🎶 It starts with sausage, A hot dog in a bun. One simple sausage, Put some mustard on one… Is it just me, or are (sinner) Sir Pentious‘s colours reminiscent of a hot dog?

I guess it’s sweet that the dog has decided that I’m not to leave my home office without her noticing. But when the naps right behind my wheelie chair I worry she’s going to get her paws run over!

With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk's career. Wouldn't it be nice if the world's first trillionaire also happened to be the world's last trillionaire?

An excellent article by Matthias Ott describes Google's promised AI-first search experience, which dispenses with search results entirely and just uses an LLM (plus sponsored content seamlessly woven in), keeping you entirely within the search giant's ecosystem and minimising how much they cite their sources. As you might imagine, I have some Opinions too.

Despite being parody, diamond geezer's new age-gating - which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn't actually block access to the site - somehow perfectly straddles the line between "invasive" and "ineffective"... in exactly the same way that I expect the UK's legal implementation will manage in a year or two.

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! This weekend, I (a) carried a 1970s Yamaha organ around the place, (b) took a beginner lesson in Argentine […]

Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!

A conversation with another openly-polyamorous blogger led us to ask one another why we don't write about our relationship structure more-often. In my case, the answer is simple: my relationships are boring, and that's a good thing! But here's your chance to tell me I'm wrong...

This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who's researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.

I'm seeing more and more interest in this period - even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it - as the countercultural "web renaissance" tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.

Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.

Niki wondered whether "midnight" is actually the middle of the night and discovered that it pretty much is. I explain that this is because he's in Berlin, which sits very close (only about 6 minutes out) from the solar UTC+1

Daniel loves blogs and loves blogging, but wishes that more of the people in his 'real life' blogged too. I get it, Daniel!

And it's important to remember that. Chris Ferdinandi has some direct words, and I expand upon them.

Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.

109 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody’s coming around to […]

DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search.

"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm."

It's been 107 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving.

Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy. Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice. But it didn’t. CI complained […]

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! The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act tonight. I […]

Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.

Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts.

Note to self: ignore all the search results that say to install a plugin. The absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation, assuming you're using WP-CLI, is just to run something like: wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");'

Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.

Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and flag emoji.

There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood. But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s […]

I think I'm probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It's been a surprising amount of work.

But don't think I've stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day... I still don't think I "get" it. I've even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but... nope. It's still all gibberish to me!

Think I need the ELI5 version!

Nicholas A. Ferrell explains how to tell WordPress 7.0 to keep its AI features disabled, and I share my alternative approach: use a fork - ClassicPress - that doesn't include the AI features in the first place, and add them using a plugin if that's really what you want.

JTA wrote a LinkedIn post about Three Rings, its remote-first culture, doing things in person, and crisis management, and it's brilliant.

No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.

As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history.