Top all-time · #2660
Matt Sephton
Personal blog · blog.gingerbeardman.com · on HN as msephtongameshardwaredesign
Matt Sephton writes Get Info, a personal blog at blog.gingerbeardman.com about games, hardware and design. Since 2021, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 167 times, most often “Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Blog of independent game and app developer Matt Sephton. Featuring vintage Macintosh, game development, digital artwork, Japanese esoterica, video game reviews, hacks and tips, and much more.
Most-linked posts?
- Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-04-18
- Today I shipped 20 apps and a screensaver4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-04-17
- Emoji History: The Missing Years3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-10
- Beltrunner: Game Design Postmortem3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-31
- List of vintage Japanese pixel/dot art software3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-02
- When Playdate Stopped Being Fun3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-15
- Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- Macintosh Magazine Media: 1M files3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-28
- Donating my Playdate earnings to The Cybersmile Foundation2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-02
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-06
What Hacker News says?
My initial thoughts were that these issues were showing how things look on a non-retina display, or a display with non-default scaling. That does seem to be the case, but not entirely. I took some screenshots and I do not see the misaligned numbers at retina or non-retina resolutions, but I do see the odd bevelled edges on the 8/10/16 "tabs": https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai Apple have pretty much given up on making thin…
Comment linking /2024/01/25/running-modern-macos-on-non-retina-displays/
on “Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator”Submitted Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app as a story · 219 points
HN discussionI'm a big fan of OpenSCAD. I first used it to model a Wii Wheel sort of thing that I could put an Apple TV remote in. But my main use of it was creating a few dozen cars for a video game. Really great fun to model things. If you know CSS and HTML you know enough to create a 3D model in next to no time. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/tag/openscad/
Comment linking /tag/openscad/
on “OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller”Submitted How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet as a story · 162 points
HN discussionI do 1-bit art for a limited platform (Playdate, so not quite Macintosh Plus limited) I'm @gingerbeardman on Twitter. Examples: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art...
Comment linking /2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art-contest-2024/
on “Move Fast and Abandon Things”Submitted Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh as a story · 159 points
HN discussionPerhaps not quite solving your problem, but I have a handful of domain-specific Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) that limit the results to predefined websites. I summon them from Alfred with short keywords when I'm doing interest-specific searches. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/20/interest-specific...
Comment linking /2021/04/20/interest-specific-search-engines/
on “Ollama Web Search”Submitted Emoji History: The Missing Years as a story · 141 points
HN discussionComplete link https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/21/level-viewer-for-...
Comment linking /2021/04/21/level-viewer-for-pang-nintendo-ds/
on “I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig”Submitted Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist as a story · 141 points
HN discussionDS has both 2D tile-based renderer and 3D renderer. You can find many examples of games with tiled graphics. I made a tile map viewer for my favourite DS game https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/21/level-viewer-for- ...
Comment linking /2021/04/21/level-viewer-for-
on “I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig”Submitted Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (2021) as a story · 119 points
HN discussionLittle projects like this are what keep me going. These days this sort of creative effort goes into the games I make, but in years gone by: favemoji (2017) - a Safari extension to add emoji to the site title because Safari didn't (doesn't? I forget) show favicons in tabs. Inbox Zero Fanfare (2013) - played the Macintosh trumpet sound effect when you reached inbox zero in Gmail. I was as much proud of the icon as the…
Comment linking /2024/10/08/bender-2-bend-harder-for-playdate/
on “Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?”Submitted Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS as a story · 115 points
HN discussionthanks! to my knowledge iSH is too limited for my use case (it's more of an emulated linux environment). I might give UTM another shot. I can see that there's a "proper" distro but for iPhone 7 though! btw if you're into this kind of stuff, check out MacPaint on iPad via UTM. It looks lovely! I can't find the link now, but check out Matt Sephton's blog for that: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/10/21/list-of-vin…
Comment linking /2023/10/21/list-of-vintage-japanese-pixel-dot-art-software/
on “Install postmarketOS on Android phone and use Docker as a home server”Submitted PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts as a story · 110 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in the software used in Japan for pixel art (or dot art, as they call it) I keep a list, which has 235 entries at the time of writing: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/10/21/list-of-vintage-j...
Comment linking /2023/10/21/list-of-vintage-japanese-pixel-dot-art-software/
on “The effect of CRTs on pixel art”Submitted Building Basilisk II for iOS (2021) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionBasically, lockdown project. I made the decision in early 2020, shortly the first C-19 lockdown happened in the United Kingdom. I had extra time every day given that my usual routines, childcare, etc were disrupted. And I had a Playdate developer preview unit. I switched from web and app development to purely games. I'd previously made games but only occasionally, as a hobby. Though I do live and breathe classic vid…
Comment linking /2024/03/07/a-year-in-the-life-of-a-playdate-game-developer/
on “I love programming but I hate the programming industry”Submitted Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (2021) as a story · 79 points
HN discussionYes! Here we go: - Mostly on an iPad Pro, no less: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/17/turning-an-ipad-p... - Here's my latest artwork done in System 7: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art... Believe it or not there are apps that run under System 7 that have no modern equivalents, or their modern counterparts are objectively worse. The vector apps I use on System 7 (Canvas, artWORKS,…
Comment linking /2024/07/14/shibuya-pixel-art-contest-2024/
on “Cosmic: A New Desktop Environment”Submitted Mouse Support for Playdate as a story · 68 points
HN discussionCool people: • https://tracydurnell.com • https://www.benkuhn.net • https://schmud.de • https://brandur.org • https://bytes.zone • https://cassidoo.co • https://www.chrbutler.com • https://sive.rs • https://fasterthanli.me • https://akkartik.name • https://www.todepond.com • https://blog.gingerbeardman.com • https://gwern.net • https://interconnected.org • https://jacobfilipp.com • https://johnnywebber.com • https:/…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?”Submitted Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005) as a story · 61 points
HN discussionSony CLIÉ were my choice of Palm devices. Hi-resolution (double), better colour, better screens, better system apps. Crazy hardware design, cyberdecks with so much personality, a far cry from what we have today. And one CLIÉ device that perhaps inspired the iPhone, the TH55, as both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were fans. I did some preservation of Palm stuff, lost SEGA games https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2019/04/24/re…
Comment linking /2019/04/24/recovered-forgotten-sega-exclusives-on-palm-os/
on “Palm OS and the devices that ran it”Submitted Recovered: Sega Exclusives on Palm OS (2019) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionTcl has been a staple on Mac for over 30 years at this point, since System 7 at least. It was installed in Mac OS X as standard, not sure if it still is these days. I use it to wrangle text directory listings from old Macintosh CD-ROMs from pre-Unicode era. The character set support and conversion code seems to have been written by Apple themselves in the mid-1990s. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working…
Comment linking /2022/03/31/working-with-classic-macintosh-text-encodings-in-the-age-of-unicode/
on “A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)”Submitted Slugs on a Cube: An Interactive Animation as a story · 52 points
HN discussionMy favourites of the year so far... album: Yo Irie "Love Affair" single: LAGHEADS "Your Light" most anticipated album: Hazel English A playlist from last year: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/12/31/japanese-music-re...
Comment linking /2023/12/31/japanese-music-recommendations-2023/
on “Cindy Lee might be the future of music”Submitted Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993) as a story · 50 points
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