I started writing a post about my computing history (coming soon) and realised I couldn't remember the name of a game I played a lot of in the early 90s. The best way to describe it is flappy bird in space. I tooted with this description: black background with white stars and you … | Continue reading
On Hemispheric Views 110 Jason presented the following question: Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it's mostly open to interpretation, but I'm kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without sk … | Continue reading
Settle in and get comfy kids, time to tell you the tale of T9 predictive text. We didn't always have a full QWERTY keyboard to type on. T9 was how we typed messages on our dumb phones back in the early 2000s. T9 stands for "typing on 9 keys". Here is a Nokia 3210 and it's gloriou … | Continue reading
Inspired by Chris' post, herein lies my favourite games across the genres I play. Also like Chris, a ★ indicates what I think is a greatest of all time game. I have a fairly large collection of physical games which you can see on my games collection page. 3D Platformers ★ Jak and … | Continue reading
Matt, then Dave, then Kev, then another Dave, all wrote about what their ideal CMS would be. I don't have as lofty ideals as they do although there's some interesting ideas in there but I do have some things I would like in my perfect CMS and might possibly be doing with a custom … | Continue reading
If you prefer listening to reading, I spoke to John about this on Ruminate 183. I have used Alfred for about nine years. In that time I've come to rely on it for almost everything I do on my Mac - snippets, clipboard history, finding files, and numerous custom workflows. Raycast … | Continue reading
Last week Anne put up a page for WeblogPoMo: What is it? Weblog Posting Month, 2024! If you use weblog.lol, or otherwise have a personal blog, you should absolutely participate in this month-long blog posting extravaganza! I said I'd participate so here we are, publicly committin … | Continue reading
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast is so good. This came to me via Marty and I'm so glad he thought to post about it. I love The Lonely Island and the first four episodes of this show are great. Each episode they talk about one of their digital shorts from SNL starting wit … | Continue reading
The past two weeks have been busy with EchoFeed. I launched it after a brief beta period, lots of folks started using it, I fucked up, fixed that, and it's sent over 1700 posts already. Lots of folks wrote about it, many of them as a test of EchoFeed which is very meta, including … | Continue reading
On this week's ATP (around 25:00) John spoke about how a show he listens to said that a link would be on the website and he went out of his way to find that it just wasn't there. I feel bad for the hosts because I'm sure they thought this would be done. Marco spoke about the "two … | Continue reading
It’s taken a bit longer than expected but EchoFeed is now out of beta and ready for sign ups. If you wanna jump right in you can sign up now. There’s a slew of features that have made it into the first release including support for: Mastodon Micro.blog Bluesky GitHub Webmentions … | Continue reading
I hit 100 articles saved in Raindrop this week and there's no way I can post them all individually so here we go for link dump volume three. I got a new keyboard this week and that led me down a rabbit hole of Mac utilities and also keycaps. Hyperkey - Joshua mentioned this to me … | Continue reading
This week I bought the 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard which is not supported by MacOS, at least according to their website. I came across this Reddit post that said it does work so I decided to go for it. I think when they say it isn't supported they mean their software for acc … | Continue reading
I can't find the original tweet, nor do I know which one of us sent it, but some time in the summer of 2015 either John or I sent the other a tweet that said "We should start a podcast" and Ruminate was born (after quite a few never-to-be-published "pilot" episodes). Over those s … | Continue reading
Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think everyone is schedu … | Continue reading
Jarrod set up a site a few days ago, One a Month Club, which is a collection of people offering memberships at $1 a month. This was inspired by Manu's post about the same thing: I recently realized that tiers are the wrong approach [...] I also realized that 1$+/month is the best … | Continue reading
Time for Link Dump #2. Lots of interesting links and not enough time to post them all separately. Here we go: Organic Software Directory - This is fun. A bit quiet right now but I'll be keeping an eye on it. Using Gitea/Github actions for triggering Echo - Lewis is running Echo o … | Continue reading
It’s well know how much I love Back to the Future so I was excited to see The Incomparable cover Back to the Future the past three episodes. Back in 2011 they did a single episode for all three movies which, as Jason noted, is not nearly enough time to really discuss these movies … | Continue reading
So, I am converting every line of dialog of Office Space into a .gif. If that was to be a Mastobot, is that something you might be able to give some pointers on in the future? This was a message I got from Jason seven weeks ago. Jason then spent the next 28 hours converting Offic … | Continue reading
Sometimes I hate computers. This evening I lost two hours to a stupid issue that had me doing all sorts of command line nonsense trying to fix it. I tried to install xml2json with npm and was presented with a wall of errors culminating in the actual error of No module named 'dist … | Continue reading
A conversation yesterday in the Hemispheric Views Discord pushed me towards an idea I'd had for a workflow for a while: type some text, append that text to a note. Don't care about the how? Download QuickNote here. As Alfred workflows go it's pretty simple: just three objects. Th … | Continue reading
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