A video version of my recent joke about why I'm so tired, which was also made available in article and podcast formats.

As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I'm building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She's called Bee, and - thanks to the absolute insanity that is The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake - she's one of the most bonkers PC cases I've ever worked in.

Blades in the Dark (and other Forged In The Dark-based games) use a highest-value-from-D6-dice-pool mechanic to resolve actions. I was looking for a visualisation of the resulting probabilities, but couldn't find one... so I made my own.

Terence Eden's maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I'm aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.

Tintern Abbey’s looking especially beautiful in the fresh snow, this morning.

Our dog has decided that the perfect place to lie down at our holiday accommodation is… on a staircase whose carpet is the same colour as her! I’m grateful for her very-visible blep… or I’d have tripped over this camouflaged pupper several times already!

I was in these woods anyway, seeking GC10N80 and figured I'd come hunt for this cache too. A quick find; my geosense spotted a candidate hiding place right from the main path, and I turned out to be right.

This puzzle cache, undiscovered for 20 months, made for one of the most satisfying geocaching expeditions I've ever done.

Hiked over from Catbrook on the way to a cache up Pen Y Fan and stopped by these beautiful waterfalls on the way. So glad I did!

Kai Koehler reminds us that D&D 5e is far from the only TTRPG, with a tight dissection of its specific characteristics so that they can be compared to other, perhaps more roleplay-heavy, games and systems. They include some suggested ideas for other games, too, a couple of which I'm strongly-inclined to try out!

The geopup and I, on holiday from West Oxfordshire and staying nearby, came out for a morning walk in the ice and snow today. Our little Frenchie's tiny legs made the work of climbing the stiles on this path a little challenging, but with persistence we were treated to a wonderful view of the sun broaching the horizon over the valley at the North end of School Wood. Soon the cairn was in sight, and what a brilliant spot for a cache! Signed log, and dropped a travel bug that's come all the way from Texas to continue its journey. FP awarded for bringing us out this way.

The geopup and I absolutely chose the right time to come up here on this wintery morning. The sun's ascent over the valley whenever we escape the cover of the woods is absolutely spectacular. Found without difficulty SL, TFTC!

The geohound and I walked over from Catbrook this morning "the long way" - over the hill and woods, finding a couple of caches along the way - to this cache. From both the cache type and my GPSr's map data I fully expected to find a post box here alongside the (decrepit) red phone box, but it's nowhere to be seen! Has it perhaps been removed? In any case, the hint reassured me that I was in the right place and my geosense told me where to look. A disappointingly tiny cache container (where a larger one could have probably been placed) was soon found, caked in mud, and replaced as-found. TFTC.

I'd promised the kids I'd dig up my (ten-year-old!) original HTC Vive VR gear and hook it up in the living room over Christmas. Roomscale VR, even running on decade-old kit, still rocks and is as immersive as ever!

Back at the Rollright Stones fire New Year's Day, per family tradition. This year the younger child counted 74, the elder 59. The curse that prevents you counting the same number twice continues!

I think the dog’s back paws were cold this evening. The giveaway was when she tucked them into a convenient nearby trouser pocket.

I don't get much time for videogames, so when I find the opportunity to complete not one but two games within a single month, you know my recommendation of them holds some weight! Let me tell you about 'Egg', and 'Dispatch'.

Went to a West End theatre wearing my “Slamilton” t-shirt. In this corridor, during the act break, a stranger spotted it and did a double-take. “Is that…? wait… that’s not Hamilton!”, they said. I seized my chance. “It’s Slamilton,” I replied. “You know: ‘Who slams, who jams, who tells their story.'” And then, after a […]

Boxing Day breakfast (of champions (of leftovers)).

Unusually, we had no guests this Christmas Day. This meant that my usual level of overcatering went even further than normal. A side effect of this is that a certain little doggo was delighted and surprised by her Boxing Day breakfast of roast goose!

I asked the younger child to “help” me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner. “Well,” he began, “I’m going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo…”

I usually agree with Chris Ferdinandi, but he and I aren't entirely in accord about the Shadow DOM. He thinks it's useless. But I think it's MOSTLY useless.

Came out for a walk with my Ruth and the kids. While Ruth sat on a rock and the kids went with their uncle up to explore a small cave above, I broke from the path to find this cache. QEF in the second host I looked at.

A quick and damp scramble from the footpath above brought my right to the cache. SL, TFTC. Container seal has perished and logbook pretty wet; signable, but only barely.

There's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing my unusual name, immediately asks whether that's what's on my birth certificate (with an underlying implication that it's not my 'real' name, whatever that means, if it isn't). Well: as of this week, thanks to a quirk in Scottish law, the name I've used every day for almost two decades DOES appear my birth certificate. Fuck the haters.

CSS is all grown-up, and the combination of nested selectors, variables, :not, and :has unlocks a wealth of potential for interactivity and customisation without resorting to (the slower and brittler approach of) JavaScript. Let me show you two examples from my recent editor history.

Waiting for the ideal time to finally do that thing you've been procrastinating on? Greg's clever new micro-site will help you decide the perfect time to do it (and no, it doesn't necessarily just say "now!").

I’m not sure which of our children was last in this bath, but the configuration in which they’ve left their toys makes me feel as though I’m the subject of some kind of waterfowl-related shunning. Perhaps they finally got wind or my heretical opinions on the God of Ducks (may he throw us bread) and […]

A few pockets of the morning’s freezing fog still cling to the hedgerows as the dog and I set out on a chilly West Oxfordshire morning walk.

Obviously I wasn’t planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did… they might struggle with my visa application when I put every “email address I’ve used for the last 10 years” on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains. I’ve probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I’ve only […]