My sabbatical might give me more time for geohashing, so long as the numbers come up right. So let's take an expedition up Harcourt Hill with the dog (plus video)... | Continue reading
Not for the first time, our eldest child has drawn me a network diagram. It's cute, but I've outright refused to name one of the new servers I'm provisioning after our dog. Here's why... | Continue reading
Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app, which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things! | Continue reading
Kicking off day #1 of my three-month sabbatical from work at a hotel in Reading, at a meeting with fellow Three Rings volunteers to discuss our organisational culture and values. | Continue reading
The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I've once again had to update my script to "fix" the feed so that it only contains, y'know, news. | Continue reading
I've extended CapsulePress to support Nex, an ultra-lightweight smolweb protocol from the Nightfall City community. | Continue reading
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Checked-in in this cache to ensure it was still healthy, after a recent spate of muggling. Happy to report the cache is well. | Continue reading
✅ Inbox Zero ✅ Slack Notification Zero ✅ Assigned PR Reviews Zero ✅ Owned PRs... one, but it's approved and just waiting for the right moment to merge That's got the be the first time in... literally years... that I've ended a workday so "clean". Feels amazing. There'll be a mess … | Continue reading
Okay, I've officially had enough of WordPress drama now. Can we all just go back to making awesome content and contributing to our awesome CMS, please? | Continue reading
Happy International Pronouns Day! 🥳 I use he/him pronouns. | Continue reading
And while we're talking about AI... it took a disproportionate about of time to find the right (tiny) link, but eventually I managed to opt-out of my content being used to train Facebook's AI. They don't make it easy, do they? | Continue reading
As Google invest in next-generation nuclear generation to provide electricity to their energy-hungry AI datacentres, so they can keep providing shit answers to everyday questions, I'm optimistic that maybe after the LLM fad fizzles out we'll be left with new power technologies th … | Continue reading
You know that you REALLY needed that coffee when you: 1. get out a mug, 2. turn on the coffee machine, 3. load the dishwasher while you wait for the coffee machine to warm up, 4. can’t find your mug any more, oh shit it’s in the dishwasher 🤦 | Continue reading
eBay UK have changed their terms to (a) remove seller fees for most private sellers, but (b) instead of paying-out immediately, payouts are four times a year (or on-demand). That sounds like they’re trying to keep money in their ecosystem. The hope is, I guess, that by paying sel … | Continue reading
This evening I pushed against my illness-addled brain to try to sit in on the fortnightly Zoom call with the Three Rings dev team. Unfortunately it seems like the primary symptom of my cold is an inability to string words together. At one point, I apologised to by colleague “Beff … | Continue reading
I was listening to the bats flying silently above me while I watched the Perseids, the other month. When was the last time I was actually capable of hearing their echolocation? I simply can't remember, because it didn't feel significant at the time. | Continue reading
Girl on the Net diverts from her usual sex blogging to write about taking a date on a 25-forms-of-transport tour of London, and it's delightful. | Continue reading
Playing simultaneous games against both children might have been less challenging if they hadn’t both kept trying to start fights with one another at the same time! 😂 | Continue reading
Rosie, who like me never even considered taking Automattic's alignment offer, writes about her experience of this week's meetup. | Continue reading
I’m back home from Mexico (and feeling a little worse for wear), where this young lady wanted to let me know that I was sorely missed. | Continue reading
As I come to the end of a week in Mexico with ~400 of my the smartest, friendliest, open-source-loving geeks I could wish to know, I come to realise that Automattic's meetups are just... magical. | Continue reading
Goodbye, Tulum! You were delightful, if very hot. It’s time for me to head back to the UK. | Continue reading
Cassie Jones asks what EXIF photo metadata would - or should - look like for a photograph taken on the moon. It got me thinking, a bit. | Continue reading
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take it away, not towards, me. My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexic … | Continue reading
It’s a bit hard to perform close-up magic to an audience 40 metres deep, so I pre-recorded my favourite card trick! Then I talked over it, explaining to colleagues from my division why it’s my favourite bit of slight-of-hand, and what great magic tricks have in common with great … | Continue reading
It’s 05:30 local time on the third day of my work meetup in Tulum, on Tyne Caribbean Coast of Mexico, and I was just woken by incredibly heavy rain. I got up and stepped out until it, and was surprised to discover that it’s almost as warm as the shower in my bathroom. In the […] | Continue reading
Something I’ve long enjoyed about Automattic gatherings is the opportunity to meet some the most diverse characters you’ll ever find in one place. But today was the first time I’ve ever been at a beachside disco that was attended by a foraging racoon. | Continue reading
Max props to my employer for providing pronoun pins not just in a diversity of options but also offering blank ones for people not represented by any of the pre-printed options. | Continue reading
It took almost twenty hours of travelling but I made it to Mexico! | Continue reading
Think I blew Ruth‘s mind this morning when I set off for a week in Mexico with only a medium-sized, underseat-suitable backpack. But since working for Automattic five years ago I’ve totally been bitten by the travelling-light bug. Highly recommended! | Continue reading
This week, Automattic made a very generous offer to employees who didn't feel aligned with the company and its leader: to pay them to leave. 8.4% of the company took it, and it's been a heartbreaking time, but we'll build back stronger, I'm sure. | Continue reading
Harry Segell’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait went on to inspire such an extraordinarily long legacy of follow-ups. I’ve only seen the most-recent few and my experience is that the older iterations are better, so I probably ought to watch Here Comes Mr. Jordan, right? | Continue reading
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and … | Continue reading
My colleague Paolo Belcastro invites you to play a little game: one of these phrases that begins "wp" is not like the others... | Continue reading
I've been doing a bit of tidying-up of the mess that is my personal Internet hosting. I've made a lot of progress, but the rest is probably going to have to wait until later in the year. | Continue reading
Ana Tudor shared an absolutely gorgeous effect based on SVG filters, CSS properties, linear-gradients, and (after all of that) relatively-basic animations. It's pretty amazing. | Continue reading
At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico. Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie c … | Continue reading
After fourteen years of waiting, The Duck Song trilogy finally got a (proper, official, canonical, by-the-original-creator) fourth episode. | Continue reading
We made it! This young furbaby managed to pose a bleppy picture every single day of Bleptember. Thanks for coming along for the ride! | Continue reading
“You want more Bleptember pictures? I demand payment in the form of tummy-scritches!” (Wow, it’s the penultimate day of Bleptember. ) | Continue reading
The eldest is really getting into her WW2 studies at school, so I arranged a trip for her and a trip to the ever-excellent Bletchley Park for a glimpse at the code war that went on behind the scenes. They’re clearly looking forward to the opportunity to look like complete swots o … | Continue reading
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Noticed while on a dog walk that the container looked a little loose, so came by to tighten it up. Noticed that the logbook was missing – muggled? – so replaced t … | Continue reading
Tttttthbbptt. The sound of a bleppy dog deflating like a balloon, this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember | Continue reading
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a standard for multilingual emails? Oh wait, there is! Let's see how it works, and whether it's (ever going to be) ready for mainstream use... | Continue reading
Joost de Valk weighs in on the WP Engine drama, but pivots into some excellent ideas that think bigger about the future of the WordPress community, contribution, and collaboration. I'm not 100% convinced by his ideas, but I'm enormously impressed by his big-picture thinking. | Continue reading
This Bleptember pic looks a bit like a political poster to me. Vote Dog, for a future with More Ham, Fewer Vacuum Cleaners! | Continue reading
The YouTube channel @simonscouse has posted exactly two videos. The first came a little over ten years ago. It shows a hand waving and then wiggling its fingers in front of a patterned wallpaper. The second came a little over five years ago, and shows a hand - the same hand? - wa … | Continue reading