This week I added /where and /someday to the Slashpages site. I started making my own someday page, which is still in progress, but it got me thinking about a similar but distinct page: /next. I see this page as a toned-down version of someday: rather than my hopes, dreams, and g … | Continue reading
WeblogPoMo is over. You can read all my posts here. I followed the hashtag all month and also followed the @pomo account. I was flooded with excellent posts daily including people who just started blogging which fills my small web heart with joy. There's nothing I love more than … | Continue reading
When I got married, I wore a suit and a pair of black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star's. They were brand new and the first time I wore them was the day of our wedding. The day after I just put them on because the wedding was over and they could just go into the normal shoe rotatio … | Continue reading
My Famicase Exhibition 2024 - A design competition where people design fake famicon game covers. This 3D printed mechanical digital clock is glorious. Look Mum, No Breakpoints! - A great intro into using CSS clamp for fluid design. 8BitDo have some new keyboard extensions. I'll d … | Continue reading
Almanac, my media logging blog, has been ported across multiple systems in the past few years. Of the ~1300 posts, some were manually entered, some were done via an API, some were imported from Letterboxd. The data was sporadic at best and I had no posters or covers which after s … | Continue reading
A really easy recipe that Baby Knight can't get enough of. Ingredients: 500g beef mince 500g passata 250g of orzo 1 beef stock cube Grated cheese Brown off the mince in a saucepan Add the passata, the stock cube, and the orzo, plus 250ml of water Simmer for about 20 minutes while … | Continue reading
While working on Almanac to make sure all the posts have all the info and images they need, I came across two posts that didn't really fit there. Both of them were based on memes doing the rounds on Twitter in 2018 so I've moved them here such that they can be found easily. #Game … | Continue reading
After writing this post and using the new setup for a few days I would occasionally get a delay when changing the volume so I've turned this off but I want to keep the post anyway for reference in the future. I've been enjoying my new keyboard from 8BitDo but one thing has been b … | Continue reading
Following on from my two posts about Raycast, I got some feedback about some things that I missed. Dean pointed out that my scripts to open common folders were unnecessary because Raycast has a Quicklinks extension which can be used to open files, folders, and websites. He also m … | Continue reading
In part one I covered how many of Alfred's built-in features Raycast has (it's basically all of them). Firstly, some follow up. I mentioned my toggle workflow from Alfred in the last post. Lewis pointed out that most of the toggles exist in Raycast. I needed to install the Wi-Fi … | Continue reading
Don't care about the backstory? Go check out slashpages.net. While putting Baby Knight to bed I had an idea for a project: a website that acts as a guide to the different slash pages you can add to you website. "Slash pages" is a phrase coined by Shellsharks when I called pages l … | Continue reading
I've been planning out my mythical CMS based on my workflow on and off for a while. I know what features it needs. I know how I want it to work. What I haven't been able to work out, is how I could make it work for other people. How does configuration work? Is it hosted? Paid? Op … | Continue reading
Ready for some first-world problem whinging? Of course you are. It's the most personal product we've ever made This is how Apple described the Apple Watch when it was introduced. And yet here we are nine years later without custom watch faces or even a way to make our own based o … | Continue reading
I don’t have a driving licence. I’ve lived most of my adult life in Portsmouth which is the most densely populated city in the UK. We have a pretty decent bus system, taxis used to be cheap (not so much the past few years), we have rental scooters, and we have five train stations … | Continue reading
An excellent idea from Merlin Mann: the idea is to see if I can get somebody interested in a band I love (or sometimes even one specific aspect of a band I love) by curating a playlist of seven and only seven songs [...] Just seven really good songs that might help you fall in lo … | Continue reading
We got married in September last year, having previously been booked in to do it in September 2020 and May 2021. We had a small wedding so we didn't need to be precise with the number of people attending for the most part but we[1] did want a website where we could put all the in … | Continue reading
Heiji asked what my blogging workflow is and I thought not only is it an interesting idea for a post, but also can serve as a blueprint for how I want my new CMS to work. Post Types I have four types of posts on my site: Blog posts - titled, usually long-form, posts like this one … | Continue reading
I have bad movie opinions. I love movies I know are bad in the "la-de-dah I studied cinema at whatever university" way. I will avoid movies that win oscars because more often than not it means they'll be boring as fuck. If it won darling-of-the-weekend award at some film festival … | Continue reading
In 2005 I got an iPod Video (5th generation) for Christmas. The first thing I did was plug it in and start syncing my music collection that I'd been ripping in preparation for getting it. While I was waiting for the music to transfer over the mega-slow USB 2.0, I started browsing … | Continue reading
If you're interested in what I consider a perfect album I wrote about it last week and if you want to see other people's perfect albums, check out the perfect albums project. This post was originally going to be the same idea as fLaMEd's post with their top 50 artists. Then Apple … | Continue reading
I cannot stop thinking about this Waffle House video and their bonkers system for "marking" orders. It involves placing packets of jelly, ketchup, and other things a Waffle House has knocking about in specific places on a plate. John and Merlin spoke about it for almost the entir … | Continue reading
There are some phrases that no matter how many times I hear them, and then look them up, I always forget what they mean either because the phrase just isn't obvious or it doesn't come up enough for it to stick in my brain. I'm writing them here in the hopes that this might help m … | Continue reading
This post is inspired by episode 015 of Hemispheric Views. When I started drafting this post, I got distracted trying to find the first game I ever played. Turns out it was Asterisk Tracker which you can read all about here. I played that game for endless hours on an Amstrad comp … | Continue reading
Okay so maybe the definition of sitelet doesn't quite fit but it's close enough to describe these common pages people have on their sites. Maybe it needs a better name. Pagelets? Web dongles? Barnacles? Do they need a name? I want one. Anyway, Chris had an idea for a /interests p … | Continue reading
By my count I've had 18 different phones since 2002. In my mind, there are three distinct eras in terms of the type of phones and where I was in my life. Sadly, I don't have any of these any more. Sounds like a fun project to track them all down though. The Hand-Me-Down Era I got … | Continue reading
How was your delivery? How was your ride? How was your call to customer support? How was your purchase you received literally 15 seconds ago? You only just got here but would you rate our website? How was your experience filling in our form to get access to your mother’s will?[1] … | Continue reading
Last week I tooted a poll to decide what my next post should be for WeblogPoMo, Ben jokingly asked: Is ‘My Favourite Games’ a compilation of the best covers of The Cardigans track? Of course, it wasn't. Then I went down a rabbit hole for over an hour and listened to every possibl … | Continue reading
I started writing a post about my computing history (coming soon) and realised I couldn't remember the name of a game I played a lot of in the early 90s. The best way to describe it is flappy bird in space. I tooted with this description: black background with white stars and you … | Continue reading
On Hemispheric Views 110 Jason presented the following question: Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it's mostly open to interpretation, but I'm kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without sk … | Continue reading
Settle in and get comfy kids, time to tell you the tale of T9 predictive text. We didn't always have a full QWERTY keyboard to type on. T9 was how we typed messages on our dumb phones back in the early 2000s. T9 stands for "typing on 9 keys". Here is a Nokia 3210 and it's gloriou … | Continue reading
Inspired by Chris' post, herein lies my favourite games across the genres I play. Also like Chris, a ★ indicates what I think is a greatest of all time game. I have a fairly large collection of physical games which you can see on my games collection page. 3D Platformers ★ Jak and … | Continue reading
Matt, then Dave, then Kev, then another Dave, all wrote about what their ideal CMS would be. I don't have as lofty ideals as they do although there's some interesting ideas in there but I do have some things I would like in my perfect CMS and might possibly be doing with a custom … | Continue reading
If you prefer listening to reading, I spoke to John about this on Ruminate 183. I have used Alfred for about nine years. In that time I've come to rely on it for almost everything I do on my Mac - snippets, clipboard history, finding files, and numerous custom workflows. Raycast … | Continue reading
Last week Anne put up a page for WeblogPoMo: What is it? Weblog Posting Month, 2024! If you use weblog.lol, or otherwise have a personal blog, you should absolutely participate in this month-long blog posting extravaganza! I said I'd participate so here we are, publicly committin … | Continue reading
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast is so good. This came to me via Marty and I'm so glad he thought to post about it. I love The Lonely Island and the first four episodes of this show are great. Each episode they talk about one of their digital shorts from SNL starting wit … | Continue reading
The past two weeks have been busy with EchoFeed. I launched it after a brief beta period, lots of folks started using it, I fucked up, fixed that, and it's sent over 1700 posts already. Lots of folks wrote about it, many of them as a test of EchoFeed which is very meta, including … | Continue reading
On this week's ATP (around 25:00) John spoke about how a show he listens to said that a link would be on the website and he went out of his way to find that it just wasn't there. I feel bad for the hosts because I'm sure they thought this would be done. Marco spoke about the "two … | Continue reading
It’s taken a bit longer than expected but EchoFeed is now out of beta and ready for sign ups. If you wanna jump right in you can sign up now. There’s a slew of features that have made it into the first release including support for: Mastodon Micro.blog Bluesky GitHub Webmentions … | Continue reading
I hit 100 articles saved in Raindrop this week and there's no way I can post them all individually so here we go for link dump volume three. I got a new keyboard this week and that led me down a rabbit hole of Mac utilities and also keycaps. Hyperkey - Joshua mentioned this to me … | Continue reading
This week I bought the 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard which is not supported by MacOS, at least according to their website. I came across this Reddit post that said it does work so I decided to go for it. I think when they say it isn't supported they mean their software for acc … | Continue reading
I can't find the original tweet, nor do I know which one of us sent it, but some time in the summer of 2015 either John or I sent the other a tweet that said "We should start a podcast" and Ruminate was born (after quite a few never-to-be-published "pilot" episodes). Over those s … | Continue reading
Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think everyone is schedu … | Continue reading
Jarrod set up a site a few days ago, One a Month Club, which is a collection of people offering memberships at $1 a month. This was inspired by Manu's post about the same thing: I recently realized that tiers are the wrong approach [...] I also realized that 1$+/month is the best … | Continue reading
Time for Link Dump #2. Lots of interesting links and not enough time to post them all separately. Here we go: Organic Software Directory - This is fun. A bit quiet right now but I'll be keeping an eye on it. Using Gitea/Github actions for triggering Echo - Lewis is running Echo o … | Continue reading
It’s well know how much I love Back to the Future so I was excited to see The Incomparable cover Back to the Future the past three episodes. Back in 2011 they did a single episode for all three movies which, as Jason noted, is not nearly enough time to really discuss these movies … | Continue reading
So, I am converting every line of dialog of Office Space into a .gif. If that was to be a Mastobot, is that something you might be able to give some pointers on in the future? This was a message I got from Jason seven weeks ago. Jason then spent the next 28 hours converting Offic … | Continue reading
Sometimes I hate computers. This evening I lost two hours to a stupid issue that had me doing all sorts of command line nonsense trying to fix it. I tried to install xml2json with npm and was presented with a wall of errors culminating in the actual error of No module named 'dist … | Continue reading
A conversation yesterday in the Hemispheric Views Discord pushed me towards an idea I'd had for a workflow for a while: type some text, append that text to a note. Don't care about the how? Download QuickNote here. As Alfred workflows go it's pretty simple: just three objects. Th … | Continue reading