Somebody’s doing a kickass job with these adverts on the Tube. Found via https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3ljobtnidrk2s; there are other examples in that thread. | Continue reading
My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88×31 button representing “me” (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme). | Continue reading
How do birds hear the calls of species of bird other than their own? Is it like background noise that they can talk (sing) over, filtering out everything but the calls of their own kind, like how you can talk over the murmur of a cocktail party until the second somebody says your … | Continue reading
Right after I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built, I began reading its sequel A Prayer for the Crown-Shy and... it's also wonderful. It takes a different-but-similar approach to the philosophy of identity and purpose, and the story provides a deeper look into Dex's world, but it' … | Continue reading
Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This'll work, right? | Continue reading
What's the equivalent phrase to "hair of the dog", but for caffeine? I've always been pretty sensitive to it, and while I'm less-so now, it was still definitely a mistake to eat several portions of tiramisu right before bedtime. So now I'm going to need more caffeine, this mornin … | Continue reading
Inspired by an 11-year old comedy sketch, I asked a GenAI to solve an unsolvable programming problem... and (for at least some models) it failed in exactly the way I anticipated: claiming to be able to solve it and delivering code that just... didn't. What does this teach us abou … | Continue reading
While I've been ill I read A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers, which had been on my reading list for a while. It's a comforting and compelling story about purpose and identity in an environmentally-conscious utopia, and it's flipping awesome. | Continue reading
After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what’s probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉 It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervisin … | Continue reading
Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great… until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your “streak” as an “achievement”! 😅 | Continue reading
Third day of being ill with what’s probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school… and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip… I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers’ A … | Continue reading
Don’t remember the last time I felt so run-down. I’ve been unwell since Sunday with an illness I can only assume I caught from the 11-year-old, who’s been unable to keep food down for several days. In my case, though, I’ve mostly been full of muscular aches and cramps, ocassional … | Continue reading
Joanna Bryson's put together an absolutely fantastic list of considerations about the use of AI, and two of her points do a better job than I did at saying what I was trying to, last week. | Continue reading
OpenStreetMap blows Google Maps out of the water for walkers and also for if you're trying to find a particular-named house in a rural area. I'm not saying never to use Google Maps (there's plenty of things it's the king at): but maybe consider giving OpenStreetMap a go next time … | Continue reading
Checked up on this cache while the dog and I were nearby. It's in fine condition and ready to find. The latch for the container is beginning to rust, but the whole thing is perfectly serviceable. Go find it! | Continue reading
Eduaro Ordax is concerned that less-experienced developers will (be encouraged to) use AI as a crutch rather than learning programming fundamentals. I have similar and related concerns, and I'm still of the opinion that we just don't know how to teach people to program! | Continue reading
Yesterday, owing to some plot, the dog didn’t get as much outside/walk/play time as she’d like. Today, she let me know how she felt about that by shredding my slippers. 🙄 | Continue reading
I was experimenting with VP8/VP9 WebM video transparency and I made a stupid thing: a URL that, if you go to it, means you’ll he followed around my blog by a video of me just hanging out in the corner of the page – https://danq.me/?fool_id=06 I’ve added it to my list of “stupid/r … | Continue reading
Ruth and I spiced-up this week's date night with a challenge from a mysterious book: Ruth, blindfolded, baked pies while I instructed her only in non-verbal ways. It was challenging, stressful, and... pretty fun! (Also we got to eat pie.) | Continue reading
Vika shared her frustrations with Content-Security-Policy nonces when delivering pre-generated/cached content. I've had a similar fight, so I've written-up a few of the things I tried and what I learned as a result. | Continue reading
Andy Hawthorne criticised a new website owner for not using a popular CMS, arguing that this would necessarily impact their SEO and so invalidate the point of their website (that point being, Andy presupposes, to attract views). I dispute... almost every single part of that argum … | Continue reading
WordPress.com's YouTube channel just shared an influencer 'get ready with me'-style video but featuring a techfluencer. It's... weird? But funny? | Continue reading
A lunchtime dog walk was made especially delightful by the growing warmth of the approaching British springtime. It’s really bright and pretty out, this afternoon! | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I switched this blog to ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress. Here's a deep dive into how (and why) I did it, as well as a look into what my experience so-far has been with this (mostly-)cut-down version of the world's most popular CMS. | Continue reading
Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power. - Mia, 2019 This is what I needed to be reminded, today. | Continue reading
Cat shares the experience of his friend who semi-independently discovered that queer-friendly online spaces are an antidote to patriarchal toxic masculinity. Because duh. A delightful tale. | Continue reading
Chris Messina remarked about the insane terms and conditions that Bloomberg.com require you to agree to in order to read a news article, effectively signing away your rights. Except... I don't see the dialog: I just see the articles. I haven't given consent, and they can't concei … | Continue reading
What's got nine working fingers and shouldn't be allowed to own a meat cleaver? This guy! 👉🩸😥 | Continue reading
For almost a year I've been slowly working my way through the archives of Monday Punday, a webcomic which challenges the reader to solve picture-based pun puzzles. Give it a go! | Continue reading
This checkin to GC2F23P A Road Anarchy - A40 Eastbound to Oxford reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. No logs here since… 2023!? Mindboggling. The geopup and I were out running some errands this damp afternoon and figured we’d take a walk near here. … | Continue reading
The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano. Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend. But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, … | Continue reading
As a kid, I enjoyed a 1983 program that dynamically generated insults. So I found a copy of it, reverse-engineered it, and reimplemented it in Perchance. Who wants to be insulted? | Continue reading
Matt talked about change, and mentioned the history of WordPress. I weighed-in, talking about my (positive) experience of open source in an environment of change, and contrasting it to fighting with Squiz CMS at the Bodleian! | Continue reading
I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset. So obviously step #1 involves a big ol' coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go... | Continue reading
Step aside, George Carlin! Sam Easterby-Smith wants to share with the world the 55 words you can't say in a UK faster payments reference. | Continue reading
“I’m only asking for basic respect.” – Dr. Beth Upton, in the face of a hostile courtroom, media, and world. Her fucking bravery is amazing. 💖 | Continue reading
After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’v … | Continue reading
The UK seems to be strongarming Apple to weaken the security of its consumer products, which is fucking stupid. Weakened and backdoored encryption in mainstream products doesn't help catch smart criminals. But it does help smart criminals to catch regular folks. | Continue reading
Inspired by Geneveive Raine's "The Continuum", I turned all of my blog post's featured images into a stripy picture. | Continue reading
It turns out my filtered BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than I thought, so I've launched a new site with all of them (plus all the source code to produce them) in a variety of editions. | Continue reading
I must be the last blogger on Earth left to do Ava/Kev's 'Blog Questions Challenge'. Let's get to it. | Continue reading
Don’t Bishops normally get to retain their regular name? This BBC News headline makes it sound like we’re gonna end up with Bishop McBishopface! | Continue reading
When I was a young child I took part in a school nativity play, and was so insistent about picking holes in the theological inconsistencies implied by the script that I had to be expelled from the classroom. Here's how it went down. | Continue reading
In kind-of local news, I see that the folks at Diamond Light Source (which I got to visit last year) have been helping the Bodleian (who I used to work for) to X-ray one of their Herculaneum scrolls (which I've written about before). That's really cool. | Continue reading
The second lesson I took from my sabbatical was that it's possible to risk burnout (and therefore, it's important to be aware of and ready to counteract it) even when you're not working (in the conventional sense). Fortunately, my coach is on hand to help. | Continue reading
Somebody commented on my blog to say they liked my "BBC News... Without The Crap" script, but still wanted sports news in their RSS feed. Luckily, I know just the person for the job: me! | Continue reading
Possible future presentation concept: using a cafe/dining metaphor to help explain the proximity principle in user interface design (possibly with a “live waitstaffing” demo?). Great idea? Or stupid idea? | Continue reading
On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment. It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I p … | Continue reading