Programming, digital privacy, indie web advocacy, and internet culture.
Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy. Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverag…
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! The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last…
Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.
Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's acco…
Note to self: ignore all the search results that say to install a plugin. The absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation, assuming you're using WP-CLI, is just to run something like: wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example…
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.
Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing aroun…
There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood. But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot…
I think I'm probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It's been a surprising amount of work. But don't think I've stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on a…
Nicholas A. Ferrell explains how to tell WordPress 7.0 to keep its AI features disabled, and I share my alternative approach: use a fork - ClassicPress - that doesn't include the AI features in the first place, and add them using a plugin if that's really what…
JTA wrote a LinkedIn post about Three Rings, its remote-first culture, doing things in person, and crisis management, and it's brilliant.
No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.
As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history.
I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it!
As both the UK’s heatwave and my up-and-down England road trip continue, I think I’ve finally found a fan big enough to cool me off.
Drinking a coffee while editing a podcast episode in the beautiful Ullswater valley, and this lovely little pied wagtail came by to say good morning!
Today, Wikipedia introduced me to a mysterious deep-dwelling octopus. So cool!
I spent a while failing to interpret this sign. It seemed to be saying that if you didn’t clear your tray… then you’d get ketchup poured on your wrist? It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins. (It is possible they my br…
It’s been too damn hot out, so Ruth, the kids, and I took refuge at the snow park of an indoor ski centre!
My random Wikipedia article of the day was Milices Patriotiques, who were a 22,000-strong communist group and part of the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Which sounded really interesting, but their article was tragically short so that's pretty much…
Hold your head up high and show some PRIDE.
Inspired by the way that Nekoweb's editor 'Nekode' works, I came up with a low-effort way to let my eldest get started with HTML and CSS editing, right from her browser, with the results selfhosted directly from the household NAS.
If the Romans played bingo, do you think the callers would have used 'bingo lingo'? - Legs two - Growing up the wall, four - Seagull in flight, five - Long-nosed dead man, nineteen - Pornography, thirty - Use your tongue, fifty-nine - Smiling in a blindfold, a…
Today's random Wikipedia article was Jim Marshall (photographer). I enjoyed reading about him and even looked up some of the many photographs that he took of musicians in the 60s and 70s, but decided that because I was literally just writing about a photograph…
It's been 97 days now since we were flooded-out of our home, and repair and rebuild work hasn't really even begun. But it's getting closer, and I'm looking forward to later this year sitting back in my own house (and probably at the piano!).
Wikipedia is 25 years old this year, and in celebration of that I found my way via a Mercurial crater to the article about Yousuf Karsh, one of the most-important portrait photographers of the 20th century.
Aquarion's written about using agentic intelligence and the role of LLMs in various tasks. The conclusion's pretty solid, and I agree with it 90%+.
Today, thanks to Wikipedia, I learned a lot about a miniscule Hawaiian island with an interesting cultural and archaeological history... after I found my way there from a random page about a hip hop album!
Today's random Wikipedia article was about a kind of seal that lives only in Lake Baikal in Siberia, which turns out to be a really, really big lake. Like: it's got about a fifth of the world's fresh water in it; that's how big it is!
Today's random Wikipedia article, which didn't make it into a full blog post or podcast episode like a few earlier ones did, was The Bugler of Algiers. This 1916 silent film, based on a novel called We Are The French, has no surviving copies and it's no longer…