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The Amiga 40th exhibit
A walk-through history of the Amiga, built for its 40th anniversary at the Vintage Computer Festival at the Computer History Museum, with the Amies awards in the evening.
Chris Collins
Principal engineer. I build software, objects, and the occasional retro machine — and write up what I learn.
I am a principal engineer working on enterprise content platforms, search, and applied AI. Away from work I make things — in wood, metal, plastic, and silicon — and keep a few old computers running. This site is where I share what I build and what I learn along the way.
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3do-dev: a modern 3DO dev kit
A modern development kit for the 1993 3DO Interactive Multiplayer: the original-style Norcroft toolchain in Docker, a patched Opera emulator with a GDB server and remote-control API, and MCP tools for Claude Code.
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Chief
A multi-project Claude Code orchestrator for macOS: it tracks the backlog of every project I work in and hands the next task to the right Claude session.
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Mac Transformer
A macOS menu-bar app that turns documents into PDF, plain text, spoken audio, and AI summaries through a pluggable pipeline — and can publish the results to Books, Music, Reading List, Obsidian, or Notion.
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event_watch
A low-latency pub/sub service: back-end services publish state changes, and clients subscribe over WebSocket or long-poll to receive events plus a server-maintained snapshot of each object.
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CityMap
A TOGAF-inspired "city map" editor for enterprise architecture — districts, neighbourhoods, buildings, and rooms on a pan-and-zoom canvas, editable by people and by AI through REST and MCP.
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claude-session-analyzer (claude-trace)
A native analyzer for Claude Code session logs: it ingests every session into SQLite and shows how much reading, searching, and sub-agent work happened before code was written.
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Amiga games and demos
Original games, demos, and test programs for classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4.1, built and debugged with Amiga DevBench.
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Code Graph Search
A multi-language code analysis platform that turns repositories into a searchable graph of classes, functions, calls, and dependencies — with a REST API, a web UI, and an MCP server for AI assistants.
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Amiga DevBench (amiga_mcp)
A cross-development environment that connects a modern machine to an emulated or real Amiga over serial — live debugging, memory inspection, remote execution, and MCP tools so Claude Code can build and drive Amiga software.
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Distributed web crawler
A horizontally scalable web crawler in Java: Kafka distributes URLs across crawler processes, Cassandra keeps the metadata, and S3 or MinIO stores the content.
Latest writing
All articles →
Article ·
3-D models
Figures, spacecraft and retro machines I have made as 3-D models with Meshy.ai and prepared for printing — mostly people as Lemmings, Amiga history and 1980s TV. This page grows as I add models.
Article ·
AI Force
The administration is starting a new military force, so I designed the one I'd expect: the AI Force — a squad of very typical geeks in hero suits, with a nod to Atari Force from the 1980s comics.
Article ·
Aliens in my house
I'm a big fan of the alien genre, so I wanted some funny aliens in my house: greys drinking coffee, on the phone, and doing see-no-evil — modelled in Meshy, printed, and hand painted.
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Space: 1999
Space: 1999 was a show I loved watching as a kid, so two of my 3-D models are from it: an Eagle Transporter and a Moonbase Alpha astronaut.
Article ·
gitwebsite is now open source
The engine behind this site — a Rust static-site generator with a CLI, REST API, MCP server, and desktop app — is now on GitHub under the MIT licence.
Article ·
AOEE: a TAO-style social graph cache in Rust
How I built AOEE, an in-memory relationship cache for social-graph queries: posting lists borrowed from search engines, four adaptive encodings, set maths instead of joins, and friend-of-friend suggestions with a budget.
Projects
All projects →Project ·
gitwebsite
The app that builds and publishes this site — a Rust core with a CLI, a REST API, an MCP server for AI assistants, and a desktop app.
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warehouse-sync
Metadata-driven incremental replication from PostgreSQL into Apache Iceberg — the database counterpart to my structured-logger project.
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Lemmings, Lemmings everywhere
My friends from the Amiga community, reimagined as Lemmings — designed with Meshy AI from photos, printed in PLA on Bambu printers, and finished with felt-tip pens and UV resin. Plus a few guesses at what Lemmings would be up to now.
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ELSA: entity-level sentiment
A Java library that finds the people, organisations, places, and products in text and works out the sentiment expressed toward each — and who holds it — using a layered ONNX model pipeline.
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Event Conduit (webhook_infra)
An outbound event-delivery platform: it consumes internal events from Kafka, matches them to subscribers, translates them to CloudEvents, and delivers them as signed webhook batches or WebSocket streams.
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Enterprise social platform
A full-featured social network — feeds, profiles, friends, groups, pages, messages, search, and an admin dashboard — built on Spring Boot, React, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and my Rust graph cache.
Areas
Browse all →
WorkProfessional engineering — how software, search, data, and AI systems are built and run.
Software engineering · Search and retrieval · Applied AI · Data and event platforms · Developer tools
MakingPhysical things — designed, built, broken, and rebuilt.
Woodworking · 3D printing · CNC and machining · Metalwork · Electronics · Glass and textiles
Retro computingOld machines, new tricks.
Amiga · Atari
LearningSubjects I am studying and the books and notes that came out of them.
Biology and medicine · Mathematics · Chemistry · Physics
LifeThe personal side — family, places, and photographs.
Photography · Travel
Tools
All 638 tools →12 V and 24 V vehicle wiringWire a car, van, truck or motorbike: cable size in mm² and AWG from the current, the round-trip length and the voltage drop you allow, with insulation rating, under-bonnet heat and bundling; the fuse that protects it; relay circuits drawn as schematics with the 30/85/86/87/87a pins and the flyback diode; crimp terminals and connectors; parked battery drain and the alternator's load; a second battery on a DC-DC charger; and the DIN 72552 terminal numbers.2.5D CAMTurn an SVG or DXF drawing into G-code for a CNC router — pockets (offset or zig-zag), inside / outside profiles with tabs and lead-ins, drilling with pecks, engraving and V-carving — with a tool library fed from the router chip-load table, GRBL / LinuxCNC / Marlin output, a 3-D toolpath preview, a material-removal simulation and a time estimate.3-D printer farm dashboardOne page for every Klipper (Moonraker), OctoPrint and Bambu Lab (LAN mode) printer on your network — state, job, progress, time left, layer, temperatures with a graph, webcam, filament, and for Bambu printers the AMS spools and decoded HMS messages — with pause, resume, cancel and start, alerts when a print finishes, fails or a printer sits idle, and a job queue. Through a small relay you run, directly, or as a simulated demo farm.3D print cost quoterQuote 3D prints from the slicer's G-code (PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer, Bambu Studio, Cura), a sliced Bambu / Orca 3MF (one line per plate) or a model's volume — material and waste, electricity and heat-up, machine wear, failure allowance, setup and post-processing labour, extras, markup, a minimum charge and tax — with saved printer and material profiles and a printable quote.3D print troubleshooterFind a 3D printing problem by what it looks like — stringing, warping, ringing, layer shifts, under-extrusion, resin failures and more — then work through its causes, most likely first, with the fix and a quick test for each.3D printer calibrationExtruder e-steps (Marlin) and rotation_distance (Klipper), belt and lead-screw steps/mm, flow from a single-wall print, scale compensation, Z offset from a measured first layer, pressure-advance and input-shaping notes, and for Bambu Studio / OrcaSlicer the flow dynamics K, flow ratio, max volumetric speed and retraction tests.6502 assemblerAssemble and disassemble 6502 and 65C02 code in the browser, with labels, local labels, expressions, and an optional undocumented-opcode set; download raw binaries, Atari binary-load files, or C64 PRGs; search the full opcode table with cycles and flags.68000 assembler and disassemblerAssemble Motorola 68000 code in the browser and export S-records (S19/S28/S37), Intel HEX, raw binary, a C array, an Amiga hunk executable or an Atari ST .PRG; disassemble hex, binaries, S-records or Intel HEX with a byte-exact reassembly check; inspect and convert S-record files.
Exploration ·
From transistor to CPU
Start with one transistor switching an LED, wire switches into gates, gates into an adder, feedback into memory, and memory plus a clock into a tiny CPU — then watch a real 6502 run a program you can read byte by byte.
Exploration ·
How a brushless motor spins
From magnets and coils to a quadcopter in the air: how a brushless motor is wound, how an ESC switches it in six steps, how it finds the rotor without sensors, what field-oriented control does better, and what happens when you bolt four of them to a frame — with the simulators running alongside.
Exploration ·
How a database survives a crash
Pull the plug on a database halfway through a write and it comes back with every committed transaction and none of the half-finished ones. How? Follow a write through the log, the buffer pool and the disk, compare B+trees with LSM-trees, watch compaction, and then see the other half of the promise — what concurrent transactions are allowed to see — with real PostgreSQL and SQLite running between the paragraphs.