After solving the riddle yesterday, my partner Ruth and I came up from the seafront to find this cache today. What a delightful spot to hide the cache, and what a wonderful puzzle (and spot of local literary history) with which to bring us here.

Bloganuary died since last time I took part in it (and I can speculate about why), but that didn't stop me writing something for every day in January 2026. Man, I've been blogging a lot lately in general... what's that about, eh?

My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today - they're all closed - but enjoyed finding both the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive.

My partner Ruth and I are spending a long weekend in Puerto de la Cruz. We loved coming up to see this beautiful, bleak, stark volcanic landscape.

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home. I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior […]

RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap. (I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.) Time to […]

Thirty to thirty-five years ago, as a young and curious hacker, I broke out of the restrictions on my secondary school's computer lab and briefly achieved rockstar popularity amongst peers who, through my tools, could now play videogames instead of doing their coursework. But their interest in the results of my exploits were incompatible with my interest in the sheet joy of discovery... and, inevitably, this meant trouble.

Our kid doesn’t like bagel holes. She’ll eat the rest of the bagel, but not the hole. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of for finding things like this most mornings.

I like it when the Internet says "yes, and".
I like it when the Internet says "yes, but".
I even like it when the Internet says "no, because".

I'm not so keen when the Internet says "well, actually",
(Probably because it reminds me of what
a shit I was in some not-yet-forgotten time.)

But I don't like when the Internet rallies a brigade
To pick apart a character flaw I have, but hate,
Or to attack something I'm not, and expect me to defend.

So perhaps next time, start with "yes, and", "yes, but",
Or even "no, because"... or just say nothing, and
Remember what it means to connect with a human.

Highlight of my workday was debugging an issue that turned out to be nothing like what the reporter had diagnosed. The report suggested that our system was having problems parsing URLs with colons in the pathname, suggesting perhaps an encoding issue. It wasn’t until I took a deep dive into the logs that I realised […]

This morning it took me three attempts to put on a t-shirt the right way around. I don’t think I slept too well.

A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that their own attempts to spy on their customers might not be 100% reliable...

This article is good and touches on many sites, people, and topics that I care about... but it's painfully ironic that the author has written a post praising the independent Web... using Substack as their platform.

Scott Wiener - who is even more pizza-obsessed than me - noticed the 'winking chef' image that's common on pizza boxes. Then he traced its origin, and wrote a blog post to share the story of the artwork. Delightful.

As previously indicated, I’m not anticipating cosplaying anybody. But I think I could do Greg Universe. Not young Greg Universe, the Star Child of ‘Story for Steven’… which seems to be the only variety anybody’s ever cosplayed as before if an image search is to be believed. No, I mean: overweight old balding Greg Universe. […]

Nolen Royalty wrote an interesting piece about diagnosing a quirky SSH-related issue, and I found it both interesting and inspiring.

Still at MegaConLive. I’ve not done this kind of con before (and still wouldn’t, were it not for my tweenager and her various obsessions). Not my jam, and that’s fine. But if there’s one thing for which I can sing it’s praises: everybody we’ve met is super friendly and nice. Sure, you can loudly telegraph […]

I may have been dragged to MegaConLive London by my multi-fandom loving 12-year-old, but I at least managed to find somebody worth getting a selfie with.

My 12-year-old's persuaded me to take her to MegaConLive London this weekend.

As somebody who doesn't pay much attention to the pop culture circles represented by such an event (and hasn't for 15+ years, or whenever it was that Asdfbook came out?)... have you got any advice for me, Internet?

Kev Quirk ran a one-question survey recently about how people discover and read his blog posts, and I think it's a pretty inspiring idea. Sure, consent-based surveying introduces biases... but what analytic technique doesn't, really?

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! Sometimes I feel like I’m resting on my laurels. The most-important thing that I’ve given to the world is […]

I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS.

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 feel like I’ve spent the last week or so half-assing everything. Both at work and at home I’ve […]

Inspired by a conversation with Elle, I expanded my FreshRSS-to-blogroll generator to support injecting 88×31 buttons (where I have them) for folks I follow.
There's still a way to go, but my blogroll's looking a little prettier as a result.

The other night, I encountered an optical illusion by which I could see a particular partially-obstructed light only when it was in my peripheral vision. This put me in mind of the experience of being only peripherally able to see the internalised quirks of your employer that were once obvious to you, and this lead me to reflect a little on my first six months at Firstup.

Michail Rybakov's gradient.horse might be the second most-amusing use of a .horse domain name I've yet seen. Draw a horse and let it run wild and free with its friends in the gradient plains of your browser window!

On the morning of the Three RIngs Christmas party, I took an early walk to a nearby geocache, just outside the area where the roads are closed for the Warwick leg of HS2's construction.

I think my “six seven”-obsessed younger child was in the kitchen with a biro earlier. How do I know, you ask?

Well my day, week, and year (which has been off to a slightly ropey start) got a whole heap better today when I received a postcard from August & Sappho, sent from 39c3 on a CCC postcard... with a CCC stamp!
Super cool, and exactly the mood boost I needed today.

About 1 in 12 rams (and a similar proportion of ewes) show a strong preference for other sheep of their same sex. To save them from being destroyed by breeders, this German farm is rescuing them and adding them to their queer flock.