Something feels wrong with Counter-Strike 2. But nobody knows quite what, if anything. My one wish for next season… for Counter Strike to improve their gameplay and their sub-tick if they want to stick to it NiKo, CS2 professional Game developers have a lot of tacit and explicit knowledge about their titles. They know the systems and the interactions between them, and what results they produce. But players of a game have a tacit feel about the game. Read more →

On October 4th 2025, kurtjmac completed his fourteen and a half year long journey to walk to the Far Lands in Minecraft. The first to take on daunting challenge, it was a great moment to watch. Kurtjmac is not the first to have reached it through walking in the Overworld, though. While there are hundreds of thousands of points on the Minecraft map Kurt reached first, throughout the years, people have taken on the mantle, and frankly blitzed it. Read more →

CYBERSHOKE is a large CS2 community server provider (see my previous post for a hint of their size). One of their gimmicks has been “optimising” the performance of the game, as the game has a lot to be desired on this front. They recently raised the point that CS2 does not engage in occlusion culling: not rendering objects and players outside of the viewable distance. The predecessor, CS:GO, did. This is bad for both performance and for combating cheating1. Read more →

For those who enjoy Counter-Strike community servers, the situation in Counter-Strike 2 is rather dire. An avalanche of spam has rendered the server browser unusable. The transition from Global Offensive killed multiple small communities. And large server providers have taken advantage of these problems to monopolise the market. Trying to find a server either involves capitulating to these big vendors, or trawling through a trench of spam. Scraping the server browser allows us to have some insight into the state of the market. Read more →

In a sweet irony, given I published a post about Evaluating kernel level anti-cheats as a consumer, some aspect of VALORANT, likely Vanguard, ended up soft bricking my internet whenever I tried to play the game. While this was a soft brick - only happened when playing the game, and it would fix itself after exiting the game - it was incredibly frustrating to run into. Here is what I learned and what eventually fixed it. Read more →

If you’re interested in revisiting Minecraft from the Beta era, here are some notes. MultiMC is a third-party Minecraft launcher that allows you to have multiple separate instances of Minecraft versions, with a great interface to manage it. It isn’t required, but I’d recommend using it. Playing on 1.7 itself It is trivial to use play Minecraft 1.7.3 itself. The official launcher & MultiMC can be used to easily spin up an instance. Read more →

Cursor, Claude Code & Cline all have different formats for writing reusable instructions for agents that are automatically embedded into requests. Claude Code takes a file called CLAUDE.md with a variety of directory configurations. Cursor used to be a file called .cursorrules, but is now a folder called .cursor/rules, with the rules being individual “MDC”1 files. Cline supports .clinerules (or .cursorrules). It seems to me that we should be standardising this, much like Model Context Protocol. Read more →

As a subscriber to The Verge & WIRED, it is rather annoying that the RSS feeds that both provide are littered with product recommendation listicles, designed to generate revenue through affiliate links. While they may be useful to some people, and generate an additional revenue stream, I am paying you. It is frustrating to still be advertised to, especially for something that promotes continual spending, something I’m cutting back on. Read more →

Just under 10 years ago was when I first registered this domain, but I’ve had some form of website on the internet for 13 years. Despite the readership of this website probably hovering around ~0, this has been a nice, quiet place to put things I’m proud of online. But as with anything, this site has evolved over time, and has probably had the biggest change in content philosophy over the past month. Read more →

YNAB is my budgeting tool of choice. It works, and I don’t want the hassle of maintaining my own instance of Actual Budget . YNAB has support for Open Banking sync, which I do use. However, their API vendor, TrueLayer, continues to lack Chase UK Open Banking support, despite it being available for ~1 year now. Other tools, like Moneyhub, have supported it for yonks now. Using the direct bank API yourself is impossible (regulatory requirements), but you can use a intermediary vendor. Read more →