Wayne Young

@slartyb.bsky.social

146 Followers 86 Following

Artistic uber-geek with a passion for astronomy, electronics, and .. well pretty much anything else really. ex-NVIDIA & 3Dfx. Opinions my own.

A leaf cutter bee carrying a piece of leaf it has just removed from a plant. It is flying into the entrance of its nest, which is under a paving slab.
Graph of global daily sea surface temperature anomaly with the years 2023 through 2026 highlighted. It shows that from mid June 2026, the oceans have been the warmest since records began.
Screenshot of a post on X from the Belgian National Football team after they beat the USA team. The text reads "Overturn this" which is in reference to the red card received by a USA player in a previous match, which was overturned by FIFA at Donal Trump's request.
A section of errata for a PIC microcontroller.
A picture of a man soldering a circuit board in a secret underground laboratory, with strange signals on an oscilloscope and atmospheric backlighting that is completely useless for the job in hand but makes for a good picture.
A computer rendering of some snow-capped mountains surrounding lakes. It is reminiscent of the fjords around the coastline of Norway. This image earned the creator the nickname Slartibartfast after the character in the book the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This image was created in 1986.
A very early parabolic radio antenna at the Jodrell Bank radio observatory.
Logos of the technology companies 3Dfx and NVIDIA
A zombie character with a head crab from the computer game Half-Life, on fire, and walking down a halway.
A graph showing the global average sea surface temperature anomaly, which is the temperature difference to the average across all years from 1991-2020 (dotted horizontal line). The years 2024, 2025, and the this year are highlighted in yellow, orange and dark red, respectively. It shows that the line for 2026 is now above (hotter) than all previous years.
A computer game that simulates landing a spacecraft on a moon running on an 8-bit microcomputer from the 1980s.
A computer game called "Canyon" written in 1982 or 1983 in BASIC, running on an Ohio Scientific Instruments C1P computer.
Audio cassette tape from the 1980s. The label reads EMI SUPER C60, Which indicates it could store 60 minutes of audio.
Ray-traced simulation of a Harmer-Wynne telescope, which consists of a parabolic primary mirror and spherical secondary.
A home made analogue modular synthesiser playing a piece of music.
Lots of knobs and 1/4 inch sockets on the control panel of an analog synthesiser.
Circuit diagram showing a PIC microcontroller connected to a rotary encoder and a connector that interfaces to several potentiometers. The position of the potentiometers describe various 3D manipulation parameters. Signals highlighted with red ellipses are not working.
An image from an Excel spreadsheet showing two arrangements of satellites in two different orbits, demonstrating how the same coverage could be achieved with fewer satellites (green dots) compared with Starlink (yellow dots).
An image of the polar vortices around one of the poles of the planet Saturn with plots of two different models overlaid on top.
A page from an Excel spreadsheet that is a configurable calendar. It is showing the dates and days of the week for the month of July 2026
A happy man standing in front of his exhibits at a festival of retro computing. On the left is an OSI C1P computer running a moon landing simulator game, and on the right is a 3D graphics card he designed from 1987. It is displaying a wireframe image of a TIE fighter from the movie Star Wars.
Two pieces of plywood that have been cut into approximately triangular shapes, and have slots and holes that resemble the mouth and eye of some creature.
A bowl of Waldorf salad
Thermometer reading 30C/86F. The thermometer has colourful hot air balloons on one side.
A thermometer reading 28C/82F. There are several colourful hot air balloons next to the thermometer.
Thermometer showing a temperature of 38C / 100F
A thermometer reading over 38C/100F in the shade in the UK.
A graph showing energy produced by solar cells, stored in a battery, used by a customer, and exported to the grid. It shows that the battery reaches full charge early in the day, excess production is exported, and the stored energy is used at night. This results in zero energy taken from the grid.
A tick on a table after being removed from a person's skin
An 8 inch floppy disk with hand and ruler for scale. Space for Tilly's Alt Text: ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "
A real time 3D graphics card I designed from 1987
Four holes drilled in an acrylic box
An acrylic box in a drill press with three holes in it. The holes have been drilled with a tapered drill bit.
Seljalandsfoss in Iceland with people behind the waterfall underneath the cliff.
Screenshot from the official music video of Seven Nation Army by White Stripes.
Graph showing power production (upper traces) and power consumption (lower traces) from a domestic photovoltaic + battery installation. Note that no power was taken from the grid since the battery was charged up during the day, and the stored power used at night. In addition, a large portion of energy is exported back to the grid during the day (dark teal colour).
Screen shot of a computer game running on an 8 bit home computer from 1982. The game is to land a space craft on the Moon. The game has ended with the craft successfully landed. There is an astronaut standing next to the space craft with a flag.
A yellow Caterham Seven car on a driveway just after being washed. This car had been sat inside for almost 20 years.
President Comacho from the movie Idiocracy holding up a machine gun.
The Channel 4 on-air clock circa mid-1990s. Generated by a Miles M44 SDI (serial digital interface) clock generator. All three hands were rendered and composited every second. Not shown here is the clock's capability to render arbitrarily shaped hands (they were actually images, so could be anything), and the ability to blend each hand with transparency.
Main control deck of the spaceship Nostromo in an Unreal Tournament map.
The escape pod for the spaceship Nostromo in an Unreal Tournament map.
Video of a simple unfinished game running on an 8 but computer from the 1980s. The graphics consists of white lines drawn on a black background showing stars above moving scenery with craters.
A Forstner drill bit in a drill press having just drilled a large hole on solid oak.
A plot of the top half of the Mandelbrot set on the complex plane. The plot is made up of Julia sets computed for every location on the complex plane. The shape of the Mandelbrot set has not been computed directly, but has emerged from the thousands of Julia sets that have been computed. The red box indicates the expanded region in the next image accompanying this one.
A mathematical Julia set rendered in green, pink and yellow hues.
Eclipse of the Sun by the Moon as seen by the Artemis II mission. Mystery feature circled on the left.
A screenshot of a Truth Social post by president Donald Trump stating that a "whole civilization will die tonight", referring to Iran.
A small block of wood machined to replace a broken piece of plastic on a lawnmower. Shown installed.
Image of the Earth from the Artemis II spacecraft after passing behind the Moon.
A view from the Artemis II spacecraft showing the crescent Moon, and the crescent Earth (smaller, bright arc on the right).
Close up view of Vavilov crater on the Moon.
A view of the Moon (right) and the Artemis II spacecraft (left) with Artemis nearing closest approach on its trip around the Moon.
Close up map of the surface of the Moon in a region that straddles the boundary between the far side (left) and near side (right).
An 8 inch floppy disk with an adult hand and a ruler for scale.
Clip of the figures for production and consumption at a home with solar panels and a battery.
A yellow Caterham Seven car exiting the Corkscrew turn at the Laguna Seca race track. In the background are two red Porsche cars.
screenshot showing two windows. The left one, which is underneath the right one, has 6502 microprocessor assembly language source code. The right window contains the output of an assembler, which now includes the machine code for the instructions in the assembler window.
Screen capture of a BASIC program from a vintage computer. There is a diagonal line at the bottom which was drawn on the screen by the program using a programmable character generator.
Screen shot of a vintage computer output with sample BASIC program and graphical character set displayed at the bottom.