I have seen various attempts at turning live sports into some form of 3D rendered animation. This is usually an attempt to coax younger viewers into watching sport they may previously not have been interested in. The most recent one I've seen is the Simpsons NFL game from about a month ago.

But what is interesting about the Australian Open approach is that they are using it to get around rights issues, allowing them to broadcast full matches live globally via Youtube, with commentary and audio from the courts.

This is despite the large pot of money they have made from selling broadcast rights to TV channels across the globe.

If I was one of those channels, I am not too sure I would be very happy about this, especially as it is proving to be quite popular.

The technology is not perfect, it can be a little glitchy with the backgrounds and the players. But at times, especially with all the angles, it is easy to forget they are not real.

There has to be a limit here though. If the technology keeps improving and can render ever more realistic players, at what point do they break their broadcast contracts? Do they ever? Photorealistic rendering does not seem out of the realm of possibility even now, so does that mean they are deliberately keeping it cartoony to not dip into that even greyer area?

There have been so many leaks over the past couple of weeks, the Switch 2 hardware is not much of a surprise. It looks like a Switch with magnetic controllers, a bigger screen and an additional USB-C port on the top.

That it still plays all Switch games is a plus. That it isn’t called the Super Nintendo Switch is not. But at least it is not called the Switch U. Or Switch Series S.

I hope the USB-C port on the top is for something interesting.

More details will be released at the start of April, where we will see the launch titles. A new Mario Kart game seems to be one of them, but most concerning is how little it seems to have advanced graphically from what the Switch is already capable of. I hope they will be able to demonstrate a change in the kind of game it is possible to make as the hardware moves forward 8 years.

New F-Zero please.

This is a UK construction project doing something that sounds totally ridiculous when you describe it.

They need to tunnel under the motorway so that new train lines can be built, and they need the motorway to then pass overhead on a bridge. But they cannot close the motorway for months while they do it.

So they are building the bridge and tunnel as a combination giant concrete box next to the motorway. They will then close the motorway for three weeks, during which they will demolish the carriageway and tunnel through. They will then push the box into position and reinstate the road deck.

I would love to have been the person who suggested this as a solution. Just to see the look on the faces of everyone around me.

If you cannot find what to watch on streaming services, but you have a bunch of your own media, like Youtube downloads or DVD rips, then you may be interested in creating your own local IPTV channels.

I have been experimenting lately with ErsatzTV, a Github project which you self host and can connect to your Emby, Jellyfin and Plex servers to retrieve media, or can simply read it off the local file system.

You can create schedules of programming with more options than I can honestly currently understand, then create playouts of these schedules onto channels. Each channel can have a name and even a watermark in the corner. If you are really adventurous, you can even populate the spots between your programming so everything correctly starts on the half hour or hour. I've seen some impressive examples of recreating mid-80's and 90's television with period appropriate bumpers and breaks.

Once you are done, it can publish M3U and XMLTV feeds for you. These should be usable in a lot of different IPTV software apps, but I am using Plex with the DVR support. Each of my "fake" channels appears in Plex and I can "tune" into them and see what is currently playing.

I am still learning what is possible, but tuning into my music video channel is a good way to have something on in the background while working.

I have been doing web development for a long time. In the early days that meant editing HTML without CSS, just font tags and animated gifs in Notepad, uploaded via FTP to my ISP provided "web space".

Web pages were basic and very simple to construct. I learned HTML through experimentation and "view source" along with millions of others.

There were few tools to choose from, no web server software to worry about, and it was mostly a game of making sure your page rendered correctly in each browser as new ones were released.

In the 28 years since there has been a web development explosion . There are a million tools, too many frameworks, a thousand different ways to approach and solve every problem.

I have tried a small fraction of the available options, yet have the battle scars of what worked and did not work during those years. That means for every new project I try and start, I am crippled by that experience.

I do not have the unbridled optimism or naive outlook of a new developer who has never tried anything before. The young upstart at school or college trying downloading node for the first time, getting their first Python function working, or wondering why there is so many things to learn before you can even write a line of code.

Instead my brain sees nothing but problems. The function that will not scale properly. The server configuration that works now, but which offers no high availability. The dependency tree which is not pinning any versions, so is just one npm attack away from oblivion.

Decisions are easier when you know nothing.