Thanks to severe train delays, I have a morning to spend in Paris. Last night I booked into a charming hotel in Saint-Paul, and just met some of its extraordinarily friendly staff at breakfast. Going by previous experiences, I didn’t think any of this was possible! Paris might be growing on me.

Favourite tree doing favourite tree things.

♫ Lucky by Radiohead

Played this in the car driving around Kent with Jon at the weekend, and now pleasantly stuck in my head.

Caught up with the Apple Event. Took me 30 minutes to realise I was watching last year’s event.

Probably the last post-work rays of sunlight for 2025.

With the NHS.UK Eleventy Plugin you can focus on writing content instead of writing code.

Stop the slop.

I found a Benchmark. Harder to find than I thought it would be.

Tonight I watched Nye at the National Theatre, a play about the life (and death) of NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan. Beautiful and haunting, the very last scene completely broke me. Forget ten year plans; Nye had a vision, and he absolutely delivered on it.

Many years ago I read about Book Mountain, a curious pyramid-shaped library in Spijkenisse, the Netherlands. Today I finally stepped inside.

Good services are verbs.
Bad services are nouns.
AI services are whimsical, opaque or vAPId.

As teams at GDS prepare to launch a refreshed brand for GOV.UK on 25 June, so the X-GOVUK community has been updating its projects in preparation for this go-live date.

Poster I created to mark Good Machine’s first firebreak week.

I’m not convinced that the designer of a $10,000 gold watch (now obsolete), who gets driven around in the back of a Bentley, and who spends his spare time in coffee shops ‘inventing the future’ with the likes of Sam Altman, is capable of designing products for the rest of us.

Happy M&S cyber incident update day for those who celebrate.

Goodbye Dribbble.

The mission patch for the HPV private beta features Mavis the polar bear watching the sun rise over the horizon, representing the launch of our new service into private beta.

The mission patch for the release supporting ‘doubles’ (co-administered MenACWY and Td/IPV vaccinations) features Mavis the polar bear meeting her double.

Hey Guy’s

Diffused (sunrise).

If everything is working correctly, this is the first post from my website syndicated to Bluesky via Indiekit. 🤞

I put a little care into something and sent it out into the world.

Just watched B. J. Novak’s directorial debut, Vengeance (2022) and oh boy, it’s a hoot. A hearty recommendation from me.

Please, make it stop.

If you’re wondering why you can’t find any pineapples in Brighton, thank Fatto a Mano, where for a limited time you can exchange a pineapple for their Bella Disgrazia pizza. Fortunately they also accept tinned chunks!

Blogging about blogging.

Micro Social is to Micro.blog what Tweetie was to Twitter. Sometimes it takes a passionate and attentive third-party developer to design and build the best app for an open platform. Astounding work @gregmorris@micro.blog!

That loud groaning noise you can hear is the sound of a 1000 employees at Williams Racing being told they’ve now got to use Jira.

Watched the penultimate performance of Elektra in Brighton this afternoon, before it transfers to the West End. Dense dialogue compensates for the short running time and an abrupt ending, yet the play is undermined by needless and nonsensical gimmicks (effect pedals, a random blimp, ink guns). Larson gave a forceful performance though, and was an absolute pro dealing with a mid-performance interruption (a cup fell from an upper circle).

Before the new year gets into full swing, time to recap the year gone by.