Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
-
"You saved my life!" (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)
A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger.
-
Hashcard #2
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!
-
The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers
Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly.
-
How I (Don't) Collect Blog Statistics
I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.
-
Recreating a 1990 Book Cover (in HTML + CSS)
This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do.
-
My piano came home from the hospital
Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it!
-
Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?
-
Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you...)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
-
Grïgnyr the Ecordian by Geoff Bottone
I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement.
-
Exploiting Thoughtcrime in LLMs
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too...
-
A postcard from a distant friend
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!
-
You don't have to blog like me
You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here.
-
How the European heatwave fucked me up
I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly.
-
My Polyamory is Boring
A conversation with another openly-polyamorous blogger led us to ask one another why we don't write about our relationship structure more-often. In my case, the answer is simple: my relationships are boring, and that's a good thing! But here's your chance to tell me I'm wrong...
-
I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.