Vale.Rocks
Vale.Rocks
Declan Chidlow
Long-form writings spanning an assortment of topics, though oft technical in nature.
Latest Posts
Team Fortress 2 is a great game. It is also a deeply unserious one. I’m not sure how much value can be extracted from the gameplay statistics of an online multiplayer experience where it is not uncommon to killbind for a laugh or to...
The ebbs and flows of the web have gotten us to where we stand today. We simply wouldn’t have the web we do without the journey it has taken us to get here. However, some of the steps it has taken to get here have been interesting to say...
When HTML was first created, a document could be very simple indeed. A valid document could look like this: <TITLE>HTML document</TITLE> <H1>Heading</H1> <P>This is a paragraph with a <A HREF="https://example.com/">link</A>. It wasn’t...
With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux. As a result, so is the HTML we write. For every line...
I am not what one would call the greatest player of Halo to ever grace this planet. If you can believe it, I am rather mediocre. I have moments of greatness, but I’m also very much a casual player. Halo is a game I can pick up and play...
Minecraft: Pi Edition is a modified port of the game Minecraft to the Raspberry Pi, a hobbyist single-board computer. It is a bit of an oddity, because it differs greatly from other editions of Minecraft, is completely free, saw only...
In 2019 three students in their mid-teens – Paul Makles (Insert), Rene Vinter (Nizune), and Martin Löffler (FatalErrorCoded) – established Riot (stylised RIOT), an online chat platform targeting gaming communities. Funded by donations on...
Web3, the ‘era’ of the web supposedly ushering in blockchain technologies and other such fluff, has undoubtedly been a bust. Perhaps not for the bank accounts of manipulators, but a bust in general. Blockchain has very few legitimate...
Hacker News is a popular news aggregator and web forum created and run by United States-based venture capital firm Y Combinator. The site officially launched on the 20th of February 2007 as ‘Startup News’. The idea of the site was for...
The web platform is a wonderful thing. A collection of standards and implementations that power the ever-wondrous World Wide Web – HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, SVG, WebAssembly, HTTP, etc. However, it can always be better. As such, here is my...
Head-mounted virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality devices have received many browsers over the years. Fundamentally, these browsers present a different user experience to browsers on other devices. They’re a very...
The Oculus Go was Oculus’ (now Meta) first attempt at a standalone virtual reality headset. Indeed, it was one of the first commercial attempts at a standalone VR headset entirely. By contemporary standards, it is extremely obsolete,...
From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants (PDAs)1 a connection to the internet, people started connecting them to the internet, as is the natural order of things. Initially their connections were just...
Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to...
There are a great number of tools and devices out there designed to improve computer use for people with disabilities or even make computer use possible at all. We can consider them in two broad categories, input and output. Input...