I keep hearing from developer friends who are 'expected' by their employer to demonstrate that they're using AI, even for tasks at which the AI is demonstrably a suboptimal choice. So - as a joke - I came up with a git post-commit hook that makes it look like they're doing so, even when they're not.

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! My workplace is now name-and-shaming/praising engineering teams based on a ranking of what proportion of their PRs use generative […]

Hurrah! I just made my first successful submission to Curious Cones, a weblog collecting photographs of traffic cones spotted in unusual places.

Despite being relatively 'local' - only half a mile away, and fans of the show - it took until this morning before the family and I actually came to up visit Clarkson's Farm.

Apple's podcast player's new video standard locks-in video hosting to one of a pre-approved list of providers. What the fuck, Apple?

Unbelievably muddy today Took me so long to pick my way along the boggy path (pictured) that this'll probably be my only cache of the day. Still, one more for my LOL collection!

I'd been speculating for the last month or so what Nolen Royalty had been working on recently that had required such high-performance out of the SSH protocol, but now we know: it's massively multiplayer snake.

Samsung's 2026 phones will feature a dynamic privacy filter, blacking-out parts of the screen selectively from shoulder-surfers. I'm so curious about the capabilities of (and API for) this technology: what could I make it do?

I don't know what this machine was (a crane, perhaps), but it's now been almost-completely reclaimed by nature.

It's been only twelve days since our house flooded (it feels like a lot longer!), and progress is slow on getting damage assessments and medium-term accommodation planning sorted.

Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could "be available to multiple browser tabs" (that's not how browser JavaScript works). Just in case I wa...

Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back "home". So I came in and lay on the floor. At which point the dog decided I was a pillow.

I recently read Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was... underwhelmed.

This morning, I saw a real heron and a fake heron, and it made me think of a police officer I photographed myself while geocaching with a few years ago. Let's talk theoretical psychology!

The family and I are staying in Lyneham for a couple of weeks following the flooding of our house (on the other side of Witney). This morning the younger geokid, the geopup, and I came out for a walk to find this geocache as well as to explore Milton-under-Wychwood and tag some of the memorial benches for OpenBenches. We sat near the cache and the geokid immediately found it. Looks like we're the second signatories of the New Year: somebody beat us to it on 5 Feb! TFTC.

blackle mori delivers a welll-rounded, one might say voluptuous, take on the writing process, glistening with the fiery passion of its author. I desperately want to get off... how fun this post was.

It took me a while, but I finally got around to reading Hannah Fry's "Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine", and it was really good!

"How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?" I asked, warily. "Six to twelve months?" guessed the loss adjusters.

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! Happy Dead Dad Day to those who celebrate (which I guess, in reality, is just me and my sisters). […]

I stopped paying for VPN services a decade ago and I haven't looked back. When I 'need' a VPN service, I just spin one up on cheap VM services, and then I throw it away when I'm done. It's cheaper and more-customisable... and if the UK goes ahead with an idea to age-gate VPN services, it might soon become more-convenient too.

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! Note to self: when running a big ol’ 13 amp dehumidifier through an extension cable that’s longer than you […]

While cleaning up/assessing damage following our house flood, I finally found a lost digital stylus I've been looking for for a couple of months. Unfortunately it's been sat under the water line so I don't know yet if it survived. But it's FOUND, at least! (Look at me, finding ways to stay positive!)

It's only been three days since we had to evacuate our rapidly-flooding house. Here's some horror pics.

I want normal life back now, please. I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much longer. Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this […]

This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water. Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we’ll be living for the near future. But strangely, […]

My house is under water. Well, fuck.

James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I'm at that point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being "around my age". I'm neither young nor angsty enough to enjoy a re-watch of Dawson's Creek, but I especially loved him in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 so maybe I'll re-watch that.

What fragments you? What defragments you? How are you balancing both?

I feel like I'm reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting's fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.

Curious Cones is a catalogue of traffic cones in unusual places. How wonderful and weird our World Wide Web is, that such a thing can exist.