I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that res … | Continue reading
Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it. | Continue reading
Last night I wrote a stupid userscript to exploit a stupid XSS vulnerability to add a stupid feature to a Web-based chat room I'm in. Everybody else's name is coloured in accordance with the theme they're using. But mine... can be a rainbow, or an image, or something else entirel … | Continue reading
As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱 | Continue reading
Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss! | Continue reading
Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent. | Continue reading
A goldfinch came to my bedroom window to say hi, this morning. Good morning, Goldfinch! | Continue reading
There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current stat … | Continue reading
Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good! (The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induct … | Continue reading
In a longer article about the less-known Duleep Singh princesses, my friend Sundeep argued that it was inappropriate to describe Irene's death as her "committing suicide" because it implies criminality. One rabbithole of the laws of four countries later, I argue a (pointless) cou … | Continue reading
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time! Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I use a … | Continue reading
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of so … | Continue reading
Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just "fun" ones. Has this art form died? Most residen … | Continue reading
The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture? | Continue reading
It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our ge … | Continue reading
On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway. Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian... | Continue reading
It's my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we're living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden. Except the dog isn't even here. My brain keeps getting tricked... by this stat … | Continue reading
I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”). But man, I really like the “garden office” at … | Continue reading
I guess I’ll need some “assistnace” from Tesco to explain why my (long-neglected!) Clubcard didn’t work when buying some emergency sunscreen this morning. 😂 | Continue reading
Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation. | Continue reading
Today I had a Cadburys’ Cream Egg… for breakfast. I am a monster. | Continue reading
Found successfully on an Easter morning dog walk from Bledington. The geopup and I came out across the fields, trying to get outdoors early before the rain that's forecast for later in the day. Careful patience, logical elimination, and a determination not to give up were the key … | Continue reading
The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure! | Continue reading
The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure! | Continue reading
QEF for the geohound and I as we came out for a walk from the house we're borrowing this week - the latest of many AirBnB-like week-long lets we've had to decamp to after our house was rendered uninhabitable by a flash flood around fifty days ago. Hopefully the last, though, as t … | Continue reading
The elder geokid and I had a search in all the likely spots we could find after attending her cousin's 2nd birthday party nearby. No luck for us today! | Continue reading
Ran out of time and had to give up.. Nice view of our accommodation for this week from this hill, though! | Continue reading
Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I've revisited these predictions twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and "scored" his predictions both times. I love that the Web's memory (and the persistence of UR … | Continue reading
Found without difficulty while the geokid amused himself on the swing. Shame about the litter near the GZ, may be a CITO opportunity up here! Loving the views: think I can see our accommodation from here! TFTC and for showing us this rope swing! | Continue reading
Not a fan of this kind of container, but I must admit that I enjoy a decent-sized cache! TFTC. | Continue reading
We enjoyed sitting on the nearby bench while we cracked open this decent sized cache (and emptied out the accumulated water!). Log still in good condition, though. TFTC! | Continue reading
Quick find with the boy (thanks to the hint!) as we stopped for a sandwich break. TFTC! | Continue reading
Incredibly easy find for the younger geokid and I: we could see the cache before we even reached the GZ. TFTC! | Continue reading
This year's 3Camp venue had a wood-fired pizza oven, so I signed-up for a shift of cooking for my fellow volunteers and thoroughly enjoyed making and baking a monumental amount of dough. | Continue reading
There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year's 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there. | Continue reading
I'd completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools' Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of "features" until I went to it myself and got "party mode". So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools' myself. | Continue reading
After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still ha … | Continue reading
It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect "hobbit hole" … | Continue reading
I'm volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities... among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the … | Continue reading
Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities. But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rub … | Continue reading
Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning… before starting work on a new Three Rings feature! | Continue reading
This one's going to bug me! The second nearest cache to this week's volunteering event accommodation and I had to DNF it!? Poked my fingers into every hidey hole I could find (while a nearby goose honked at me: maybe it was mocking me, or perhaps it was saying "it's on your left" … | Continue reading
When I drove along this lane yesterday evening I didn't appreciate how wonderful it'd look under the morning sun. An easy find with thanks to the cache title! TFTC! | Continue reading
Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way thr … | Continue reading
Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional “receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries” activity. | Continue reading
Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button. At first I thought this was an unusual user interfac … | Continue reading
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal. | Continue reading
Manu reminds all bloggers, no matter how they do it, that they're doing it right. I couldn't agree more. | Continue reading