Tracy Durnell keeps her online- and offline- friends separate, and describes some solid reasons to do so. I appreciate her thoughts, even where I don't want to apply her conclusions to my own life.

When somebody started repeatedly leaving bottles of urine on top of a utility cabinet in his neighbourhood, filmmaker Derek Milton decided to investigate. I watched the documentary he made while doing so and... I still have no idea what to think about it.

A throwaway comment in a WhatsApp group lead me to a deep dive into geodata encoding and drawing a big old line all the way across England (and a little way across Wales!). It's nerdsnipe time!

Giles Turnbull's written a wonderful piece, imagining a conversation with his 19-year-old self. I wonder what I'd say to myself at 19 if I bumped into him?

Sure, you could leave a comment or drop me an email or say hi on Mastodon... but wouldn't it be cooler if you could send a physical postcard in response to a blog post? Let's find out together.

13 years ago I reviewed The Signal and the Noise by Pagan Wanderer Lu. Despite being knocked down at least one peg, it still stands among my top ten concept albums ever, and it's now available for free so you should go and listen to it.

A 'ten questions about yourself' quiz is circulating the blogosphere, and I figured I'd join in (and wear four different hats, in the process).

The younger child and I nipped across for a photo while we waited for our tram to come.

Very easy find for the kids and I after a delightful visit to the Tram Museum. We went to the coordinates and instantly saw the cache! SL, TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.

QEF while my family examined the sculpture. What a great spot for a cache, and so well-maintained. FP awarded. TFTC!

A quick photo before the family and I took a ride on the wheel!

Found after an embarrassingly long hunt! After reading the hint I quickly spotted the correct hiding spot, but said to myself "no, it surely can't be there" and moved on. Only on my third time walking past it did I think to actually try it, and sure enough, there it was! SL, TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Third of three finds on this, my final morning here before my flight to Helsinki. Taking a brisk walk/slow jog up to Hotel Levi Panorama, but first, a QEF. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

It's the final morning of my short visit to Sirkka. Having 90 minutes until I need to set off for the airport, I decided to come out for a quick geocaching expedition first. This was the first cache on my list, and I was so glad to choose it. A truly beautiful and well-maintained cache in a wonderful spot. FP awarded. TFTC!

The second of three caches hunted on this, the final morning of my brief stay in Lapland. Found on the second host I tried. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC!

Second “surprising Finnish confectionary” is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means “green balls”, which doesn’t tell me much. Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visited) I had to try them, but I couldn’t place the flavour. […]

Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn’t have been surprised (given the country’s love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured. And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was. (Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.)

QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Layitout! Terra is a CSS-only implementation of a customisable Transport Tycoon-like terrain generator, and it's left me impressed and confused!

Good morning Lapland!

Jo of Dead.Garden wrote a poem, seemingly inspired by a particular variety of spam email, that I really enjoyed.

The ever-excellent Blackle Mori posted this about 18 months ago but I don't think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you've never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it's an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.

The BBC and EBU did some research and discovered that AI assistants tasked with bringing you news get it right only slightly more-often than they get it wrong, and they get it catastrophically wrong about one time in five. This should be a surprise to nobody.

Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op!

I reimplemented Al Sweigart‘s “Pipe Swap” scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP Refresh header: https://textplain.blog/scroll-art-viewer/pipe-swap This was a stupid idea, but it was about the level of code sophistication that my illness-brainfog can handle today.

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! I hate being ill. Not (just) for the obvious and immediate reasons: (this time around: the nausea, the musculoskeletal […]

Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden. Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you? Guy 2: Dunno. But we can't dig round it soo... 😬

As the latest in a series of stupid things I've done on or for the Web, I've made a website that dynamically generates 'best viewed at' buttons... for exactly the Web visitor's current screen resolution...

Andrew Stephens reminds us to HtDTY (Host the Damn Thing Yourself) to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks and improve privacy. But I think the argument goes further than this.

The Scroll Art Museum demonstrates a surprisingly cool way of generating animation using ASCII art in a scroll buffer and... look, it's just cool, okay? And it inspired me to dust off a copy of QBASIC for a moment, too...