8-bit fonts for games
I started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led aul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Windows. My interest in 8x8 fonts was suitably rekindled, and I ended up delivering about 60 - some even extracted from my original +3 disk images.
WordPress to Jekyll part 6 - A faster build
My 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.
Azure Pipeline Build Variables
Azure 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.
Terms of Use
Damien Guard ("us", "we", or "our") operates the https://damieng.com website (the "Service").
Revisiting my BBC Micro - display, speech & more
It's been a while since I blogged about Revitalizing my BBC Micro. In that time, I've performed a few upgrades readers might find interesting.
As useful as the tiny Amstrad CRT was, I wanted something bigger, brighter, and sharper. LCD is terrible for retro systems with blurry scaling attempting to draw images designed to take advantage of CRTs. Emulator authors spend significant effort trying to mimic CRT effects for an authentic retro feel - but the best option is to use a CRT.
WordPress to Jekyll part 5 - Hosting & building
The next stage is considering where to host the site and whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). My preferred approach on other sites has been to:
WordPress to Jekyll part 4 - Categories and tags
Jekyll does support categories and tags directly but doesn't support the pagination of categories and tag list pages. The Paginate-v2 gem does solve this - and also lets you tweak the URL format.
WordPress to Jekyll part 3 - Site search
Site search is a feature that WordPress got right. Analytics also tells me it is popular. A static site is at a disadvantage, but we have some options to address that.
WordPress to Jekyll part 1 - My history and reasoning
It's hard to believe it was 13 years ago, back in a cold December on the little island of Guernsey, when I decided to start blogging. I'd had a static site with a few odd musings since 2000, but this was to be more regularly updated and with technical content. Blogspot seemed the easiest way to get started.
Comma-separated parameter values in WebAPI
The model binding mechanism in ASP.NET is pretty slick - it's highly extensible and built on TypeDescriptor for re-use that lets you avoid writing boilerplate code to map between CLR objects and their web representations.