Welcome to The Tech Teapot blog.

The Tech Teapot blog is the online home of Jack Hughes and concentrates on tech for the most part as well as large dollops of software development and networking.

A new dawn for The Tech Teapot

Some big changes to The Tech Teapot blog including porting it over to use the Hugo static site generator Hugo.

A reminder of the power of the internet, again

A reminder of just how powerful the internet has become. Everything is being revolutionised by connecting all sort of things to the internet including astronomical telescopes.

My 2019 Reading Log

I think I can say that 2019 was my best year for books in a very long time. Maybe my best ever. I certainly went to town on non-fiction this year.

My 2018 Reading Log

Just eight books in 2018. A new low I think. The best book of the year would be between Larry Niven's Ringworld, Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three and Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish.

My 2017 Reading Log

A very bad year for reading over the last year. I suspect that the Playstation 4 got in the way again. No great shame in that. Games can be excellent story telling mechanisms. Just 9 books read in total.

My 2016 Reading Log

I read a total of 13 books in 2016. Maybe slightly higher than average but not by much.

My 2015 Reading Log

I've not managed to read as many books this year. Mostly due to the competition from playing Dragon Age: Inquisition for the first four months of the year.

Tools to lesson the WPF pain

I’m back writing GUI code at the moment. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that I hate writing GUIs. But, there’s nobody else to do it, so it has to be me. It’s not just that I am doing GUI code though that makes my current project tough, it is that I am learning WPF at the same time. The last time I had to write a reasonable sized GUI I was using MFC and C++, circa 2002.

A reminder of the power of the internet

It is very easy to become jaded about technology, I had a reminder this week of just how wonderful it can be. Last Thursday I started a beginners astronomy class at the local secondary school. I was more than a little surprised to learn that you can subscribe for a mere £3 per month and have access to three telescopes situated on top of a mountain in Tenerife through the Bradford Robotic Telescope.