Messing around on the web one night last week I went down a reminiscing rabbit hole that took me to the terminal based email client “Pine”. My mind conjured up fond memories from the late '90s of the winding route to the computer room at Van Mildert College in Durham University – left past the high table in the dining room, along a narrow corridor, before queuing up to go down a few steps on the right for my time to surf the fledgling internet with Netscape, or access my email via Pine instead.

I hardly ever drink it these days but tmo's recent posts^[1] about swapping to instant reminded me of when I used to, early on in my coffee journey. The peculiar pleasure of opening a new jar of instant. Twist the lid and beneath is a golden foil. Crack! A short, sharp blow pierces the foil and out wafts that heavenly smell. Breathe in, breathe deeply – don't let that first coffee scent escape unloved and unnoticed! The world pauses for a moment in silent appreciation. OK, that's enough – make the coffee now!

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.