It can be done, but you won’t be able to fill in those pieces of time where you have to face the horror of existing, while your friend is buying a drink. | Continue reading
It can be done, but you won’t be able to fill in those pieces of time where you have to face the horror of existing, while your friend is buying a drink. | Continue reading
A landing page that doesn’t have a hero image linking to one thing at the top. How will the readers cope 😱? — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
A landing page that doesn’t have a hero image linking to one thing at the top. How will the readers cope 😱? — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
The iPhone SE (first generation) was also my favourite phone – tiny and no camera bump – but I didn’t try and get a new one when the battery failed. I should have. Also, SEcore should be a genre. | Continue reading
The iPhone SE (first generation) was also my favourite phone – tiny and no camera bump – but I didn’t try and get a new one when the battery failed. I should have. Also, SEcore should be a genre. | Continue reading
This is great on what we like to call the “business end of the season”. Avid readers may be aware that I’m an Ipswich Town fan, and the team is – after nearly 20 years of utter mediocrity – on the verge of promotion to English football’s Premier League (the one with Manchester Ci … | Continue reading
This is great on what we like to call the “business end of the season”. Avid readers may be aware that I’m an Ipswich Town fan, and the team is – after nearly 20 years of utter mediocrity – on the verge of promotion to English football’s Premier League (the one with Manchester Ci … | Continue reading
Marvelling at the greyhound’s ability to sleep absolutely anywhere. — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
Marvelling at the greyhound’s ability to sleep absolutely anywhere. — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
Was logged into this laptop on a separate work account, and this is what I did see. Remember: I don’t see Iowan Old Style if I’m logged in to my normal account. This is just an old-fashioned (really annoying) MacOS bug. — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
Was logged into this laptop on a separate work account, and this is what I did see. Remember: I don’t see Iowan Old Style if I’m logged in to my normal account. This is just an old-fashioned (really annoying) MacOS bug. — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
I do occasionally wonder why Labour hates me so much. Take this on losing voters due to becoming a centre right party. Firstly, it’s the sneer in “urban progressive”, as if some fictionalised northern eebygum is more valid. Secondly “changing the Labour party and putting it back … | Continue reading
I do occasionally wonder why Labour hates me so much. Take this on losing voters due to becoming a centre right party. Firstly, it’s the sneer in “urban progressive”, as if some fictionalised northern eebygum is more valid. Secondly “changing the Labour party and putting it back … | Continue reading
Came across this article today on how Overdrive – the UK, US and Canada’s main provider of ebooks to the public on behalf of libraries – was bought out by an investment firm called KKR, and had begun to show signs of enshittifying. …the first thing you do is identify a middleman … | Continue reading
Came across this article today on how Overdrive – the UK, US and Canada’s main provider of ebooks to the public on behalf of libraries – was bought out by an investment firm called KKR, and had begun to show signs of enshittifying. …the first thing you do is identify a middleman … | Continue reading
This is a great explainer on how LLMs come to provide misleading information. I guess the LLM/AI marketing spiel is that it is intelligent, rather than a huge data processing machine. So it’s not just the reliability/bias of the source information – it’s the fact it’s unable to t … | Continue reading
This is a great explainer on how LLMs come to provide misleading information. I guess the LLM/AI marketing spiel is that it is intelligent, rather than a huge data processing machine. So it’s not just the reliability/bias of the source information – it’s the fact it’s unable to t … | Continue reading
Because this has been making us laugh. And now I’m off to the fitba. — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
Because this has been making us laugh. And now I’m off to the fitba. | Continue reading
Partly prompted by this article on the devastation wreaked on the UK by 14 years of Tory rule, I’ve been thinking about austerity and how it’s affected my working and home lives. I worked for a poster-child of austerity, a library service divested from council control, back in th … | Continue reading
This is good on how we use Google – as every web manager knows, the majority of website traffic comes from very obvious brand searches – and why AI isn’t the right UI for navigation and information queries. When I was trying out ChatGPT I asked it to write me an article about Ips … | Continue reading
I have pointed out that Labour’s leaflets make it look like a far-right party on a couple of occasions. FWIW, I think The Guardian’s framing of this is divisive and will only feed into a culture war argument over the Union Jack. It is offensive simply because I don’t want my part … | Continue reading
(Have micro.blog → Mastodon syndication set up, testing adding a permalink to notes.) — thisdaysportion.com | Continue reading
Ways to fund a search engine: do it for free, ask for payment, get small scale investment from individuals, sell contextual ads, get VC funding, become the world’s adtech giant and surveil all your users. There is a not-for-profit index, which is a major data source for LLMs … | Continue reading
Obviously this can’t happen for one very big reason, but the best additional service Mozilla could provide – in its non-Silicon Valley, tech firm guise – would be a search engine. There are some great, curated alternatives, but following the money on, say, DDG, leads you inevitab … | Continue reading
Went to watch Days of Heaven at Ipswich Film Theatre today, purely because I’m on leave and that’s what they were showing. It was great – 6 quid a ticket, you could take a Briarbank beer in with you and if there’s a better film of golds and fiery skies I’ve not seen it. | Continue reading
A gruesome list of Bankman-Fried groupies. Take your pick from Blair, Katy Perry, Shaq, Biden and (sigh) Larry David. Also interesting how celebrity and finance has merged into one big ball of hype and influence. It’s quite normal to discuss the POTUS and a retired quarterback in … | Continue reading
This is interesting on what Labour has planned for us. The common view is that Starmer and Reeves are running a Blair tribute act and, in turn, neoliberalism will continue to be the order of the day. According to Meadway, that’s not what’s happening. It’s worse. The truth is Blai … | Continue reading
Yesterday I wrote about how some installed, MacOS fonts only seem to work in Safari, and how I can’t work out which ones do and don’t. Another app (or at least a part of the app) that appears to work as expected is Firefox settings. Look! Here’s Iowan Old Style in all its glory: … | Continue reading
For about three months in 1989 (I think) I was obsessed with Butthole Surfers after seeing them on Snub TV – probably the most deranged, drugfuelled band I’d ever come across. It’s lovely that they’re mainly still alive, if obviously damaged. | Continue reading
I noticed several typefaces recently failed to appear on my website, including two I often use; namely, Iowan Old Style and Seravek. My normal method for checking whether a font is installed is to open Pages and see if it’s in the font list. Lo and behold, Iowan Old Style and Ser … | Continue reading
A word of warning… Apple are prone to removing fonts from MacOS. The latest Sonoma doesn’t include Iowan Old Style, which was, in my opinion, its best serif. Bear in mind if you’ve been using Modern Font Stacks. Seravek has also gone 😒. | Continue reading
I tend to set primary and secondary background colours on my site to distinguish between the primary, content area, and the secondary footer and header areas. —The primary area contrasts text and background more than the secondary because the background colour is lighter. You’d e … | Continue reading
I’d add: if your hobbies are online – blogging, for example – not “monetising” them and avoiding platforms that will monetise them for someone else keeps them as leisure. | Continue reading
Apparently, ☉ is the Pythagorean symbol for the monad. As such, I think it’s the perfect website pictograph (and writing that I’m picturing one reader sniggering at the back there). | Continue reading
At the moment, anything I post online is published on this website first, and then syndicated to social media (in my case, that’s micro.blog and Mastodon accounts). In indieweb circles, this “strategy” is known as POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). I POSSE b … | Continue reading
Fucking Reform/The UKIP leaflets dropping through the letterbox again. | Continue reading
Got a little Saturday morning, slightly bleary blogging tradition developing here. Football this afternoon too. These rituals make us. | Continue reading
There’s some interesting stuff on Britain’s demographic development here. The percentage of us living in towns and cities is growing at a similar rate to India and Pakistan. While London is growing, it’s the smaller cities and towns that are growing more quickly – Cambridge’s pop … | Continue reading
I really love this idea – the great public keenly awaiting the next morsel – and it translates well to a newsletter or RSS feed. Dickens serialised Bleak House. Imagine the excitement of receiving Chapter 48 in your feed or inbox. Through the stir and motion of the commoner stree … | Continue reading
I’m using grid for the sidebar layout on this site, and this guide was very good. | Continue reading
This is fairly similar to my experience of AI in a university. There’s the academic response – lots of events and papers that broadly support the “this is the future” idea – and the professional – “we should be using this in some way”. I’m the weird guy at school who isn’t exci … | Continue reading
…not in 10,000 years. However, any alternative to the PLP is a good thing. | Continue reading
Bit of a work one, really, but interesting nonetheless. Solves the eternal we want the website to look engaging by making it an usable mess conundrum. (Also, feel I need to publish something in order to take my mind off a weekend-ruining ITFC result.) The UI layer is not where … | Continue reading
We win away at Plymouth, Leicester lose and Southampton and Leeds draw. Five wins in a row. We are going to win the Championship #itfc | Continue reading
The venerable Kottke has redesigned and I very much like it. I mean, it’s all blogs and RSS these days, so why not a sidebar with a ton of links as well? I’ve been thinking about shifting things around here having come across a few sites still using my Scherzo WordPress theme. Sc … | Continue reading