Absolutely essential reading and viewing on how to produce captions with valuable real world examples of how to completely mess it up (and a lot of social posted videos do the bad mess version). As someone who's hard of hearing and uses captions on all viewing media that I can, I … | Continue reading
A little while ago (read: 14 years ago) I wished for a parent selector, and we finally have :has 🎉. Now, how about the ever useful jQuery selector :contains but reusing the text fragment syntax? | Continue reading
More of a TIL but my blog is rather bare lately, so this will do. I was browsing the excellent MDN to check something and came across both Map.groupBy and Object.groupBy. A handy static method for keying an array by some property (I'll show working example in a moment). Pretty us … | Continue reading
I've been eyeballing Cricut machines for a few years now, but it was mostly for stickers for my own use and the cost just couldn't be justified. However, last Sunday I found a faulty Cricut on eBay, put an offer out and it arrived on Wednesday for a total of £35 (including postag … | Continue reading
For me: a must read. Reading Moran's book I could quickly see that I was the exact target audience for the content: white, cis, straight, leftie male. I try my best to be a feminist but I know that sometimes I end up being an apologist for my own gender. Moran doesn't slam men in … | Continue reading
Remember the days that Apple used to pitch itself as David in the David and Goliath stories? Well, the tables have turned. Apple, in a short number of days, are going to intentionally kill of PWA support. This affects developers, businesses and users. When any documentation event … | Continue reading
I came across a reasonably interesting question on Reddit today, ask "If you don't use TypeScript, tell me why (5 year follow up)". Frustratingly it was mostly replies as to why the dev was using TypeScript, or replies to those who didn't saying that they're probably using TypeSc … | Continue reading
I mean… the writing was on the wall, wasn't it? Didn't we, the tech nation desperate to actualise the ten-ecks developer, make our own bed? I know it's the cynic in me that doesn't trust copilot assisted work to produce long term "good code" (aka: code of a reliable quality that … | Continue reading
Brilliantly written, almost car-crash like reading. The story is very much set in the publishing world, which isn't something I know very well or is directly relatable, but I was still brilliantly drawn in by Kuang's characters. It took me a while to fully realise that the protag … | Continue reading
I've removed shows from Spotify in the past, but the change was to find the specific request and modify what was being sent. Eventually it would, and did fail. So I've gone one step higher and now I'm intercepting every request Spotify makes and I can modify the content as I wish … | Continue reading
A heartwarming story where not everything needs to be okay. I really enjoyed this book. It's more of a 4.5 for me, as I'm not sure I'd need to read it again, but it left me with some warm and fuzzies inside, and that's nice to have every once in a while. I cared about each of the … | Continue reading
As we (try) to train Coco, one of the big tasks is being able to leave the dog alone for a decent amount of time (made trickier by the fact that both Julie and I work from home so are usually always around). We also learnt from our Battersea training that if the dog has a negativ … | Continue reading
Although I've been tinkering with bits, this was another home fix exploit. The lights didn't work at all (outdoor LEDs). At first I thought it was corrosion on the battery contacts (which is a good first port of call), but when I injected bench supply power I could see it was dra … | Continue reading
Some laughs but ultimately turned into a journal. The first series of chapters were really fun and throughout the book there's genuine chuckles from the writing, but the actual content is what left me feeling the book could have either been 150 or so pages, or at least dig a litt … | Continue reading
That's another year done and time for another "my years" post, where I attempt to log what I got up to so that in 2033 I can look back and chuckle from my full body haptic AR web browsing kit I bought from Amaoogle for £3,999.99. So, please sit back, engage your eyeballs whilst I … | Continue reading
Great addition to the story of a struggling Murderbot. I continue to love Martha Wells' Murderbot diaries. As the years (and diaries) have gone on, SecUnit/Murderbot (and I'm sure they gave themselves a name in one of the books...) struggles to navigate their own emotions, mostly … | Continue reading
I present to you, a gift, a gift of a service that will "unrot" your links, cleverly named… unrot.link. The service promises to prevent and undo link rot on long lived web sites, via a service based implementation of my No More 404 method, free for all. | Continue reading
I only use Goodreads because it's directly integrated into my Kindle (which I love) so I can easily track when I start and finish a book. However, Goodreads itself is terrible for data, either losing the data, corrupting it or just not having it. So I've fixed that. | Continue reading
Surprisingly modern for a book written nearly 100 years ago. A solid murder mystery. Apparently one of Christie's most (or more?) controversial books which I can believe given it was written in 1926. There's talk of drugs and cocaine and even a dictaphone (which I didn't even kno … | Continue reading
The event ran last Friday and (thankfully) as usual, going by all the people I spoke to, it was a huge success. In previous years I've been asked "what's the theme this year", and as far as I can remember, I've never had a theme. Though this year (as I've seen in others) a theme … | Continue reading
I found this really hard to determine in the 11ty documentation, so I've added it here for future reference. If you want a default layout for all pages there's a few ways you can do this (which is why I found it hard to determine from the docs), but since I almost always have an … | Continue reading
This is probably a hacky way to go about things, but if I don't write it down, I know I'll have forgotten it by the time maintenance comes around in 2033… TL;DR: use ufw but ensure you can access ssh. | Continue reading
Felt like a long read and felt a little like it was trying to be Red Dwarf a few times, but eventually settled into an interesting and fun story. I do admit I got lost with the length of time reading the book, but suspect it was the speed I was reading (only a handful of pages ea … | Continue reading
My friend's son had a kid's kindle that wasn't charging any more. They were going to buy a replacement, but then asked me whether I thought it was fixable. Definitely! I'd not fixed a Kindle before, but my guess was the USB port was probably at fault. Inspecting it under the micr … | Continue reading
Specifically the [space] [slash] combo before the closing bracket: /. I've had history with these particular two characters, but until recently that history of going back and forth was entirely based on aesthetic. Then React came along (or rather I climbed aboard) and I found mys … | Continue reading
A wonderful does the job bit of software that supports Apple hardware going back over a decade. It intercepts all keyboard input allow you to safely clean your keyboard. Simple. Excellent. Source: jan.prima.de | Continue reading
This is Coco. She came to live with us at 9 weeks old last Saturday. She's a bundle of love and has us all already on our toes! | Continue reading
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links: When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, … | Continue reading
Accessible colour combinations - and upon hitting reload, there's actually some really stylish (to me) combinations whilst being either AA or AAA compliant. Nice. Source: randoma11y.com | Continue reading
All of Brian's approach to dependencies and concerns about long-term support, we're talking 10 years here, are absolutely excellent spot on and he goes on to talk about enhance.dev which is really a nation of first approach to building software. Source: www.infoq.com | Continue reading
On the Console Repair Discord I'd offered to fix a Pokémon Sapphire cart that was initially not working, but then went to a repair shop and came back with a leg on one of the chips missing. The work would require grinding down the silicone of the chip to expose the internals of t … | Continue reading
Although ffconf has been running since 2009, sponsorship is always a process that you have to start from scratch. The event is organised by just Julie and myself, specifically we don't have a dedicated sales person (perhaps we should?). This means keeping in touch with our sponso … | Continue reading
Useful tool to check the meta tags used and preview how they'll appear in various social media sites, particular as Twitter declines, the need for Twitter specific meta tags becomes less and I realise I should support the opengraph tags (og:*) more carefully. Source: www.opengrap … | Continue reading
About a year ago I came across the Kettle Companion which is a lovely idea: you share a device with a loved one, and when they boil their kettle, you get a little notification on a device (a toy kettle) either letting you know they're okay or maybe you want to give them a call fo … | Continue reading
So good on all levels. Utterly polished and wonderfully likeable characters. Not much to add, except that the story was really well drawn out, and the main characters in the "Murder Club" were interesting, had depth and I could really imagine. Understandable how this series of bo … | Continue reading
Kind of lovely. Kind of trippy. The book drops me right into an utterly bizarre world inside a building where waves crash and tides rise and fall. Piranesi, the protagonist, and our story teller, is one of only two humans in this world - both scientists trying to understand the w … | Continue reading
We bought the flowers today. Heart shaped. We started using a heart shape on the 10th year. We used to have numbers, the year-old she would have been, but double digits just seemed weird. Whenever I see people buying flowers I always assume they're for a lost loved one. I don't k … | Continue reading
I found the storytelling device clumsy and distracting, the first miss (for me) from Hunter. The story is told through a docu-drama series, half as if it were a script, and half as if it were transcript of the episodes (including call sheets for the beginning of each episode). Hu … | Continue reading
Having seen the author present at a conference, I wanted to read this story: and I'm glad I did. The story is about a time-travelling serial killer who is being hunted by one of his victims. What attracted me to the book, was Beukes' explained that there was a crime that had occu … | Continue reading
Following on from my hard and easy way of getting timezone from an IP address, having the timezone (as text) is one thing, now finding the actual offset is entirely a different problem. TL:DR; jump to the spoiler if you can't be bothered to read/listen to me ramble! The problem i … | Continue reading
I've been branching out from my usual Game Boy folly and have been tinkering with the Wonder Swan (an interesting little Japanese exclusive handheld). The original Wonder Swan can do sixteen shades of grey and has no backlight (very much like the original Game Boys for viewing). … | Continue reading
Not just the emulator but also debugger. Given that all the tooling for this (specifically around emulation) is on Windows, this is a great example of porting software to the web (I'm a big fan). Source: minimon.scyl.us | Continue reading
Through the little Etsy store I've got, I offer Game Boy game repair mostly just so I get to "play" on different problems, and a different problem did arrive. This Game Boy Advance game, although worked, requires a battery for the real time clock aspects of the game (i.e. timed e … | Continue reading
Another day, another joycon (actually, these are pretty satisfying because people tend to want these to work). I was expecting another mashed in shoulder button, but instead when I opened this joycon, I found the shoulder button entirely missing. Goodness knows where it went (it … | Continue reading
I love these little cartridge based handhelds (apparently the smallest released). I've got a few that I'm working on repairing because they fail pretty hard when corrosion gets in there. However, in this particular case, though it was sold as "junk", only the left button on the d … | Continue reading
An excellent discussion on the explosion, or even, implosion, of AI and how it's being tested and developed in public when the implications seem to have been swept aside in favour of the arms race between the big corps. Policies and law haven't been written and it's the experts t … | Continue reading
This Pebble started off with an intermittent fault that would gradually get worse - the screen would start to distort. I had originally planned on removing the battery from this Pebble and transplanting to another Pebble Classic I had which couldn't hold charge, but on doing some … | Continue reading
Picked up from Ebay for £12.50, the fault was "Console turns on but doesn't load ds games, and touch screen doesn't seem to work,". Makes me a bit sad, but this fix was literally clean the DS cart port with IPA, and run a DS cart in and out. There was also some gunk inside the de … | Continue reading