It's day #100 of Loconundrum! Thanks so much to everybody who's played - it's been lovely to hear from people enjoying the game. To mark the milestone, you can now play all 100 past puzzles from the new Archive! Fill out a missed day, or catch up on puzzles from before you started playing.

Here's a peek behind the curtain at Conductor, the thrown-together dashboard I use to schedule Loconundrum puzzles. It used to automatically pick at random from a pool, but once I ran out of the major stations, I started scheduling puzzles manually instead so I could test things out a bit more.

Loconundrum now has dark mode 🌙

If you played Loconundrum today (puzzle #40, 2026-04-24) before 7am BST, there's a chance you may have got the wrong puzzle due to a caching issue. If you got Birmingham New Street, you were affected. It should be fixed now, please load up Loconundrum again and have another go! Sorry about that 🚂

I wrote a blog post about how Loconundrum actually works. Thank you to everybody who's played! aaronc.cc/2026/03/29/l...

Arc's "File" menu is probably the worst example of macOS Tahoe's automatic menu icons that I've seen yet

I made a daily game where you try to guess a UK rail station! loconundrum.aaronc.cc

Falling in love with inline snapshot testing My usual problem with snapshot testing is that you need to find the snapshot files to learn the expected output of a test - but with inline snapshots, the expectation is in the test code, which can be updated automatically by the snapshot tool. Neat!

For the latest Gosu Game Jam, I wrote a crop-cultivating roguelike deckbuilder in Ruby, where you race the clock to score coins by combining your crops' effects. This is the most fun I've had creating a jam entry, I've wanted to try making a card game for a while! orangeflash81.itch.io/topsoil

TIL that: 1) you can have SVG favicons nowadays, and 2) they can be styled to respond to light/dark mode automatically evilmartians.com/chronicles/h...

Agree with a lot of the points in this article. I've found Tahoe's menus take me noticeably longer to scan than before, and I think it's partly down to the inconsistent visual noise of the icons. tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-i...

Do you remember this gadget? It was sold as letting you control your apps/games with your hands. Young-me saw this in Maplin back in the day, thinking how cool it would be. I saw one in a second-hand shop, for a price where I'm not too bothered if it's rubbish. Let's satisfy young-me's curiosity!

I've done some mad science with Ruby 4.0's new Ruby::Box namespacing feature - what if Ruby had JavaScript-style `import`/`export`, rather than requiring entire files? You only get what you import, and imported items don't "leak" between files. Try it, if you dare: github.com/AaronC81/rixby

Had a good time with Langjam Gamejam - a week-long jam where you build a language and then use it to write a game. The resulting game is pretty simple - I didn't have much time left after getting the language to a usable state - but I think it's at least fun! orangeflash81.itch.io/space-blaster

For a bit of polish and ease-of-experimentation, there's now a basic editor! Here's one possible implementation of a rounded rectangle. Being able to define a new operation that inspects the geometry, like this `rotate_around_centre`, feels rather useful to me.

Ruby argument validation with pattern matching aaronc.cc/2025/12/12/r...

Starting to get interesting - now you can write operator modules which behave based on some properties of their children - here repeating the children in a grid. You can't do something like this in OpenSCAD unless you also pass a separately-calculated size for the children.

Having a crack at a project I've been thinking about for a while. An OpenSCAD-alike where you can introspect objects you've already drawn - which means less thinking about how to structure your variables for quick thrown-together 3D prints. First prototype works well!

I found out about the “Paged Out!” Magazine, which publishes one-page articles about programming and computing. I absolutely LOVE this pagedout.institute

Seeing if I can put together a tiny macro pad to live in my work’s office - I miss my macros when I’m not working from home! First steps - a 3D-printed plate with hardwired Gateron Browns (with jumpers I now realise I’ve made far too long)…

New Twilight Sad, wooo! Fantastic start, can't wait for more... www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9zu...

My Jujutsu problems were caused by .gitignore being case-sensitive. Turns out I've been relying on case-insensitivity for a long time - macOS and Windows will do that to you ;) Patched in case-insensitivity, and now Git and Jujutsu agree with each other: github.com/AaronC81/jj/...

I’ve landed a little warning improvement in this release! Gleam was a lovely codebase and community to contribute to - high hopes for where this language goes in the future

What if we were 3D printing decades ago? Downloading STLs over dial-up? I mocked up Cura for Windows 95

After a few days - this works alright! Only issue is there's some disagreement between Git and Jujutsu about a few files from LFS - Git is tracking them, but Jujutsu thinks they're new. If I delete them, Git sees the repo as dirty, but Jujutsu is happy and works a treat.

Having a play with Jujutsu VCS: jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/ You can move back to a previous commit and edit it, and all the later commits rebase automatically… coming from Git, that feels MAGIC

I don’t know how long this has existed, but I’ve never spotted it before… Apple Photos smooshing together geotagging and event listings to give concert photos an artist tag - which you can search by! - is such a damn clever feature

all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe

This looks really promising - I’ve read a lot of praise for uv in Python-land, so having something similar on the horizon for Ruby is exciting andre.arko.net/2025/08/25/r...

Echo Point Nova is one of my favourite recent indie games, a super fast movement-shooter, and the first game in a while I’ve 100% completed …and it just got an entire second map as a free update. Time to 100% complete this too 😁

I enjoy using keyword-argument-heavy languages, and IMO an underappreciated feature is letting arguments have different external vs internal names. An example in Swift - variables named “of” and “with” would be unintuitive inside the function body, but read naturally when calling

I suddenly remembered the Parallax Propeller - a microcontroller with a custom architecture and language, which I saw mentioned on Arduino forums back in the day and thought looked super cool. Turns out they released a second generation a few years ago! Awesome… www.parallax.com/propeller-2/

I've been playing with Gleam, a little compiled language targeting BEAM (Erlang's runtime) and JS. I like a lot of its ideas, it's the closest I've felt to writing "garbage-collected Rust". My favourite trick is the `use` keyword, which is like a generalisation of JS' async/await transform:

New article! Ruby's blocks share many similarities with the anonymous functions found in other languages - but how are they different? The unique control-flow features of blocks make them perfectly suited to a wide range of applications in Ruby. aaronc.cc/2025/07/07/r...

I want to start Posting More - ideally about programming, electronics, and the like. But instead, since we’re half-way through the year, I’ll kick off with a short thread about some music released this year which I’ve really enjoyed. Hopefully, you might enjoy some of it too 🎶🧵

This is really exciting! Standardised RBS syntax + Sorbet's developer ergonomics = a big win for Ruby static typing

My first article of the year - defmt has been a slick improvement to my embedded development experience! aaronc.cc/2025/02/20/d...