Max Glenister
Max Glenister
Max Glenister
Max Glenister is a software developer from the UK. He writes mostly about software development, video games, niche hardware and technology.
Latest Posts
My daily reading is deliberate at this point. I’ve settled on a small set of tools that surface the kind of internet I actually want, rather than whatever’s performing well today. Hacker News I use hcker.news rather than the main site,...
Hyde from lazybea.rs runs a blog interview series called Over/Under, where bloggers rate a mix of topics as overrated or underrated, then pass a question along to the next person. I’m issue 61. A few of my takes: NAS: underrated. Built...
I’ve been having a bit of a think about data I’ve left entirely in someone else’s hands. Specifically Google Photos, which has photos going back to 2011 and no local copy anywhere. I’m not going anywhere dramatic with it, but having a...
Back in 2022 I added webmention support to this blog. The implementation worked but it was entirely client-side, so the page would load, JS would fire, fetch from webmention.io, and render the results into the DOM. With JS disabled or on...
The Game Boy Camera was brilliant and stupid in equal measure, a 128x112 pixel sensor bolted on top of a cartridge, printing to thermal paper on a Game Boy Printer the size of a brick. I got both for Christmas when I was 12 and somehow...
Icons work because they’re fast. One glance, immediate meaning, no reading required. The tradeoff is that they compress complex information into a single symbol, and compression always drops something. Most of the time that’s fine. But...
I’ve spent more time over the last 20 years working on front-end asset pipelines than I’d care to admit. One thing that kept coming up when inheriting older codebases was CSS full of vendor prefixes that hadn’t been necessary for years -...
In 2007 I was deep in the DS flashcart scene, cycling through a string of carts. GBATemp threads, firmware drama, custom skins, compatibility lists. By 2009 I’d moved on. Nearly twenty years later, the DS Pico has pulled me right back...
I have a “now playing” widget on my /now page that shows the last track scrobbled to Last.fm. It’s powered by a GitHub Actions workflow that polls the Last.fm API every hour and commits the result to the repo. It worked fine, but quietly...
I’ve had a SNUNMU GK3 mini-PC kicking about since early-2023, barely used. An impulse buy that ended up on a shelf, alongside a drawer full of old drives from various machines and NAS attempts that never quite came together. Picking up a...
I’ve been using Google’s Call Screening feature for a while now. I turned it on mostly to filter out calls from numbers I don’t recognise (I’ve signed up with TPS and reported numbers to the ICO, and neither has made much difference),...
I was talking to someone about foobar2000 and how prolific I’d been in the customisation scene back in the day. I knew I’d written up a detailed config somewhere, with screenshots and everything, but the domain was long gone and I hadn’t...
I recently picked up two Pixel C tablets from a seller on eBay, along with the magnetic keyboard. One tablet had a cracked screen but worked fine and wasn’t locked. The other was cosmetically perfect but the display was completely black....
Chrome’s split view tabs is one of those features that silently arrived and slipped into my workflow. I’ve found myself using it more and more over the past couple of weeks since it rolled out at the end of 2025. It’s as intuitive as tab...
I’ve had a OnePlus 7 Pro sitting in a drawer for a couple of years. I used it from 2019, found it too big, got a Pixel 5a, and now I’m on the Pixel 7a. The usual thing, fiddling with an old gadget that’s been kicking about doing nothing....