After more than a decade, my friend and colleague Cal Bryant has moved on from Cydar, and has written a long piece about the his time with the company. Cal started at the company not long after I did, and it’s great to have a look back at the journey we’ve been on. We’ll definitely miss him at Cydar, but I have no doubt he’ll continue to do great things at his new company. Aw, snap.
Reading OpenAI’s recent announcement of GPT 5.5, I was struck by the following pull-quote:
One engineer at NVIDIA who had early access to the model went as far as to say: “Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I’ve had a limb amputated.”
They presumably intended this to be taken as an endorsement, but I read it as a warning. I don’t want to come to rely on a tool from a single vendor to such an extent that I can’t work without it. As demonstrated recently by OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic, that vendor can unilaterally degrade the service, by accident or design, or perhaps jack up the price by five times. Given the staggering expense in serving increasingly complicated models in increasingly complicated ways, both of these seem less like if then when.
A similar criticism could be levelled at cloud providers like AWS, and many other things, and it’s always wise to approach any such entanglement with eyes open. However, AI seems like a special case, as the alternative that it’s foreclosing is not another vendor, but your own skills. Despite the myriad problems with and around LLM-based coding tools, there definitely seems to be something useful there. Leaning on them too much, though, seems like a recipe for ending up in a very uncomfortable place when the music stops.
It’s been a bit quiet here of late; I’ve not put anything up anything since my now-annual New Year’s Eve book post. At time of writing, that’s ninety-five days ago, which is the longest gap I’ve had since 2022 into 2023. The reason is prosaic — there’s been a lot going on both at work and at home, and I’ve simply not been able to carve out the time. I don’t plan to go into either on here, but I wanted to plant a flag in the ground to encourage me to get back to writing. I have a couple of pieces in mind, so hopefully this declaration will act as additional motivation to get them over the line.
In the same way that two points make a line, I’m going to say that two posts make a tradition. This time last year I wrote about the books I read in 2024, and suggested it might become an annual thing. Making good on that threat, here’s my reading in 2025:
(The yellow bars indicate when I started and finished each book; the open ones are for books I was reading when the year started, or still have on the go.)
The biggest through-line has been the Matha Well’s MurderBot Diaries (highlighted in green). I added these to my list about the same time as last year’s favourite Hild, but I only got around to starting at the beginning of the year1. Once I had started, I devoured them at a breakneck pace, having to make a conscious effort to read other stuff in between to avoid running out too quickly.
They’re for the most part short (novellas rather than novels), and the style is a fantastically readable inner monologue. What really makes the series, though, is the combination of kinetic set pieces with emotional literacy and an engaging main character. If you’ve not tried them out yet, I definitely recommend that you do so. Don’t let the title put you off; it sounds like it’s about a murderous robot, but they’re actually more of a cyborg.
When I wasn’t reading about everyone’s favourite telenovela-loving Security Unit, I tried to hit a reasonable mix of fiction and non-fiction, with variety within each. Careless People, Apple in China and This is for Everyone were all interesting both in their own right and in the context of the public discussion they sparked; I’m usually late to such things, but I’m glad I pulled my finger out in these cases, and will look to do so in the future. I also revisited old classics and familiar authors, and spent some enjoyable and thought-provoking hours with vintage computer texts.
Looking back, I’m happy that the time I spent reading over the last twelve months was time well spent, and it also provides me with a prompt to think about next year. Maybe more history? Some new fiction authors, maybe new genres? In any case, now that I’ve established a tradition, I’ll share all next December.
Happy New Year.
For reference, here’s a full list of the 38 books I read in 2025:
This was, by coincidence rather than design, a few months before the great-but-different Apple TV adaptation brought the series to a much wider audience, so I can still claim to have been into MurderBot (just) before it was cool. [back]
A year ago, I got a 3D printer. A year later, is it gathering dust, or am I still using it?
I’m happy to report, while it’s not quite as busy as it was for the first few weeks, it is still in regular use. While I’ve made quite a few posts over the year (collected at the end of this one), I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what kinds of things I’ve been using it for.
One obvious category (indeed, the thing the printer is doing as I type this) is toys. This was the original impetus for pushing the button on a 3D printer. Specifically, articulated dragons — our youngest in particular loves these. While they’re cool in their way, if this was all the girls were using the printer for I’d be disappointed. However, they’ve been substantially more creative, in particular with doll’s furniture and accessories. The eldest has got very into TinkerCad, and has custom designed numerous pieces, the most ambitious being a working wheelchair for a doll with a broken leg. HeroForge is also proving a hit.
Another cliché is that the main use of 3D printers is to print accessories for 3D printers, and I’ve done my fair share of that. Along with the usual scrapers and buckets, I’ve printed out quite a few mounts for hygrometers1, and most recently a Y-splitter to allow me to keep the external spool connected at the same time as the AMS. Printing things to better print things is a bit circular, but a nice fringe benefit.
I’ve also found it surprisingly useful for things around the house. Sometimes I find myself printing out things that are better and cheaper mass-produced, like curtain hooks. The benefit of using the printer is that you can get one or two rather than buying an entire pack, and you can get it in ten minutes rather than making a trip to the shops. More often, though, I’m printing something that I couldn’t buy, as it’s custom designed to meet a specific need. An example would be the wall mount for our kitchen scales — we have something that exactly fits the scales we have, and the location where we want to put it. I’ve picked up enough basic CAD skills (OpenSCAD and FreeCAD) that I can create pieces to solve particular problems without too much effort, and doing so is immensely satisfying.
I recently got a Skadis pegboard to display some of my retro computing bits and pieces. 3D printing is the ideal way to get mounting hooks and other attachment to support things of all shapes and sizes, either designed from scratch, downloaded from communities like Thingiverse and Makerworld (where Skadis accessories are a thriving subgenre), or a custom combination of the two. I can see retro computing being another area where the ability to make custom 3D printed parts will be handy; I’ve only done one project in this vein so far, but I can see more on the horizon.
One thing that I’ve not used the printer for much, at least yet, is making parts for keyboards. I’ve made keycaps, but I’ve just not been able devote the time needed for a bigger project. Hopefully, I will soon.
Overall, I’m glad that our 3D printer has continued to prove its worth. It’s not in action every day, or even every week, but it’s great to have on hand, and I certainly don’t regret taking the plunge.
3D printing posts this year:
3D printer filaments are, to a greater or lesser extent, sensitive to humidity, so unless you live in the Sahara you need to keep an eye on it, especially for storage. [back]
This site is maintained by me, Rob Hague. The opinions here are my own, and not those of my employer or anyone else. You can mail me at rob@rho.org.uk, and I'm @robhague@mas.to on Mastodon and robhague on Twitter. The site has a full-text RSS feed if you're so inclined.
Body text is set in Georgia or the nearest equivalent. Headings and other non-body text is set in Cooper Hewitt Light (© 2014 Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and used under the SIL Open Font License). BBC BASIC code is set in FontStruction “Acorn Mode 1” by “p1.mark” (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license).
All content © Rob Hague 2002-2026, except where otherwise noted.