I use, and make, a lot of Alfred Workflows. Some of them I rely on every day, some only come in handy on occasion, and sometimes I build something then realise I actually don't need it. I've spent some time the past week sorting out some lingering problems with a couple of them, … | Continue reading
This post is adapted from the talk I did at the Eleventy Meetup. You can also watch the talk on YouTube. This is what I look like when I try to explain how my website works: There are three main parts that make up this website: Echo, my API server (and Eleventy data files), and s … | Continue reading
James wrote a great post with 100 83 ideas for things to do on a website[1] with a call for people suggest more so here's another ten suggestions to add to his list, most of which already exist on my site because I have no imagination. A uses page with software, tools, whatever y … | Continue reading
tl;dr: The process is terrible. Also, these notes are only relevant to the UK. Process This is simplified but, in theory, the process is: Save a deposit Work out how much you can borrow - this tool on Money Saving Expert works well Find, view, and put in an offer on, a house Have … | Continue reading
This post was originally in my wiki but I decided it made more sense to have it as a post. I have recorded and edited over 175 episodes of my podcasts so I know some things about podcasts but this is a basically a list of things I use. If you want to hear from actual professional … | Continue reading
After thinking on all the issues and discussion around the privacy of webmentions, I've re-done everything about how I show webmentions on my site, more specifically backfeeding Mastodon replies. Follow Up Chris noted in his post, as pointed out by Cam, that the issue we were act … | Continue reading
Three months ago I wrote about using the Johnny Decimal System - a system to organise your files, emails, and everything else in a way that means things are findable and storable quickly. I had assumed, like a lot of things I try, that given a month or so I'd be back to just dump … | Continue reading
Wouter's post about retiring their webmention server is an interesting write-up on how complicated webmentions and indieweb functionality in general can be but one point from it has stuck with me since reading it: ...people mentioning or replying to your link via Twitter suddenly … | Continue reading
I was recently[1] asked by Zoe the following question: What's your preferred type of time travel (like singular timeline where things always where, multiverse when you go back, some other shit) That is quite the question. We should start with the different types of time travel to … | Continue reading
I'm going to try doing some quick posts like this going forward about things I like. Being the naming genius I am, I'm calling this series "Things I Like". Pizza the Action is a seasoning from the UK-based company Condimaniac. It’s a seasoning mix designed to, as the name might s … | Continue reading
Computers are not my friend this week and I am basically ready to throw my computer into the sea. Here is an incomplete list of things annoying me at the moment: Discord not marking a channel as read no matter how many times I look at it. Only force quitting fixes it. Open source … | Continue reading
Now this is a theme I can get behind. If my specialist subject for Mastermind couldn't be Back to the Future, "Crisps of the UK" might be a close second. Following in the footsteps of Lynn, Dave, Jonathan, and Peter here are my thoughts on chips crisps. Prawn Cocktail is one of t … | Continue reading
Apologies for the terrible filtered photos but the only versions I have are from my Instagram archive when we all thought filters were the best thing ever. They were not. My first Mac was a 2009 27” iMac. It was a Christmas present from my parents. I had asked for a Mac Mini so a … | Continue reading
Last night I updated my blogroll and podroll to include a description about the sites instead of just showing the latest post; this is much more useful to someone who lands on that page. Then I realised I could add an OPML file so anyone could subscribe to all of the feeds in the … | Continue reading
My post about implementing webmentions on this site has been fairly popular and I get quite a few questions about something I don't think I explained properly in the post which all boil down to "what is a webmention though and what has that got to do with Mastodon?". Before we ge … | Continue reading
This is a fun one: I had a file, lets say it was originally called mycoolfile (2).png, it's been uploaded to S3, and then stored in our database. Except at some point it's become URL encoded so it looks like this instead: mycoolfile%20%282%29.png. Now I want to delete that file u … | Continue reading
A conversation in the Eleventy Discord led me to remember about the dependents page of a GitHub repository. That is, a list of other repositories that are depending on a package, in this case my Post Graph plugin. I wanted to show which people are using the package on the post gr … | Continue reading
th { width: 30%; } table { text-align: center; font-size: 0.9em; } Someone recently asked me how I was able to respond to a message so quickly to a keyboard shortcut question using the command and shift symbols (⌘ ⇧) in my response. Snippets is the answer and I thought it would … | Continue reading
It's my birthday today and Jason has been more enthusiastic than anyone about it, including me. He sent me this e-card and email which I'm sure he definitely hand-crafted himself. It's a response to this toot about my home insurance company emailing me which totally wasn't a "thi … | Continue reading
Styled XML? Well, I never. Look at my RSS feeds all styled and fancy: This is done with XSLT stylesheets. A truly exciting phrase. I would recommend reading Darek Kay's post on how to do this as well as mine. I won't be repeating everything Darek wrote in his post but I do have s … | Continue reading
Now I’ve calmed down after my tootstorm, here’s what happened yesterday with Netcraft, Facebook, Digital Ocean, and this blog post.[1] At 4:06pm I received an email from DigitalOcean that said the following: We’ve received a report that there may be phishing material hosted on yo … | Continue reading
Since the last time I posted my homescreen in 2017 the main change is widgets. I still kind of dislike them and wish I could customise them more but it's better than not having them. Top left is Marvis Pro which aside from being a nice music player, also integrates with Last.fm; … | Continue reading
Yesterday Chris imported 470 old posts of his into his website and I was inspired to do the same. The earliest posts I could think of were when I was writing reviews of various iPhone apps for iPhoneWorld.ca in 2009. Sadly the site has been offline a long time so I fired up the i … | Continue reading
Since I last blogged about the App Defaults project the number of blog posts has more than doubled; there are 320 now! A few people have said something along the lines of "It would be cool to see what the most popular apps are" and I told them I'd been working on a way to do it. … | Continue reading
As part of a change to move my blog posts from /slug-of-post to /blog/slug-of-post I needed to set permanent redirects in my Nginx config so the old post links wouldn't 404. Forge has a UI for this but it only allows doing one redirect at a time and I had ~130 to do. So I grabbed … | Continue reading
I tried this recipe on boxing day this year and it was fantastic so we made some more tonight which were, unsurprisingly, also fantastic. You will need: Maris Piper potatoes. 2kg is a reasonable amount for 4-6 people but we ate all those between three of us so do as many as you w … | Continue reading
Just as I started the year writing back and forth with Jason Becker, this month I was part of Kev's PenPals project. This is the conversation we had covering all kinds of topics including Christmas food, weddings, and POSSE. You can see Kev's post about this conversation here. 1s … | Continue reading
Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. Read more about RSS club. I totally forgot about one more project I'd like to get done this year. I want to take my current Eleventy-based site I used for my podcasts and make it usable for anyone to quickly get a podcast up and runnin … | Continue reading
Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. Read more about RSS club. Congratulations on subscribing via RSS, you get these bonus posts. Lucky you. Welcome to the Knight Club[1]. What am I going to post here? Not a clue to be honest but there are things that I want to talk about … | Continue reading
Reading the title you might be thinking "Yeah no shit Robb of course the web[1] is fantastic it's literally the cornerstone of all commerce and communications in the modern world". Or maybe you're not thinking that. But I'm not talking about the web as a whole, I'm talking about … | Continue reading
I recently added automatically generated open graph images to my site using eleventy-plugin-og-image. Here is the open graph image for this post: I won't go over how to use the plugin; the docs on the repo and this blog post explain that very well. What I didn't like is that thes … | Continue reading
I got married and had a child. No time for anything else. Thank you for reading. Writing This year I wrote 60 blog posts including this one which is a big jump compared to last year's 19. My most popular posts[1] for the year are: Please, Expose your RSS - this one hit the front … | Continue reading
Here is the recipe for very easy to make sausage rolls. You'll need: ~450g of sausage meat. I prefer to buy sausages and remove the skin as there's a bigger variety of flavours available without having to add stuff to sausage meat myself A sheet of puff pastry. In the UK at least … | Continue reading
Last week I tooted about my Github-style post graph on my stats page and people seemed to like it. James added one to his blog pages. Pete swore at me. I knew I had to make it into an Eleventy plugin so other people could us it easily. If you just want to jump straight into using … | Continue reading
Threads started to test ActivityPub integration this week and the fediverse is losing it's collective mind going into overdrive to block them in any way possible so they can't grab all your data. Here's the fun part: they can already do that and they definitely don't need Activit … | Continue reading
Inspired by Marco and Kev, here is the current state of my subscriptions. Any prices that were in dollars I've converted to GBP. Anything I pay for yearly I've divided by 12 and marked them as such. Miscellanea I pay for Apple One Premier at £36.95 per month which includes Apple … | Continue reading
Part One Given this an input like this, find the next number in the sequence. See the advent of code instructions for more details, but we need to go from this: 0 3 6 9 12 15 To the following, to get the final value for that row of 18. To do this we take the first two numbers and … | Continue reading
Part One Given this an input like this, find the next number in the sequence. See the advent of code instructions for more details, but we need to go from this: 0 3 6 9 12 15 To the following, to get the final value for that row of 18. To do this we take the first two numbers and … | Continue reading
We've navigating a network today for...reasons. Part One The sample input looks like so: RLAAA = (BBB, CCC)BBB = (DDD, EEE)CCC = (ZZZ, GGG)DDD = (DDD, DDD)EEE = (EEE, EEE)GGG = (GGG, GGG)ZZZ = (ZZZ, ZZZ) The first line is a list of instructions (left or right) and the rest is the … | Continue reading
Time to play some matches of legally-distinct-from-poker-and-easy-to-play-on-a-camel[1] card game. Part One Each hand has five cards and a score: 32T3K 765T55J5 684KK677 28KTJJT 220QQQJA 483 Each hand outranks others based on how many cards of each type it has, starting at five o … | Continue reading
According to Overcast's stats I've saved 424 hours with smart speed. Smart speed, or "trim silence" as other apps call it, is a feature that will remove silences from podcasts and at launch was Overcast’s primary selling point. After the best part of a decade I was convinced by K … | Continue reading
It's boat racing time. For each millisecond you hold the boat down, it's speed will increase by one millimeter per second. Just like the bus in Speed, the boat never slows down. Part One The input format: Time: 7 15 30Distance: 9 40 200 Each column is a race which contains the … | Continue reading
The description for this puzzle was confusing. Like, really confusing. I had to read it at least five times before I even understood the question. Part One For this puzzle the sample input was as follows: seeds: 79 14 55 13seed-to-soil map:50 98 252 50 48soil-to-fertilizer map:0 … | Continue reading
As soon as I saw this one this morning I knew it was going to at least be a bit easier than yesterday. Part One The premise for today was scratchcards with two sets of numbers: winning numbers and numbers you have. The first half is winning numbers, the second is numbers you have … | Continue reading
More regex and string parsing today. Sounds like a party.[1] Part One Given an "engine schematic" like below, identify which numbers are part numbers. That is, they have a symbol (not a . though) either next to, above, or below them including diagonally. 467..114.....*........35. … | Continue reading
More regex and string parsing today. Sounds like a party.[1] Part One Given an "engine schematic" like below, identify which numbers are part numbers. That is, they have a symbol (not a . though) either next to, above, or below them including diagonally. 467..114.....*........35. … | Continue reading
After finally finding time to do today's challenge, I was able to knock it out in about 30 minutes for parts one and two. At the core of both of parts was parsing strings like this: $input = [ 'Game 1: 3 blue, 4 red; 1 red, 2 green, 6 blue; 2 green', 'Game 2: 1 blue, 2 green; 3 … | Continue reading
Until Zoe mentioned it this morning, I didn't know what Advent of Code was [1]. Advent of Code is an "advent calendar of small programming puzzles". So once I knew what it was, I figured I'd give it a go. I'm not sure if I'll make it all month but I'll certainly try. I'm doing it … | Continue reading