We’re on holiday camping in the Lake District. I’d set my mind on riding the Fred Whitton Challenge (FWC) route while we’re here. I’ve not been feeling great this month though. A few early warning signs of over-training syndrome for two to three week. I heeded advice and postponed the FWC so as not to make things worse. I was not going home though without getting in at least one decent ride. A warden at the campsite suggested Great Dunn Fell. It’s where the highest road in the UK leads up to…

The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.At the time Apple were generous enough to provide a setting to disable this feature.Although they hid the second part deeper, because why should saying “no” be easy?Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment and upgraded macOS 15 to 27. I only…

John Gruber personal PR for Apple is again excited about his ad revenue: It doesn't matter that Samsung and Google and a bunch of Chinese companies have made foldable Android phones for a decade. Almost nobody cares. The Duo is a fucking iPhone. That makes people care. Nobody cares about Chinese companies. They just magically filled half the marketplace. That means more than Apple and Samsung together. Probably sold to aliens. If you mean foldables, Apple sold zero of them. Why is it strange…

Sometimes progress in email marketing best practices feels like two steps forward, one step back. Over the weekend, three emails landed in my inbox that were technically legal under US law, but pretty out of touch with modern email marketing best practices. Upon investigation, I had some past connection to each sender: a long-forgotten service, a parent company, or something buried deep in the terms and conditions.Remember Highlights for Children and the classic "Goofus and Gallant" comic…

Look what landed in my inbox this morning. Good grief. Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.

After quite a lot of wine fuelled reading of Brennans Blog I got a little interested in the Gemini Protocol designed as a new internet protocol for "supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents". Sounds good to me. I don't often write about tech, because everyone else on the smallweb does. But I've been a Linux obsessive since Redhat 5.2. If you search my real name, there are contributions I made to the Fedora project back when I had free time. I have made my living for 20+…

I remember back in the days of the early internet in the 1990's the concept of news, information and things that where beneficial to being a well informed person, being behind a paywall would have been a very foreign idea. How did we let that happen? Why should I have to pay for information, unless the goal is to keep us from being truly informed. This should not be a new concept — people like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and of course, George Orwell, warned us that…

I signed up for a Mastodon account recently, forgot about it, then came back yesterday to have a nose about. Had a look at the trending section and here's what I found as a relatively new Mastodon user: Everyone involved in a Linux distro called Omarchy is a Nazi bastard because of the bloke who created it. 1Password are bastards-by-proxy and everyone should hate them. You should all go and delete your Digital Ocean accounts immediately. Because, reasons. Some guy called Manton is crying about…

A common maladaptive daydream I have is imagining that I wake up and I'm much younger again, spontaneously and miraculously, with all of my knowledge and understanding still intact. Magically, I find myself back at a specific age in my life, and I can redo everything all over again from that point on. For me, I always imagine awakening to find myself twelve and in grade six again. Back when I would walk down 17th Avenue travelling home after elementary school ended to take care of our four…

I've been keeping up with the blogosphere, and there have been a couple of posts that have irked me enough to write a post about linguistics. And that's saying something. A good example is from itsme, who wrote a blog post asking people to please learn how to write. And it received over a hundred uptoots. I'm afraid I have to pull rank here and say I studied English at university, and although the majority of my classes were about reading books, I did also take classes on the meta-disciplinary…

People often confuse freedom with disorder, and predictability with trust. Autonomy threatens something psychological that obedience doesn't. Human ability to predict the other person. People generally build a mental model of someone: "He's this kind of person. She believes these things. He always reacts like this. She's the funny one. He's conservative. She's difficult. He's against this." Once that model exists, interaction becomes cheap. You don't have to encounter the person anymore. You…

Everything is just worthwhile. At least according to Robert Birming. https://robertbirming.com/ Boring, out of reality, but the machine for positive, affirmative and empty words. Rainbow and sunshine even though he lives in Sweden. Everything he writes is valuable because he wrote it. If he writes more, more valuable it becomes. His writing is like closed ecosystem. Just post and it's like sunbeams in January. Self-affirmational vomit of words. It is the ego manufacturing a sense of progress to…

Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met. She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily…

In short: from my experience, people like map and filter, but not reduce. I use functions like map and filter all the time. When I put that code up for review, my peers rarely complain. I get plenty of feedback about other decisions, but not about my use of map and filter. I cannot say the same for reduce. Often, when I’ve submitted a patch with reduce inside, I get a comment like, “this part is hard to read.” And I see reduce way less than map, filter, some, and so on. Anecdotally, I have come…

There is a particular feeling some old software has that is hard to explain without sounding sentimental. You open it, it appears almost immediately, and it does the job it was built to do. The menus are where you expect them. The file is yours. The program is not asking you to sign in, sync, subscribe, accept a new policy, dismiss a promotion, or wait while it talks to six remote services before showing a blank document. That does not mean old software was always better. Plenty of it crashed.…

Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front…

I don't mean in a linguistic sense, as recent Beartroversy would protest, but quite literally. Your blog is hard to read. It physically strains my eyes to even attempt it. Whether you can write well or not, it really doesn't matter if we can't read it at all. Which is a shame because so often I come across posts high up the trending page or with incredibly interesting titles in the Recent tab that, once opened, blast me with a colour combo so unreadable I wonder how the author even managed to…

Heather Burns: I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive. It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened. If you were in school in 2001, there were probably televisions playing live news coverage in your classroom or in the hallways. There were in mine. I am with Burns, and with the…

LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software’s most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories. Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I’m putting my money on a…

With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux. As a result, so is the HTML we write. For every line of the HTML specification itself that has changed since the language’s inception, there are many more bits of HTML that have seen what I’ll call ‘environmental’ changes. Adaptations to differing browsers, extensions, integrations, and systems which we find HTML…

The subject of using AI for blog posts is one that keeps coming up, whether it's writing posts entirely or "just" proof-reading. Readers, generally, don't like it when writing becomes too AI apparent (in one survey 78% of technical readers said they stop reading if a post seems AI authored). This is not an issue that I, as a writer, have ever run up against: I write because I enjoy the process, so it's never made sense for me to outsource any part of that to a chatbot. As a reader, though, I…

For the sake of ending the Byzantine invasion of Italy to conquer the Ostrogoths and unify the old Western Roman Empire with the Eastern Byzantine Empire, King Vitiges of the Ostrogoths agreed to terms with General Belisarius.The Goths at Ravenna had little choice. A fire destroyed the granaries inside Ravenna. This may have been sheer accident, but Procopius offers two theories: Vitiges' queen, Matasuntha, may have caused it herself, angry at her forced marriage to Vitiges, or citizens were…

I'm somebody who's written rather extensively on generative AI ethics, and I feel there is a lot that is unethical about the current corporate climate and culture surrounding the technology. And when I write about LLMs and chatbots, I'm careful not to make judgments about the people using the end products—I don't think you're a bad person if you use ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever. What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in…

So I got the same form letter reply that everyone else did in response to this: man this sucks. sent them an email, and my renewal date isn’t until December, but it’s going to be a pain to migrate my family if they don’t cut these shenanigans 1Password is supporting DHH and his bigoted views Craig Pilcher https://pilch.zip/2026/09/01/man-this-sucks-sent-them/ Will be putting my money where my mouth is, same as they are. But I ended up in dad voice for my cancellation email: I believe you when…

About a month ago, I wrote an article recommending that if you are going to have an always visible control for switching between light and dark mode, it should be a two-state toggle that alternates between system and whatever the current opposite of system is, not a tri-state one (system, light, dark). If you are forced to include such a control (say, someone is pointing a gun at you and shouting “code dammit! now!”), I stand by that recommendation: use two states, as described in the article.…

15 years after being tasked to replace Steve Jobs, Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down this week, presumably to be replaced with younger white men similarly incapable of standing up to fascism despite no limit of "fuck you money" (Apple has a $4.665 trillion market cap and $62.5 billion cash on hand). While Apple certainly made boatloads of money during Cook's tenure, the company also steadily morphed into something unthinkable to company founders Jobs and Steve Wozniak: it became not just…

“Bakery”, “road trip”, and “tradition” are often associated with certain geographies in literature and tourism booklets. That’s probably why the next-word predictor in the heart of whatever LLM wrote the headline above decided to us “mountain town” to describe Yalaha, Florida, home of Yalaha Bakery. Florida’s the flattest state in the Union, and despite having places named Mount Dora, there are no mountains here. Any AI, no matter how well-trained, has no experience. It simply has…

Photo by Miguel Ángel Padriñán Alba on Unsplash Introduction I wrote about hosted blog options1 a while back. Included in the options that I thought were interesting was Pagecord. It looked like one of the nicer options: easier to use, well-thought-out, and some other nice features. At the time I was a little uncomfortable recommending it, but not having a specific reason I kept it in the options that I talked about. Now, it appears that the issues I had started to examine are worth discussing…

This is my 13th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. I just returned from a long weekend in Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a beautiful town in the Rogue Valley, a half hour north of the California border. It is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is what brought us there for a long weekend. The main business district is full of shops and galleries and restaurants – a nice stroll. That area butts into the head of Lithia…

When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did. Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon…