Giles Turnbull's written a wonderful piece, imagining a conversation with his 19-year-old self. I wonder what I'd say to myself at 19 if I bumped into him? | Continue reading
Sure, you could leave a comment or drop me an email or say hi on Mastodon... but wouldn't it be cooler if you could send a physical postcard in response to a blog post? Let's find out together. | Continue reading
13 years ago I reviewed The Signal and the Noise by Pagan Wanderer Lu. Despite being knocked down at least one peg, it still stands among my top ten concept albums ever, and it's now available for free so you should go and listen to it. | Continue reading
A 'ten questions about yourself' quiz is circulating the blogosphere, and I figured I'd join in (and wear four different hats, in the process). | Continue reading
The younger child and I nipped across for a photo while we waited for our tram to come. | Continue reading
QEF while my family examined the sculpture. What a great spot for a cache, and so well-maintained. FP awarded. TFTC! | Continue reading
Very easy find for the kids and I after a delightful visit to the Tram Museum. We went to the coordinates and instantly saw the cache! SL, TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. | Continue reading
A quick photo before the family and I took a ride on the wheel! | Continue reading
Found after an embarrassingly long hunt! After reading the hint I quickly spotted the correct hiding spot, but said to myself "no, it surely can't be there" and moved on. Only on my third time walking past it did I think to actually try it, and sure enough, there it was! SL, TFTC … | Continue reading
Third of three finds on this, my final morning here before my flight to Helsinki. Taking a brisk walk/slow jog up to Hotel Levi Panorama, but first, a QEF. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK! | Continue reading
The second of three caches hunted on this, the final morning of my brief stay in Lapland. Found on the second host I tried. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC! | Continue reading
It's the final morning of my short visit to Sirkka. Having 90 minutes until I need to set off for the airport, I decided to come out for a quick geocaching expedition first. This was the first cache on my list, and I was so glad to choose it. A truly beautiful and well-maintained … | Continue reading
Second “surprising Finnish confectionary” is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means “green balls”, which doesn’t tell me much. Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visite … | Continue reading
Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn’t have been surprised (given the country’s love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured. And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was. (Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.) | Continue reading
QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK! | Continue reading
Layitout! Terra is a CSS-only implementation of a customisable Transport Tycoon-like terrain generator, and it's left me impressed and confused! | Continue reading
Jo of Dead.Garden wrote a poem, seemingly inspired by a particular variety of spam email, that I really enjoyed. | Continue reading
The ever-excellent Blackle Mori posted this about 18 months ago but I don't think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you've never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it's an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual … | Continue reading
The BBC and EBU did some research and discovered that AI assistants tasked with bringing you news get it right only slightly more-often than they get it wrong, and they get it catastrophically wrong about one time in five. This should be a surprise to nobody. | Continue reading
Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op! | Continue reading
I reimplemented Al Sweigart's "Pipe Swap" scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP Refresh header: https://textplain.blog/scroll-art-viewer/pipe-swap This was a stupid idea, but it was about the level of code sophistication that my illness-brainfog can … | 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! I hate being ill. Not (just) for the obvious and immediate reasons: (this time around: the nausea, th … | Continue reading
Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden. Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you? Guy 2: Dunno. But we can't dig round it soo... 😬 | Continue reading
As the latest in a series of stupid things I've done on or for the Web, I've made a website that dynamically generates 'best viewed at' buttons... for exactly the Web visitor's current screen resolution... | Continue reading
Andrew Stephens reminds us to HtDTY (Host the Damn Thing Yourself) to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks and improve privacy. But I think the argument goes further than this. | Continue reading
The Scroll Art Museum demonstrates a surprisingly cool way of generating animation using ASCII art in a scroll buffer and... look, it's just cool, okay? And it inspired me to dust off a copy of QBASIC for a moment, too... | Continue reading
vole.wtf’s 1% guild wasn’t the easiest club to gain membership of, but somehow keeping my phone alive for long enough to snap this screenshot was even harder. | Continue reading
Hive's password form can't decide whether you need 8+ or 12+ characters, gives misleading error messages and... requires that you use a 'special character' except most special characters (including most common punctuation) is secretly banned, and gives you a misleading error mess … | Continue reading
Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn't sure I'd heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text. It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three … | Continue reading
Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed. | Continue reading
Praise for a blog post by Adam Stoddard, defending the handcrafting of software even where it serves no direct purpose other than the satisfaction of its creator. | Continue reading
I’d never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier. They’re both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of t … | Continue reading
David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why... | Continue reading
Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don’t know. | Continue reading
Whenever I'm writing a rhyme, I can't do the third and fourth line. Dah-de-da-dah-duh, Dah-de-de-dah-duh. But somehow it still works out fine. | Continue reading
Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a … | Continue reading
I'm looking at listing for a ¼" to ⅝" screw adapter, for which the seller warns that I should "please allow 1-3cm error". A 3cm error would mean that a ⅝" screw could result in a screw thread anywhere between 1⅘" and... minus half an inch, I guess? (I don't even know how to make … | Continue reading
A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia's mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the "unsubscribe all" one isn't. Click the words "unsubscribe all" and... nothing h … | Continue reading
Cory Doctorow paints a bleak picture of the future world economy in the aftermath of the bursting of the AI bubble. I agree that we're in a bubble, but I'm slightly more-optimistic that we can survive it without a total economic catastrophe. | Continue reading
We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo. Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year! | Continue reading
Somehow, even when she's alert and focussed, our dog's bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey. It's the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we're almost done for another year! | Continue reading
It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house. What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶 | Continue reading
Sometimes people connect my unusual name to popular culture. They say things like “Oh, Q like James Bond?” or “Oh, Q like Star Trek?”. I think their choice of franchise tells me more about them than they learn from my answer, which is usually “No, Q like the set of rational numbe … | Continue reading
Sometimes you’re Just Tired. It’s been a long week. Happy Twenty-Seventh of Bleptember. | Continue reading
Just a mini-blep this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember, from a certain attention-seeking doggo who insisted on a cuddle from me while I sat in a Zoom meeting. | Continue reading
Checked on on this cache as part of a routine maintenance schedule. All is well, nothing needed here! | Continue reading
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been away for a couple of days and she’s missed me… but this bleppy dog wanted lots of cuddles and reassurance as we prepared for the school run, this Twenty-Fifth of Bleptember. | Continue reading