Optional AUP

Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.

Screenshot of dropdown field labelled 'Will you will comply with AWS Service Terms and AUP - optional', currently set to 'Yes'. The label is saying that the field is optional, but the joke is that it sounds like complying with the terms of service is optional.

×

Sending a test email from WordPress/ClassicPress using WP-CLI

Note to self: ignore 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.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");'

Ground White Pepper

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 for “buying a new one where the last one’s still more than half-full”.

Close-up of a spice rack containing not one, not two, not three but four tubs of 'ground white pepper by Sainsburys'.

×

Wikipedia @ 25: Surface plasmon resonance

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 and off all day… I still don’t think I “get” it. I’ve even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but… nope. It’s still all gibberish to me!

Think I need the ELI5 version!

Twenty Inches

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!

Two preteen children sit in front of an enormous pepperoni pizza.

×

Self-clear area

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?

Printed sign reading 'this is a self-clear area; thank you' beneath a red illuminated icon of a hand onto whose wrist a bottle drips.

It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins.

(It is possible they my brain is struggling from a lack of sleep.)

×

Wikipedia @ 25: Milices Patriotiques

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 all I have to say about them!

Roman Bingo

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 hundred and one

An American-style bingo card with Roman numerals in place of the numbers and 'quadrum gratuitum' in place of the free space. Based on an original photo by Oeil De Vautour / Edwin Torres, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

×

Wikipedia @ 25: Jim Marshall

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 photographer that I learned-about on Wikipedia, it probably wasn’t the time to write about another!

But here’s a fact for you: Jim Marshall was the official photographer for the Beatles‘ final concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, and he was head photographer at Woodstock. There we go; that’s my Wikipedia article of the day!

Wikipedia @ 25: The Bugler of Algiers

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 even known what role some of the billed cast played in it!

Advertisement for The Bugler of Algiers, from an issue of The Moving Picture World from October 1916.

Among others, it starred Kingsley Benedict, who would later go on to feature in Fast and Furious! No… not that one… the 1927 silent comedy (which you can watch on YouTube… it’s… about three times as long as it needs to be, IMHO).

Rubberdogging

Rubberdogging, verb: attempting to invent a solution to a technical problem by explaining it out loud to a pet. From “rubberducking”, the practice of doing so to an inanimate object, and “dog walking”.

Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and a blue ponytail, looks thoughtful as he crouches on a footpath near a fawn-coloured French Bulldog.

×