vole.wtf’s 1% guild wasn’t the easiest club to gain membership of, but somehow keeping my phone alive for long enough to snap this screenshot was even harder.

Hey, let’s set up an account with Hive. After the security scares they faced in the mid-2010s, I’m sure they’ll be competent at making a password form, right? Your password must be at least 8 characters; okay. Just 8 characters would be a little short in this day and age, I reckon, but what do I […]

Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text. It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three Rings, managed to connect […]

Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed.

Praise for a blog post by Adam Stoddard, defending the handcrafting of software even where it serves no direct purpose other than the satisfaction of its creator.

I’d never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier. They’re both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while […]

David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why...

Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don’t know.

Whenever I’m writing a rhyme, I can’t do the third and fourth line. Dah-de-da-dah-duh, Dah-de-de-dah-duh. But somehow it still works out fine.

Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a few minutes thought... because it turns out computers aren't always the right answer!

I’m looking at listing for a ¼” to ⅝” screw adapter, for which the seller warns that I should “please allow 1-3cm error”. A 3cm error would mean that a ⅝” screw could result in a screw thread anywhere between 1⅘” and… minus half an inch, I guess? (I don’t even know how to make […]

A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia's mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the "unsubscribe all" one isn't. Click the words "unsubscribe all" and... nothing happens. But it gets better: try keyboard-navigating through the form, and it's hard not to unsubscribe from everything, even if you didn't want to! As soon as the "unsubscribe all" checkbox gets focus, you get instantly unsubscribed: no interaction necessary.

Cory Doctorow paints a bleak picture of the future world economy in the aftermath of the bursting of the AI bubble. I agree that we're in a bubble, but I'm slightly more-optimistic that we can survive it without a total economic catastrophe.

We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo. Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year!

Somehow, even when she’s alert and focussed, our dog’s bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey. It’s the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we’re almost done for another year!

It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house. What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶

Sometimes people connect my unusual name to popular culture. They say things like “Oh, Q like James Bond?” or “Oh, Q like Star Trek?”. I think their choice of franchise tells me more about them than they learn from my answer, which is usually “No, Q like the set of rational numbers.”

Sometimes you’re Just Tired. It’s been a long week. Happy Twenty-Seventh of Bleptember.

Just a mini-blep this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember, from a certain attention-seeking doggo who insisted on a cuddle from me while I sat in a Zoom meeting.

Checked on on this cache as part of a routine maintenance schedule. All is well, nothing needed here!

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been away for a couple of days and she’s missed me… but this bleppy dog wanted lots of cuddles and reassurance as we prepared for the school run, this Twenty-Fifth of Bleptember.

I’ve spent most of the Twenty-Fourth of Bleptember travelling, but my bleppy doggo got to go out and play with her best dogfriend. Photo courtesy of Lisa from Muddy Paws.

“What’chu lookin’ at?” I’m away from home this Twenty-Third of Bleptember, but managed to snap this epic blep before I left.

Attempt #2 to get to Belfast starts… at 3:30am in a Premier Inn in Gatwick. 🥱 Today, perhaps, I’ll catch a plane! 🤞

After standing completely stationary on the M25 for over an hour and a half and with no end in sight, I’m getting increasingly confident that I’m not going to catch my flight from Gatwick whose gate closes… in half an hour. 😢 Well, fuck.

Just blepping around the garden this Twenty-Second of Bleptember.

Developers just love to take what the Web gives them for free, throw it away, and replace it with something worse. Today's example, from Open Collective, is a dropdown box: standard functionality provided by the element. Except they've replaced it with a JS component that, at some screen resolutions, "goes off the top" of the page... while simultaneously disabling the scrollbars so that you can't reach it.

On the Twenty-First of Bleptember this young doggo was very excited to see a field of goats. Goats! I like to interpret her expression as saying “OMG have you seen the thing that’s living in this field!?” An inquisitive and excited expression let down only slightly by the inevitable blep and by a tentacle of […]

It’s the Twentieth of Bleptember, and I still struggle to conceive of how it’s comfortable to lie down with not only your head but also 50% of your tongue lying flat on your soft, furry pillow. (This troublesome young lady stole and tried to eat a dry-wipe whiteboard pen yesterday. She’s fine, but it was […]

Even play-fighting isn’t an excuse for our bleppy dog to put her tongue away. Happy Nineteenth of Bleptember! Photo courtesy Lisa from Muddy Paws.