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...

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.