I have been messing around with apple shortcuts lately and now have three I’m really quite pleased with – I am sharing them here with the caveat that they may not do what you need or want them to do! Please do use them as a base for your own though, or as inspiration for other stuff. The more I think about and get to know how shortcuts work the more things I think of adding in or creating. For example I haven’t even started looking at APIs yet, and if I can get the Discogs API working with it then that opens up many possibilities.

For now though, here are the three I am regularly using.

Create Songlink URL & Copy To Clipboard

This I find really useful for hashtag games on mastodon, or for simply sharing a track with family friends via Signal etc.

The basic flow is:

• Get details of now playing track in Apple Music
• Build URL based on songlink syntax and in markdown format
• Copy URL to clipboard

Then you can paste that URL anywhere you like – I use it for music hashtag games and it saves a lot of typing!

Grab it here

Post Now Playing Track to Mastodon & Buffer

This takes the songlink URL further and uses it to post details about the currently played track in Apple Music.

The basic flow is:

• Get details of now playing track in Apple Music.
• Build URL based on songlink syntax
• Uses a few regular expressions to clean up artist and track names for hashtags
• Checks if the file is local or cloud and sets that to a MusicLocation variable
• Prompt for extra comments (or leave blank)
• Build the post body
• Post to mastodon via Mona

Grab it here

Music Recognition to Mastodon & Buffer

This does a similar job but takes the track details from Shazam.

The basic flow is:

• Open Shazam and recognise music (error if no song found)
• Save track to playlist of your choice
• Get current location
• Read in tracks in Apple Music playlist and get latest item
• Get track details
• Save track artwork to local folder
• Create basic Alt Text for image (working to improve this)
• Use regular expressions to tidy artist name for hashtag
• Prompt for music recognition source – user can put things like a TV programme or venue/restaurant etc.
• Create image attachment from local folder (based on artwork above)
• Build post
• Post to mastodon

Grab it here

I’ll build some more out over the coming weeks and months and post them here if I think they will be of interest.

Let me know if you use them and if you find them useful!

The post No Shortcuts In Life appeared first on SoundHog.

I have been thinking about a cyber deck for a while now, looking to create something out of a raspberry Pi or other single board computer, something to resemble the Free Write or the old Alpha Smart devices. I just wanted to have something ultra portable with little distraction and no purpose other than writing. Then I came across the concept of a WriteDeck, or Write Deck – a cyber deck specifically for the purpose of writing.

Reading other blogs and searching for write deck projects it became clear that a lot of what I wanted to do could (and perhaps should) be achieved with an old laptop or an iPad and keyboard. Not so much fun maybe, but after all I wanted to end up with something productive, not overly complicated and a solution that just works.

So I took on board the advice, and repurposed an old iPad that I hardly ever used.

I even had an old folio case in a drawer with a keyboard and stand, again going unused. So once all charged up and, for the keyboard at least, a change of battery, I had something with potential. I looked for the best minimal, distraction free writing apps and ended up simply using Notes in full screen mode. I removed almost every other app apart from WordPress so I can share directly from Notes to a new draft on either of my sites, but even that isn’t vital as I can always resume from my laptop when I get home.

So I have got myself exactly what I wanted – something very portable, lightweight, distraction free and most importantly something that does the job I wanted it to do perfectly. Oh, and it didn’t cost me a penny!

You can pick up an old iPad Air for around £50 on eBay, and folio cases are ridiculously cheap now for early iPads. I assume something similar can be achieved with an Android tablet but for me at least, fully immersed in the apple eco system, the iPad made sense.

Anyway, I have used it now a few times ‘out in the field’ and it is a joy to write on, I just wish I had thought of it sooner!

The post Write Deck appeared first on SoundHog.

My physical media of choice happens to be vinyl LPs. I have waxed lyrical (no pun intended) on why this is before, here and on mastodon, so I won’t go into the reasons for choosing this format. Suffice to say vinyl is very important to me for many reasons.

So here are my ten albums.

The Who – Quadrophenia

This is the album I have had and held the longest. My brother took me into Our Price records in Croydon for my birthday (I was 14) and told me to choose a record. I went straight to this, and I still have that copy on my shelves. I have had it for 40 years and have never, ever grown bored of it. You’ll have to prise this album from my cold dead hands when I’m gone.

The Who – Tommy

I flip flop between Quadrophenia and Tommy when asked what the best album of all time is. It all depends on when I listened to each one last, or how I’m feeling, or the weather or something. I don’t know, but they are both truly excellent and groundbreaking in their own ways. Tommy is a masterclass of telling a story through music, an art form that few have ever matched.

The Jam – All Mod Cons

For me this is the moment The Jam came of age. The first two albums are excellent and an undeniable tour de force from a band and songwriter so young, but All Mod Cons remains my favourite. Weller’s genius at song crafting is obvious throughout. The iconic imagery on the cover and inserts shaped how me and my mates dressed for quite some time!

Billy Bragg – Brewing Up With Billy Bragg

I think I have seen Billy Bragg live the most of any artist. From his early days carrying around his amp and speakers in his rucksack, I followed him on Red Wedge tours with The Style Council, The Communards etc. and, latterly, on solo gigs. His music was an absolute eye opener and a breath of fresh air. It’s not an exaggeration to say Billy shaped my political views, as well as sang the most perfect and painful love songs. He understood a generation perfectly.

Secret Affair – Business As Usual

I realise as I type this that this list is fuelled by nostalgia. Secret Affair were part of my youth in a big way. I was quite young when the whole mod revival thing kicked off, but just old enough to be enthralled by it all. I went all in. There are many, many exceptional albums from that era and that movement, but this is the one that means the most to me.

Jethro Tull – Thick As A Brick

I came to Tull relatively late. I had heard them before but for some reason had always dismissed them as slightly odd or a bit stuffy. I was SO wrong. When I got them, I really got them, and I became obsessed for a while. Thick As A Brick (another concept album – a definite theme developing) is by some way my favourite of theirs.

The Smiths – The Queen is Dead

A remarkable album from a seminal band. Yes, Morrissey is a shitty person now. I don’t know how or why that happened but I still believe he wasn’t a shitty person back then. Either way, I choose to ignore that and continue to love this album, and I make no apologies for that decision.

XTC – Skylarking

I could have chosen any XTC album, especially English Settlement, but Skylarking is the one I have the most nostalgia for and memories of. I have mentioned a few times that one of my best friends’ dad managed XTC so I had early access to this album, and others – we absolutely played it to death all summer. A great, great album.

Green Day – Dookie

This album coincided with me falling in love. My now wife and I would listen to it back to back in the car and it holds a special place in my heart because of this. It’s a great album, but it wouldn’t be on this list without those memories. As it is, I couldn’t be without it. I didn’t get this on vinyl until relatively recently.

The Beatles – Abbey Road

Over time, Abbey Road has become my favourite Beatles album. It’s a masterpiece. The medley on side 2 is some of the best music I have heard. In any case, I couldn’t in all consciousness leave The Beatles out and this album pips the other ones to the post, which is no mean feat.

So that’s it. An exercise in futility, maybe, these lists always are, but those are the ten albums I’d currently save from a burning house. They have been with me through thick and thin, are old friends, and I hope remain friends for many years to come!

The post Ten Albums To Take To The Grave appeared first on SoundHog.

Your donation, big or small, makes a difference. £33 could fund a new dementia specialist Admiral Nurse to spend an hour helping a family in the community, offering practical solutions and emotional support to cope with their loved one’s distressed behaviour.

You can support me by donating here.

This post will be updated throughout May with progress, and pinned to the top of my blog for the duration.

Friday, 1st May.

27.6 miles to go!

Saturday 2nd May

26 Miles to go

Sunday 3rd May

23.2 miles to go

Monday 4th May

21.8 miles to go!

Wednesday 6th May

20.7 miles to go!

Thursday 7th May

19.2 miles to go.

Saturday 9th May

16 miles to go.

Wednesday May 12th

14.3 miles to go.

The post Dementia UK – 31 Miles Walk in May 2026 appeared first on SoundHog.

Although originally a type in, this game was published by The Guild, a homegrown software label set up by Tony Collins, himself an adventure game author in 1991, who ran the label until the autumn of 1993. As well as self published games, and those from other authors, The Guild built up a large public domain collection, and this game was one of those. We’ll likely come across quite a few of The Guild’s titles during our adventures.

Originating as a type-in this game is obviously written in BASIC and is a pretty small, text only adventure.

So, our buccaneering reputation preceding us, we have been chosen to recover some gold for some prince or other from a dangerous, fierce dragon. The prince needs this gold to fight an evil king, apparently.

We start, as we so often do, at the entrance to a cave.

There is nowhere really to go except into the cave, so we do that. We find ourselves in a passage leading south. Being small, we can’t expect too much from the parser, and although a door is mentioned there is nothing that can be done with it. Even LOOK DOOR tells us nothing. I guess we ignore that for now then.

There is a boat at the bottom of this passage which we can miraculously pick up and carry, but without giving too much away, it is of little use yet.

This is very standard adventuring stuff – with the help of pencil and notepad to map out moves we soon find our way around to the door we saw at the entrance to the cave, picking up the obvious things we come across along the way. The parser, as mentioned above, is very limited – the usual commands don’t work and the game uses LOOK instead of EXAMINE which always jars me, but it is just about usable. It can be frustrating though, especially as it recognises TOSS but not THROW, for example.

So, back to find the dragon (if you found the dragon too soon you’ll realise now the power of the sword!) and the gold. A fairly simple puzzle presents itself to escape back down to the boat storage area and to a more useful boat, before we can get to the prince and give him the gold.

No. No, I don’t want another go.

A quick adventure (15 mins max?) and with the aid of a mapping tool or good old pencil and paper it is extremely easy to solve, the poor parser aside. I would have been happy enough with this as a type-in but if I’d spent any money on this it would be very disappointing. Having said that, I have played worse games

Next time we’ll be playing Adventureland from 1980, released by Adventure International (Thunder Mountain in the USA). Actually, we’ll play the 1984 graphic version of the game.

Until then, try not to get hoisted on your own, or anybody else’s, petard.

The post Adventure Without A Name appeared first on SoundHog.

Ray Hoffmeister coded this game (an appropriately beery retro name!) in CBM BASIC and it’s the only one attributed to him on Gamebase 64, but it is recorded as being published by Binary Zone PD who have been around since 1990. Binary Zone distributed public domain games on disk and cassette and are still around today.

On loading up the tape image we’re presented with the above screen before being told we have a limited supply of air and a back pack that will only carry 3 items. Putting the familiar sinking feeling one gets with these PD games to one side, let’s see what the planet Zeeble has in store for us…

This is one of those adventures that has minimum location descriptions, but reveals a lot more when you type ‘look’, so the key here is to move, map and look around. It’s a small adventure, and limited in terms of vocabulary and has a weak parser. It also isn’t particularly logical and gets stuck in some place. Having said that I quite enjoyed it.

If you look around and there is an object in your location, you’ll generally need to pick it up for use later on. Some clever swapping of items is required to keep within the pack limit of 3. You should eventually end up at a cave of ice and, ahhhh, there are Zeebs here! If you got here before finding the things you need (namely stones and a pistol) then run away and find them.

Once the Zeebs scramble and the ice door of the cave is melted, you move inside. Some annoying logic follows with dropping stuff and picking stuff up, but you should eventually end up in the cave, near a metal chest carrying a raft and a parachute.

Getting the chest open is a bit annoying. If you are using VICE or the C64 Ultimate save a snapshot as you can easily blow the thing up and you’ll need to start again. The key is to keep the chest ticking softly. If it ticks loudly then that press is wrong. Start with one colour, then trial and error until you get all three ‘softly’ options and the chest clicks open.

Once that’s done we want to go back to the high mountain where we first used the rope (you’ll need it again here) and drop the raft. Then a jump and a climb down with the rope lands us in an area where there is a radio waiting to be fixed with the wire. Do that, turn the radio on, and Bob’s your Zeeble.

And that is our reward, complete with spelling mistake.

This small adventure played ok, a little inconsistent and slow in terms of code and the parser really struggled at times depending on location, but it worked, it was fairly logical in that the player knows what they need to do. It reminded me a lot of PD games I used to be able to afford and although I can’t remember ever playing this one, I think it would have certainly provided enough entertainment in a late peanut butter sandwich and coke fuelled afternoon.

Back in sequence next time with Adventure Without A Name from The Guild Adventure Software.

The post Adventure on the Planet of Zeeble appeared first on SoundHog.

Right, where was I? Oh yes, just finished up escaping from Cleopatra’s Pyramid, had a little break (19 months), got myself a brand new Commodore 64 Ultimate, had a nice cup of tea and thought it was about time to get back in the saddle.

As it happens we’re on to one of the proper big titles now. 1982’s Adventure Quest from Level 9. Level 9 games were my hearts desire in 1982/84. I used to look longingly at adverts in magazines, but they were either only available on disk, out of my price range, or very often both. Eventually cheaper cassette versions did start appearing in the UK (not all though, if I am remembering correctly) and I certainly did manage to get hold of a couple, but they were still very expensive for my pocket money budget. When I first got back into the C64 around 15 years or so ago, Level 9 adventures were the first titles I collected. It was simply impossible for me to envisage back then how readily available all the commodore software would be today and how easy it is to use thanks to kit like the Ultimate 1541 and the new 64 Ultimate.

Adventure Quest was not Level 9’s first game but it was the first alphabetically, and as I am sticking to that ridiculous notion, it comes next in the list. It is part 2 of a trilogy of games, initially released separately, which featured themes and names inspired by (stolen from) the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and so became known as the Middle-Earth Trilogy before being expanded and rereleased together in 1986 as a compilation. At that point the references to Middle Earth were removed and the trilogy was retitled Jewels of Darkness.

There are many in depth reviews out there of Adventure Quest, so this won’t necessarily be another one, but I will share my thoughts on playing through and try to give a feel for the game.

The first thing to mention is this is a large game for an 8 bit platform, something Level 9 were famous for, and a sophisticated adventure given it all fitted on one disk. As the included manual explains, this is achieved with the use of A Code.

Adventure Quest is not written in ASSEMBLER or BASIC, either of these would have made it too big – and BASIC would also have been too slow. Instead it is written in a super-compact language known as ‘A-CODE’, which is specially designed for writing adventure games.

So let’s dive in. We start outside a small brick building and like all good adventurers the first thing to do is probably go inside. Already we are slightly overwhelmed with the amount of objects and information available. This is the point you need to get your notepad and pencil out. Mapping is hugely important and clues will be found along the way, so a notebook should be the first item in the bag when packing your essential adventuring kit.

Without giving too much away, there is just no way you are going to know what to pick up, what to consume, and what to look at in more detail yet without trial and error. And this is what makes these games so great. Unlike a quick blast of Space Invaders, these games occupy your thoughts through school days (or work days!) and solutions and ideas can come to you when least expected. Rush home, try it out, feel on top of the world and move on to the next puzzle. Needless to say, make frequent use of the save feature!

I’m going to cover the first important puzzle here, so read no further if you want absolutely no spoilers.

If you go outside and look around (remember to map everything!) you will come across an area where you are stumbling over sharp stones and you can see a rare orchid two feet above you. Getting here requires getting lost in the forest, a common Level 9 mechanism, but careful mapping and trial and error will help you find your way through. Try every direction, and save, save, save. We need to get that orchid and use it later on to woo a unicorn. If only we had something to stand on! Right. The small table from the brick building. Why didn’t I pick it up when I had the chance? Well firstly you can’t just go around picking up and carrying everything as, like in real life, there is a limit to what you can carry. It’s a good lesson to learn as going back for stuff once the puzzle becomes more clear occurs throughout Level 9 adventures.

If you’ve been mapping correctly, finding your way back to the building should be straight forward. Or, as we haven’t really done too much yet, you could simply ‘quit’ and start back there again. However you do it, note the white dot over the door here. You can’t do anything with it, but white and black dots are important later! Now, get the small kitchen table, ignoring everything else, and retrace your steps to the orchid where you can stand on the table and reach it. NB randomly wolves may start stalking you. You will have a few moves to scare them away by throwing anything at them but if not they will attack and kill you. It’s worth remembering not to go empty handed anywhere! If this does happen, remember to pick whatever item you threw back up.

Worth mentioning also that carrying the table restricts you from climbing other things, such as huge oak trees you may come across. In that case just drop the table, climb up and down and grab the table again. If you’ve been exploring and mapping you’ll know the area I mean. Get to the orchid and drop the table. Simply asking the game to ‘get orchid’ works as it is assumed you are climbing the table at this point.

Leave the table there and continue exploring. If you come across an onion (it’s actually garlic) then get it and eat it. We know garlic is very good for warding off certain blood sucking baddies! Continue exploring (and mapping!) and eventually a wizard will give you a scroll to read. Make a note of it in your notebook.

Return to your map and try other directions you haven’t ventured down yet. We need to get to a clearing with a unicorn. You may have already come across it on your travels. Now we have the orchid we can give this to the unicorn and follow it north. There are some pipes to pick up and a medallion, and if you’ve been mapping correctly you’ll see we’re not too far from our starting point, the brick building.

With the scroll clue and the other items we have found it feels like the adventure has just started. And you would be right thinking that.

I have deliberately not given a ‘walkthrough’ of this first area but more of a strong guidance – you’ll find exploring, getting into trouble, back tracking and problem solving will be required throughout this adventure. Who knew unicorns liked orchids for example? That you can’t pick an orchid without a table? That you can’t climb a tree whilst holding a table? Well, maybe I knew that last one. But things like simply throwing any object at the wolves took me an age to realise the first time around.

With all Level 9 games it’s a case of writing everything down, trying and interacting with everything you find in all situations, and thinking firmly outside of the box. It isn’t meant to be easy, but it is meant to be solvable. There is a lot of love for this adventure out there and rightly so, it’s a great advert for the genre.

Oh, and those white and black dots I mentioned earlier? They are teleport dots. Going through an exit with a black dot will transport you back to its corresponding white dot. This is very useful for going back to retrieve objects you have left behind either on purpose or accidentally.

Level 9 were my absolute favourites back in the day. Along with Infocom they provided the very best in adventure gaming and I don’t think these text based games would have survived without those two giants of the genre.

The D64 game file can be found in lots of places on the internet, or there is a browser playable version at the Internet Archive here. And remember, save often, map precisely, and note down everything!

The post Adventure Quest by Level 9 appeared first on SoundHog.

First of all, after buying a Raspberry Pi OS image to the SD card, I followed the documentation – nothing outrageous here, just followed it through and made all changes as recommended. The only thing I tweaked was media size limits (including local emoticons) as I have a large 1TB SSD to play with so wasn’t too bothered about limiting sizes. Oh and despite the documentation stating otherwise, I changed the default database from Postgress to Sqlite.

The location of the hierarchy ‘gotosocial’ I put on the external drive for obvious reasons.

After installation (basically just downloading the binary from the address in the documentation) I started the service up and it just worked!

Dynamic DNS

I had at first just added an A Record for the subdomain to point to my router’s external address, just to get things working. I have now enabled the ASUS DDNS service and pointed a CNAME record to my new DDNS domain. That was surprisingly easy and works well.

Port Forwarding

Also, of course, I needed to add port forwarding from the router to the Pi ports, ensuring the firewall was ON! And of course this requires a static LAN IP set for the Pi itself.

Backup & Restore

After playing around with it for a couple of days, the next step is making sure backups are working and recoverable.

By far the simplest way to back up is to stop the service, and then compress all files and copy them to a backup location. Something like:

In theory then a restore would simply be a case of expanding the file to the correct location. I may at some stage get another cheap Raspberry Pi to test the restore process.

I’ll have to play around a bit more with this and create a way of moving the file offsite and into the cloud, but for now this is working ok.

Next steps, tweaks and improvements will appear here over the coming days/weeks…

The post GoToSocial on a Raspberry Pi B+ appeared first on SoundHog.

On the 27th November 1842, John flew into a (drunken?) rage and ended up killing my 4th Great Grandmother, Sarah Rack and, presumably, her unborn child. The court papers describe how he beat her and it makes horrible and harrowing reading. He was convicted of manslaughter at Lincoln assizes on 8 March 1843 and he was sentenced to 10 years transportation.

Other reports have him sentenced to imprisonment at Lincoln Castle. John, however, was found in the records aboard the prison hulk ship the Warrior, docked in Woolwich, and given the conditions and reputation of Lincoln Castle prison at the time, that seems to have been by far the better option for John.

However, he never left England.

For some unfathomable reason, a few years later, he was pardoned by Queen Victoria.

Victoria R
John Williams et al
Free Pardon
Whereas the following persons are under sentence of transportation on board the Warrior Hulk at Woolwich they having been convicted of felony at the times and places hereafter mentioned. Viz
John Williams at Welchpool in March 1843, Hy Biggs Horn Gardener at Hereford in March 1843, Wm Martin, Geo Jarvis, Chas Martin and Hezekial Folkes at Chelmford in March 1843, Morris Thomas at Haverford West, Edward Lilburn and John Britcliffe at Lincoln in March 1843, Edward Shenton, Jas White and Thomas Johnson at Stafford in March 1843, Neil Mc Gilvary at Glasgow in September 1842 and Jas Whistow at Chester in April 1843.
We in consideration of same circumstances humbly represented unto us are Graciously pleased to extend our Grace and Mercy unto them and to Grant them our free pardon for the crimes of which they stand convicted. 
12 April 1848

The irony is their children did well, and some moved down under of their own accord! The Britcliffe’s are alive and well in the UK and the Southern Hemisphere, and I guess I’m living proof of that!

This is the first post of some genealogy stories as I get back into researching the family tree – who knows what else will come out of the woodwork…

PS Thanks to Mike Dawson for the transcription and images above.

The post Does Every Family Have One? appeared first on SoundHog.

For some reason SEQ files always give me problems and it’s usually because I forget to use the correct flags, especially ‘a’ for appending. Leaving the ‘a’ out on creation, remembering the ‘w’ and ‘r’ for write and read. Basic (no pun intended) stuff I know, but I code fairly infrequently these days and always have to remind myself of the unforgiving syntax.

Anyway, lets get rich.

Option 1 just creates a new data file to disk.

And then moves on to the lottery results input screen. I’m not really sure how much data will fit on a file yet, so I’m guessing at around 2 months of past results can be created without too much problem. I’ll then as a phase 2 work out how to merge all past months data together when predicting. For now I am just going to enter July and August 2024’s results to date.

And so on for all the weekly results.

Option 2 in the main menu adds to an existing file, so I tested this a few times by stopping my input and returning to the file to add a few more lines.

And I added an option 4 to give me confidence the numbers were being input and stored correctly.

So a small set of data really. Still, that shouldn’t stop the prediction from being 100% accurate….

As simple as that. All I have to do now is work out what to spend my money on.

Anyway, there we have it. A bit of fun but that won’t stop me inputting the whole of 2024’s past results and beyond with a ridiculous optimism.

I’ll tidy it up a bit and create a 2024 data file then put both up here for people to mess around with.

That’s if I haven’t moved to Monaco of course…..

The post I’m going to be rich, rich I tell you! appeared first on SoundHog.