A morning meander around the local (mostly virtual) caches under the guise of checking the condition of the West End Live queue, while the rest of my group enjoyed a lie-in, eventually brought me to take a seat alongside this iconic bear. TFTC! | Continue reading
Approaching from the West I was foiled by the glare of the rising sun in my efforts to claim this fascinating monument from afar and eventually had to walk all the way past it to line up my photo! | Continue reading
Initially thought I'd be able to find this one without the hint, but when I couldn't get fix to closer than 8m I took a peep at it and was instantly aware of where to search. Soon the cache was in hand and I was back on my way. TFTC! | Continue reading
Stood around for a bit reading about David Bowie while I waited for the waitstaff -on their pre-work fag break down the alleyway - stopped their muggling and went inside. Glad I came early while it was quiet here! TFTC. | Continue reading
Can't do the physical today, but scooping a pic with the virtual during a morning walk around the neighbourhood. | Continue reading
After nine hours on my feet yesterday queuing for and then attending the first day of West End Live in Trafalgar Square, I somehow decided that the best thing for my poor legs would be to get up early while everybody else slept in, to come walk around and find a virtual or two. R … | Continue reading
Star network topologies are more common, but you can still occasionally find these... | Continue reading
Hanging out in London’s theatreland, attracting double-takes (and a handful of thumbs-ups!) for my t-shirt… | Continue reading
Back of the queue for West End Live. It’s gonna be a long wait, but hopefully worth it! | Continue reading
Off to London for a couple of days of musical theatre fun! Don’t wait up! | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I called out a scammer after they asked me to advertise their free deed poll service (which is like mine... except it harvests personal information and provides an inferior output). It's pretty bad... but after talking to its creator I'm no longer certain that it' … | Continue reading
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! Day 1: Senior management ask me about a proposed change. I tell them it’s not worth doing. They tell … | Continue reading
125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out. Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I’m optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin. It’s a long, slo … | Continue reading
🎶 It starts with sausage, A hot dog in a bun. One simple sausage, Put some mustard on one… Is it just me, or are (sinner) Sir Pentious‘s colours reminiscent of a hot dog? | Continue reading
I guess it’s sweet that the dog has decided that I’m not to leave my home office without her noticing. But when the naps right behind my wheelie chair I worry she’s going to get her paws run over! | Continue reading
With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk's career. Wouldn't it be nice if the world's first trillionaire also happened to be the world's last trillionaire? | Continue reading
An excellent article by Matthias Ott describes Google's promised AI-first search experience, which dispenses with search results entirely and just uses an LLM (plus sponsored content seamlessly woven in), keeping you entirely within the search giant's ecosystem and minimising how … | Continue reading
Despite being parody, diamond geezer's new age-gating - which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn't actually block access to the site - somehow perfectly straddles the line between "invasive" and "ineffective"... in exactly the same way that I expect the UK's … | Continue reading
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! This weekend, I (a) carried a 1970s Yamaha organ around the place, (b) took a beginner lesson in Arge … | Continue reading
Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much! | Continue reading
A conversation with another openly-polyamorous blogger led us to ask one another why we don't write about our relationship structure more-often. In my case, the answer is simple: my relationships are boring, and that's a good thing! But here's your chance to tell me I'm wrong... | Continue reading
This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who's researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand. I'm seeing more and more interest in this period - even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic abou … | Continue reading
Niki wondered whether "midnight" is actually the middle of the night and discovered that it pretty much is. I explain that this is because he's in Berlin, which sits very close (only about 6 minutes out) from the solar UTC+1 | Continue reading
Daniel loves blogs and loves blogging, but wishes that more of the people in his 'real life' blogged too. I get it, Daniel! | Continue reading
And it's important to remember that. Chris Ferdinandi has some direct words, and I expand upon them. | Continue reading
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out … | Continue reading
109 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of … | Continue reading
115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what's beneath and whether it's stable enough to lay a new floor on top of … | Continue reading
DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search. | Continue reading
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm." | Continue reading
It's been 113 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving. | Continue reading
It's been 107 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving. | Continue reading
Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy. Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice. But it didn … | Continue reading
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act tonight. I […] | Continue reading
Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional. | Continue reading
Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts. | Continue reading
Note to self: ignore all the search results that say to install a plugin. The absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation, assuming you're using WP-CLI, is just to run something like: wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", … | Continue reading
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow. | Continue reading
Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and … | Continue reading
There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood. But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new on … | Continue reading
I think I'm probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It's been a surprising amount of work. But don't think I've stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day... I … | Continue reading
Nicholas A. Ferrell explains how to tell WordPress 7.0 to keep its AI features disabled, and I share my alternative approach: use a fork - ClassicPress - that doesn't include the AI features in the first place, and add them using a plugin if that's really what you want. | Continue reading
JTA wrote a LinkedIn post about Three Rings, its remote-first culture, doing things in person, and crisis management, and it's brilliant. | Continue reading
No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies. | Continue reading
As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history. | Continue reading
I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it! | Continue reading
As both the UK’s heatwave and my up-and-down England road trip continue, I think I’ve finally found a fan big enough to cool me off. | Continue reading