Blog
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Finished work. Figured I'd chill in the hammock for a bit as it's so nice out.
The dog decided she wanted to lie in it too.
So now I am a pillow for a dog.
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Dan, a middle-aged white man with long hair and a goatee beard, lies on a striped hammock in a verdant garden. He's wearing a t-shirt which says "love" over a ribbon in pride colours, and on his chest lies a contented-looking champagne-coloured French Bulldog.
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Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.
Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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In the event of a fire on my bus, I'm concerned that the head of the man sitting in front of me is flammable.
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On a bus, back abs sides of a man's head. His hat has a label which reads "keep away from fire", but it's hanging out in such a way that it looks like it might be his head that's labelled.
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In my first few weeks at my new employer, my code contributions have added 218 lines of code, deleted 2,663. Only one of my PRs has resulted in a net increase in the size of their codebases (by two lines).
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GitHub change summary showing +218 lines added, -2,663 lines removed.
I need to pick up the pace if I'm going to reach the ultimate goal of deleting ALL of the code within my lifetime. (That's the ultimate aim, right?)
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You MUST listen to RFC 2119
Have you ever wanted to hear a (sarcastic, passive aggressive) dramatic reading of RFC 2119? Eric Bailey - and the actor he found - have got you covered!
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A Castle Built From Random Rooms
A Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is wonderful!
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Quesapizza-pizza
A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings. A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza... constructed using a quesapizza as its base! Watch me make one in a 90-second timelapse.
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Heterophonic Homonyms
On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?
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Thanks to the community's invention of a "Region unlocked" achievement, I've been able to instantly (and retroactively!) tick another one off my geohashing list, for my expedition on Trinidad early this year!
(Possibly I've achieved it other times, too: I haven't yet determined whether anybody successfully hashed in County Mayo or County Galway before I did last year, on account of both counties spanning multiple graticules and so requiring more research!)
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Do you know the story of how Tom Lehrer hid an Easter Egg in an academic paper he wrote at the NSA, and his joke wasn't discovered for almost six decades?
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Clapham South Deep Shelter
This weekend I once again found myself underground beneath London; this time exploring the Camden South Deep Shelter with the help of the Hidden London folks. And it was pretty damn cool.
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Went to Wagamama. Accidentally made the "Order of the Beast".
(Plus a similar side, for those who read binary.)
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Wagamama restaturant placemat on which the waitstaff has written my order item numbers: 110, and 666.
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Seventy years ago, residents of this part of London would take shelter from V1 and V2 bombs in a tunnel beneath my feet. And today, I'm going down there to take a look!
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Dan, a white man wearing a Goo Goo Dolls t-shirt, stands in front of a sign describing the history of The Drum in South Clapham.
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ArtificialCast
ArtificialCast is a lightweight, type-safe casting and transformation utility powered by large language models. It allows seamless conversion between strongly typed objects using only type metadata, JSON schema inference, and prompt-driven reasoning.
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I got kicked off LinkedIn this week. Apparently there was "suspicious behaviour" on my account. To get back in, I needed to go through Persona's digital ID check (this, despite the fact that I've got a Persona-powered verification on my LinkedIn, less than six months old).
After looping around many times identifying which way up a picture of a dog was and repeatedly photographing myself, my passport, and my driving license, I eventually got back in. Personally, I suspect they just rolled out some Online Safety Act functionality and it immediately tripped over my unusual name.
But let this be a reminder to anybody who (unlike me) depends upon their account in a social network: it can be taken away in a moment and be laborious (or impossible) to get back. If you care about your online presence, you should own your own domain name; simple as that!