If you've ended up here, then hello!

This isn't an active website per se, it's just a holding page really, which now and then links to whatever mini-projects I'm working on. They might be some code tests, write ups from some tinkerings with the Raspberry Pi, it might just be some straight writing or some notes on studying Japanese.

The point being is that this is not a full, coherent, regularly updated website anymore. For that kind of content, better to go and have a look at nanikore.net, though that is more tilted towards motorcycling and outoor stuff these days.

Brightblack Current

I've written very few pages in the last few years on tech, or musings, which just didn't sit right on the above blog, so they are presented here. Emphasis on very few. Site related updates are summarised here.

Grav

When I wasn't rolling my own mark-up I've been quite curious over the years about various content management systems, and have tried quite a few to see what works and what doesn't (WordPress, Textpattern, Drupal and others). Recently I've been trying static site generators such as Pelican, and right now am looking a flat file systems such as 'Grav', partly for this site, but also for using on a friend's website to see how it goes.

Brightblack Classic

The original brightblack site ran from 1996 to 2008 and for the majority of that was hand coded. I've been looking to restore it in MarkDown along with some 'with hindsight' commentary on the original pages with the goal of once more deploying it again but with some context, in more modern mark-up, yet try to keep some of that old fashioned feel. Let's just say it's in progress and has been for about a decade. Some of the content was and is almost cringe worthy in style, and that doesn't include the sheer number of typos which survived so many years and revisions. I will eventually put it up when it's human readable.

What does BrightBlack even mean?

The origin of the name 'brightblack' really isn't interesting, though it is rather obscure I'll admit, at least if you didn't grow up in the UK during the 1980s. In 1982 Sinclair Research in the UK released the ZX Spectrum 8-bit computer. Despite the name, it only had 8 standard colours, which could be almost doubled with use of the BASIC 'BRIGHT' command - with the exception of black. Somehow, the idea of BRIGHT BLACK, that mythical 16th. colour, struck me as a nice oxymoron and 15 years later, stuck for a website name, I remembered it. There are plenty of other brightblack sites out there, and I'm curious to know where their name originated.