An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze. (Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)

I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!

Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from early in my career...

Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly.

I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.

A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden’s starting to get a little wild, this summer: we’ve been periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided that this could be the year that […]

John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already.

Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach profitability.

This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do.

James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this.

Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it!

As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?

I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.

I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement.

Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful.

In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me!

New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too...

I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well.

Trouble brewing at the village carnival’s decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance.

I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!

You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here.

unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this...

Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said “Hello, gorgeous!” “Ooh, thank you!” I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose.

Evan's done with Twitter and Reddit. But where should he go next? I make some suggestions.

Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those clocks and they smell like tulips to me... 🌷

Always reassuring when you fill in a company’s contact form and the next page is placeholder text…

I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly.

Some mornings… you just gotta make a whole damn litre of coffee. (for iced coffee purposes, of course; and definitely not just for me!)

Demmy would like to know why I haven’t turned off the UK’s heatwave yet. 🥵

Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that’ll keep me sane, working in the UK’s current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!).