# It was our grandson's 4th birthday on Thursday. It seems almost no time since he was born. My wife went out with him and our daughter on the day. They came round our house for tea this evening so we could give him his main present: a new bike. Spent the rest of the evening asse … | Continue reading
# After posting 'Round and Around' (from the Acid Clan E.P. – my first release on Bandcamp) I remembered that I'd remastered it last year but never used it. I had bounced the tracks to audio from Reason then put this into an Ableton project. It was certainly an improvement on the … | Continue reading
# Side effects for my current meds (Sertraline) are usually more intense for the first few weeks of a course while your body gets used to them. headaches drowsiness & yawning dry mouth diarrhoea malaise memory loss night sweats bad dreams It's hard to say if the pills are actua … | Continue reading
# I didn't really like the old Open Graph image fore the blog so made a new one: It'll do for now. # Cross-posting to Bluesky is back! I've decided not to pull in replies this time, just send blog posts over. I've had to update things from before to account for changes to their … | Continue reading
# Tracy Durnell writes that she hadn’t considered "a textual equivalent of negative space". the places in which the reader might step back and consider their own examples or anticipate what point the author is trying to make On reflection, this is such an obvious concept—most w … | Continue reading
# A reader dropped me an email advising that the blog text couldn't be seen in Firefox on Android. Turns out it was being caused by the CSS I'd added to fade things in and out at the top and bottom of the screen. Firefox doesn't support animation-timeline and animation-range so … | Continue reading
# Yesterday, good friend Jay Springett DM'd me to say he was catching up with my blog, and requested a feature: to be able to navigate between the entries [days] with the L/R arrow keys While I already had the ability to swipe left & right on a touchscreen, I hadn't considered … | Continue reading
# I spent some time in the studio last night intending to work on a current idea. My brain had other ideas and I went on a complete tangent. Another idea emerged, almost fully formed, and I need to get some of these things finished. I've got a couple of hours tonight so I'll see … | Continue reading
# I find myself obsessing over the /updates view. I want to do more to it but am not quite sure. I think the idea of things fading as they get older and it would fit the new aesthetic on the blog. | Continue reading
# After reworking /reader recently I realised that I'd messed up with the /updates view. I do an initial query to find those feeds with posts within the last week, then loop through those feeds. Only, I wasn't limiting that second query to a week. That's fixed now. I figure, if I … | Continue reading
# Since Google rolled out the ability to use Quick Share with Apple's Air Drop, it's made life so much easier. I don't have to worry about uploading files to cloud storage, instead I can go direct from my Mac to the phone or vice versa. # I went upstairs with every intention of w … | Continue reading
# Happy 303 Day. Can't see the video? Click here to watch... 95 BPM, raw acid. Perfectly imperfect. You can grab it on Bandcamp here. # I think part of my problem has been gear paralysis: too much choice, trying to do too much. Limiting myself to just the RD-6, TD-3s, and WASP me … | Continue reading
# Even though I tell myself I'm not going to get caught up with perfection, it's hard to just let myself go. I've recorded the idea I was working on, but it took seven or eight attempts. I lost count. The kick drum is distorted, and not in that "I've got it just right" way. The w … | Continue reading
# Jim Nielsen also riffing on Dave Rupert's Priority of Idle Hands: I’ve seen how computers and the internet are a two-edged sword for me: I’ve cut out many great opportunities with them, but I’ve also cut myself a lot (and continue to). # Over the past couple of evenings, I've … | Continue reading
# Dave Winer writes: When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs He's describing webmention replies, a standard that already exists and should be more widely used. # Struggling to make music right … | Continue reading
# My new phone skin arrived today so I stuck it on during lunch. It pairs nicely with the matt screen protector I'm using. Even though the case I was using isn't bulky it's crazy how small and light the phone feels with just the skin. I don't know why I've not considered using o … | Continue reading
# The more I dig into my server logs, the more I see how bad actors are trying to target potential vulnerabilities or probe for attack vectors. Thus far, they've not been successful but I have put in place additional mitigations that should tighten things up considerably. I've ha … | Continue reading
# If you visit the site, you'll notice that I've been messing around with CSS. Inspired by Terry Godier's site, post elements now fade and slide in and out as they enter or leave the screen. They also blur // unblur & grow // shrink accordingly. It adds a bit of movement and pers … | Continue reading
# A couple of weeks ago, I was contemplating shifting the site to a monotype font. Just one of those spur of the moment things. It didn't happen. Until last night … I couldn't sleep so somehow thought it would be a good time to do it. Changing the font was easy, but then I had to … | Continue reading
# Checking the server logs, I saw a number (a lot) of direct 'POSTs' with no referer. There were also a plethora of attempts to load classic WordPress attack points: wp-admin wp-login.php xmlrpc.php Needless to say, these don't exist. The IP addresses concerned we're all report … | Continue reading
# RSS appears to be having a brief moment in the sun, and rightly so. Terry Godier's Current, Jake Spurlock's Today, and (thanks to Manu's People and Blogs) I see that Stefano Verna has made a public/private reader on his site. He goes into a few details here. This mirrors my /re … | Continue reading
It's been the perfect weather combination ... for weeds. I cut the front grass not long ago, pulling the stuff that shouldn't be there but rain followed by some hot, sunny days meant those pesky weeds just seemed to appear from nowhere. I cut that all back again yesterday. This m … | Continue reading
Well played Southampton FC — going to Wembley for the Championship playoff final. Absolutely bossed it tonight and thoroughly deserve the chance to get back to the Premier League. 🔴⚪🔴⚽ # I've really struggled creatively over the past couple of months — only to be … | Continue reading
New up on Bandcamp: It's all in your head — a 124 BPM #acid banger. Written in March, it was originally supposed to be on a new E.P. (where each track was somehow related to mental health issues) but that never happened so I'm releasing it as a standalone track. At least for now. … | Continue reading
You may recall me thanking Robert Alexander for finding a typo in my feed. He mentioned that he had been crawling blogs using the element, along with those using '/.well-known/recommendations.opml', and has now mapped a fledgling "RSS Blogroll Network" based on sites using these … | Continue reading
All due respect to The Monkees and 'Sleepy Jean' but the 6 o'clock alarm most definitely rang 😴 # With a drive time of 3 hours each way we can now make a day trip of it to visit my wife's parents. Much better than the 5+ hours each way before they moved. The M180 was part … | Continue reading
We may have a fair amount of light pollution where we live but the strongest geomagnetic storm in years still gave us a real treat. I've wanted to see the aurora borealis for as long as I can remember and got a bit emotional. The pictures have been processed slightly to accentuat … | Continue reading
The CSS for the site is, and has always been, a huge, overcomplicated mess. There are some variables set up to aid with colour consistency but so much of it has been individually styled as I've made changes and additions. Dark mode adds a fair chunk (duplicating some of that over … | Continue reading
On his RSS only theunderground.blog, Chris wrote about how he's "doing the internet" in 2024. Feeling his approach quite boring he wanted to know how others were also "doing the internet". All I can say is, if his approach is boring then mine in mind-numbing! 😆 Due to eve … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I decided to uninstall the Bluesky app from my phone. While the number of people I follow (and who follow me) is very small it was something I didn't need nor have the headspace for, especially since disabling Bluesky integration with the blog. I can still a … | Continue reading
Thanks to Robert for pointing out the stupid typo (feed.opml instead of feeds.opml) in the element of my feed. That's now been corrected. The xsl stylesheet appears to have stopped working though (I had that problem before) so I've temporarily removed it until I work out why. Up … | Continue reading
I do hope this isn't accurate: # Started working on the RSS feed for Carousel. All the basics are done but I need to work out how I'm going to handle permalinks seeing as there is only one page and different posts are just items in a list. 🤔 Well, that didn't take long to … | Continue reading
Chris mentioned that he is reluctant to create a blogroll in case he 'might offend someone if I don't include them' or later removes them. I think this is where the 'readroll' concept (that's what I'm going to start calling it) is good as you're just listing what you read. This i … | Continue reading
There has been a lot of talk recently about blogrolls, they seem to be making a comeback. That's good! As always, Dave Winer is taking a 'fresh look' over at blogroll.social by combining a roll with a feed reader. Rather than just seeing a list of blogs you can drill down to see … | Continue reading
# I've taken the first steps towards making a blog based on Sparks. It has become a full page carousel in which you swipe left & right to view different posts. Here's a first look: Can't see the video? Click here to watch... As with my other platforms, double-click a post when lo … | Continue reading
I've taken the first steps towards making a blog based on Sparks. It has become a full page carousel in which you swipe left & right to view different posts. Here's a first look: Can't see the video? Click here to watch... As with my other platforms, double-click a post when logg … | Continue reading
# I'm still curious as to what a blog based on the Sparks concept might be like. Perhaps the biggest issue is if a carousel for previous posts would be practical, would it scale? Maybe it could load incrementally as you scroll. 🤔 I started thinking about a blog entirely b … | Continue reading
I'm still curious as to what a blog based on the Sparks concept might be like. Perhaps the biggest issue is if a carousel for previous posts would be practical, would it scale? Maybe it could load incrementally as you scroll. 🤔 I started thinking about a blog entirely bas … | Continue reading
# As was the case back in 2022, I was referred to occupational health by my line manager for an initial consultation on my health issues (physical and mental) and how it is impacting me at work. That call was on Wednesday. It was scheduled for an hour but we overran because a lot … | Continue reading
As was the case back in 2022, I was referred to occupational health by my line manager for an initial consultation on my health issues (physical and mental) and how it is impacting me at work. That call was on Wednesday. It was scheduled for an hour but we overran because a lot h … | Continue reading
# After another break, I've been wanting to come back to the blog but been struggling with what to write, what to say. It's all seemed a bit pointless but I know that writing is part of how I deal with things so I should get back on the horse. I thought I'd trick myself into it b … | Continue reading
After another break, I've been wanting to come back to the blog but been struggling with what to write, what to say. It's all seemed a bit pointless but I know that writing is part of how I deal with things so I should get back on the horse. I thought I'd trick myself into it by … | Continue reading
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I'm annoyed at myself. In the rush to get the track up last night I broke my golden rule: listen to it in at least three places. I didn't and then realised after uploading that it didn't sound great. I'm still getting used to to mastering in Ableton Live but that's no excuse for … | Continue reading