Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️

It's been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is - going many others, mostly older and larger than him! - finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞

Checked up on this cache, this morning, as I was in the neighbourhood. It's looking healthy, with dry contents including a sharpened pencil for logging plus a couple of tradables that have turned up.

The other week, a coding LLM helped me... without me ever submitting a single prompt to it. I just typed into it all the component parts of my problem, and in doing so the solution revealed itself to me. It's rubberducking... silent AI edition!

Imagine my surprise when the geohound and I are out for a walk from Appleton to find the Rainbow Bridge cache, to receive a notification of a new cache series at Northmoor. All we need to do is extend our walk a short way, I figure, and we can claim an FTF! But it was not to be!

Our taeget cache got the geopup and I: I've coated under this bridge, I think, but never found an excuse to go over it into today. The doggo is running out of steam and the afternoon looks likely to be too hot for her, but we'll make a quick run at one of the new Nortmoor Loop series before we turn back. Might even score a FTF!

What a beautiful spot for a geocache, which the geopup and I quickly found in the second host we checked. Then, we enjoyed a delightful few minutes of peace, sitting on the riverbank, before continuing our morning's adventure.

The geohound wouldn't let me search as long as I'd have liked, and my GPS must've been off because I couldn't really find anything that matched the hint description. One for another day, perhaps.

The geopup tested the waters while I retrieved the cache. What a wonderful spring on a delightful footpath! TFTC, and FP for the wonderful location and proper-sized cache container.

QEF for the geohound and I on a walk around Appleton this morning. Excellent container with a fantastic hint, FP awarded. TFTC!

Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.

The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House. Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!

In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year?

The latest episode of webcomic Mini Fantasy Theater - The Dungeon of Dark Patterns - is just excellent.

Hailey Somerville's managed to get something akin to WSL working on Windows 95. Who'd have even thought such a thing was possible?

A user of my Improved BBC News Feeds reached out to suggest that I upgrade the resolution of the thumbnail images. Turns out this was a quick win: my noodles hadn't even cooled before I finished.

My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?

Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own.

There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻

What breaks when one of your developers leaves? On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers. It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit. Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!

This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container!

A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.

Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along.

I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. We found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: but Icouldn't place exactly why I'd been there before. Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to pluck the relevant records right out of my own database. Personal location tracking continues to be an awesome aides mémoire. It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.

I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!

Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.

Last night I wrote a stupid userscript to exploit a stupid XSS vulnerability to add a stupid feature to a Web-based chat room I'm in. Everybody else's name is coloured in accordance with the theme they're using. But mine... can be a rainbow, or an image, or something else entirely.

As if I hadn’t suffered enough “flood damage” this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup – hour the first time in months! – in our rental… by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱

Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!

Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent.