A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger. | Continue reading
An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze. (Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out … | Continue reading
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely! | Continue reading
Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from early in my career... | Continue reading
Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly. | Continue reading
I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better. | Continue reading
A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden’s starting to get a little wild, this summer: we’ve been periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided that this could be the y … | Continue reading
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already. | Continue reading
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach prof … | Continue reading
This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do. | Continue reading
James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this. | Continue reading
Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it! | Continue reading
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess? | Continue reading
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it … | Continue reading
I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement. | Continue reading
Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful. | Continue reading
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me! | Continue reading
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too... | Continue reading
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well. | Continue reading
Trouble brewing at the village carnival’s decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance. | Continue reading
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele! | Continue reading
You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here. | Continue reading
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this... | Continue reading
Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said “Hello, gorgeous!” “Ooh, thank you!” I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose. | Continue reading
Evan's done with Twitter and Reddit. But where should he go next? I make some suggestions. | Continue reading
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those c … | Continue reading
Always reassuring when you fill in a company’s contact form and the next page is placeholder text… | Continue reading
I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly. | Continue reading
Some mornings... you just gotta make a whole damn litre of coffee. (for iced coffee purposes, of course; and definitely not just for me!) | Continue reading
Demmy would like to know why I haven’t turned off the UK’s heatwave yet. 🥵 | Continue reading
Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that’ll keep me sane, working in the UK’s current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!). | Continue reading
Ernie Smith from Tedium wrote about Matt's Script Archive, which back in the 1990s was a big part of how and why I learned to code in Perl. Let's take a trip down memory lane... | Continue reading
A hundred and thirty days since we got flooded out of our home, and remedial works are starting to ramp up. Today an electrician, tracing a fault that's developed in the wiring, cut a hole through a wall to repair it and threw up so much dust that it's hard to see anything! I wa … | Continue reading
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately "get it". Like: that's a cool new feature, I can already see how it'll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve accessibility, or allow me to do something new. Other times... | Continue reading
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
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