A few days ago I was introduced to someone. It was a brief encounter while I passed through a room of people with a friend. My friend introduced me: "Hi Colin, nice to see you again. This is my friend David" Colin: "Ah, good to meet you Dave". I immediately stepped in, "Hi Colin, please call me David". I've never liked Dave as a name for me. I just don't think I am a Dave, or cool enough to pull off a Dave. haha It often happens that people naturally shorten my name, but I always politely…
Andreas blogged about adding the bubbles.town widget to his blog. He used the vote widget provided by bubbles.town, which is just a bit of JavaScript you put on your pages. It's well documented and dead simple, so if you just want this on your site with no fuss, that's the way to go. I use 11ty as my blogging platform and I could just use the same JavaScript snippet on my site but I wanted to make something that's a bit more in the spirit of a static site. It's a tiny script, so yeah, I'm being…
I recently took part in the excellent Over/Under weekly series, hosted by Hyde on LazyBear. I was asked to rate and comment on a few topics, and over/under rate them. As part of my response on Hyde's blog I had the opportunity to pose one question to the next participant. This week I learned that my question was answered by Elena Rossini as part of her Over/Under review (a great read). My question was: If you could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?Now…
Gordon McLean and Case Duckworth had a good back-and-forth about typography and layout. Gordon says you should make your website uncluttered and easy to read. Case says there are reasons why you might not want to do that. Read for yourself: Gordon: Sort your sites out! Case: Your sites are fine! Gordon: Your sites are OK I guess As you can see from my own recent posts, I’m with Gordon. Check out Go big (with serifs) or go home or How to make your blog or forum post hard to read. But I do…
Haye Kesteloo reports at DroneXL: “Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned… More
Do note that this is a slightly negative post, there is alot of negativity on the internet at the moment. Take a moment to reflect if you want to expose yourself to more negativity. There are plenty of positive posts out there aswell :) Something that puts a bad taste in my mouth are blogs with this text: Did you like this post, please buy me a coffee? Buy me a coffee, it helps keep the lights on :) This irks me primarily because I'm so tired of rampant capitalization and constant…
The year is 2007. Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone in January. I spend the summer working at a camp in Pennsylvania. And before heading back home to the other side of the world, we decide to spend some of our hard-earned money on a trip to the Big Apple. We visited the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, and I vividly remember how remarkable the iPhone felt sitting on that stand — especially compared to the devices we had at the time. I never bought one, of course, but it already felt years ahead…
I find the enabled vs disabled states of the Vivaldi browser's back and forward buttons to be nearly indistinguishable. I couldn't figure out the best way to fix this, so I asked ChatGPT and the answer worked. Here's how to make the states more distinct using CSS./* Disabled Back/Forward buttons more faded */ .button-toolbar button[disabled], .button-toolbar button.disabled { opacity: 0.18 !important; } /* enabled Back/Forward buttons stronger */ .button-toolbar…
I currently use three laptops: a work-issued Windows machine that I use every day, a personal 17-inch Windows laptop that I used at my previous job (and subsequently bought from my employer when I left the company more than five years ago), and my trusty MacBook Air. My Mac is a 2017 MacBook Air - Intel i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. It’s almost nine years old now. The battery gives me a few hours at best, it’s occasionally sluggish, and it doesn’t support multiple external monitors the way…
Why I Built Bubbles 🫧 I've been an RSS obsessive for years. Hundreds of feeds, hand-picked one by one. But RSS only shows you sources you already know. New voices don't find you there. What's been missing: a front page like Hacker News, but exclusively for personal blogs. No tech bros, no AI hype, no trendy startups. Just an endless stream of thoughtful blog posts, curated by real people. So I built Bubbles 🫧. For myself, first. And hopefully for a few thousand others too. https://bubbles...
The IndieWeb is great. Lately, there has been an incredible increase in the sense of community across the personal web, largely driven by a wave of wonderful initiatives taken by people who genuinely care about blogging. Following my recent note on Junited 2026, I am excited to share that gurupanguji.com is now officially on Bubbles. I highly recommend checking out Bubbles—it is a treasure trove of incredible personal blogs and passionate people writing about all kinds of topics. Source: Bubbles
The appeal of living in a small town is being surrounded by the right number of people whom you can care about. On the other hand, living in a big city might make you feel lonely in huge crowds. Being a blogger in smallweb (or IndieWeb) is akin to living in a small town with one big exception: there’s no square in the middle of town, no town hall to gather around. In this sense maybe the proper analogy is a small island rather than a town. Smallweb can easily be an isolated experience. Contrary…
In reply to my Sort your sites out note Case Duckworth takes each of my points and gives them a good grilling. There are many good points in his reply so I thought it worth unpicking them a little, alongside my original glib comments, and see where I land. As mentioned before, I write to think and understand, so this is absolutely more an exercise for me than anything else, so please bear with me. The Origins My note was based on the last few weeks clicking around a lot of new blogs and…
well, not exactly a normal anime recommendation but close. Still so different that even people who normally skip anime stuff can give it a look. Really, a small piece of man made animation that deserves some minutes of your time if you haven’t heard of it yet. milky☆subway was made by yohei kameyama. he first did a 4 minute short called milky☆highway back in 2022 as his graduation project at kadokawa’s vantan game academy. That one blew up on youtube. So he went and made a full mini series…
Saturday 6th June 2026 Following my recent blog about the Section 106 Developer funded route to Leigh Green Garden Village in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, (and references to new route 33 in anoher recent blog being Developer funded) I’m again on the Developer Funded Bus Route trail and this time in neighbouring Cambridgeshire. And once again it’s another route operated by that ever expanding company, Central Connect, and it’s yet another route 100 to add to my collection blogged about in 2024…
Imagine a wiki that is just a single HTML file. One that you can deploy anywhere: view locally, share in local network, put in any web server. No databases, no user management, no moving pieces that cause headaches. Feather Wiki is a really cool project that I ran into a couple of weeks back. It’s a wiki project that fits the entire wiki, including all the content, in a single HTML file. You can upload it to a server (or use locally), make changes in browser and when you’re done with changes,…
One of the key takeaways from my recent Japanese trip was how even the public toilets have built-in bidets that clean your butt. I mentioned in that article that I installed one of these bad-boys in the toilet adjacent to my home office more than a year ago and as people were asking me about it, I decided to share my setup here. 🚽 Old-school toilet with a new-school built-in bidet? That’s right. My home office is on the last floor of a late-90s town house and the toilet that I have next to it…
Right around the time of Trump's re-election, I discovered European Alternatives, a page dedicated to—well—European software alternatives. It was the first time I reconsidered my software choices in terms of origin. With that in mind, I was taken aback when I checked the apps I had installed on my phone. They had US and Silicon Valley written all over them. Now what about these European alternatives? Can't we build software too? Europe can build software too! Bear is my favourite notes app.…
A little while ago I wrote a short walkthrough on how to make a website in (about) five minutes with the minimum amount of code needed. But maybe you’re in a hurry and you need a website even faster. Or maybe you really rather not write any code. Fair enough. There will be a tiny little bit of code needed if you want your website to be “fediverse-ready” (I will explain in just a moment), but that part is optional. And I will use two services for this tutorial: Hotglue, with a simpler publishing…
After nearly twenty years under CBS ownership, Last.fm is once again independent: Your account, your listening history, and your data remain exactly where they are. The team building Last.fm is the same. The service continues as normal. It is difficult to know whether it is riskier for Last.fm to be independent or under the banner of the hilariously corrupt Paramount Skydance conglomerate, but I imagine it would not — uh — last long if the leadership of the latter continues making cuts. I am…
Starting this week I've left my phone disconnected from the car for CarPlay. I still have a bluetooth connection incase someone calls me, but otherwise my car is not "smart". The reason I've done this is I realize there are so many songs out there I've loved and just lost to the ether of streaming, but when I play a radio station through Apple Music I have no was to identify it (Shazam turns off the music to listen) and Apple Music doesn't add any inherent song identifier to it's own radio…
feel for the guy checking out maslow’s hierarchy of needs next to me on the train this morning. hang in there buddy.
Nobody really talks about radio anymore. And by "nobody", I mean people my age. Speaking of people my age, I've been noticing this uptick in content about curation. Its the mechanic behind online aesthetics and microtrends1, which is in part engineered by human enagagement and curated by algorithms. We're given a false sense of curation - and by extension, control - by interacting with stuff we like. But, people have begun to see through the mask, taking back their control through physical…
by using nightshade on an image, the image will be unusable for model training. this is a proactive measure - instead of relying on mega corps respecting robots.txt, we are poisoning our data. i wonder if something similar can be done with text (i am very petty). taken from the ai resist list i have not used the tool yet, but i have read up on it. thank you very very much izzy for bringing this gem to light! i am very curious to try nightshade.
Or not! For completeness here's a belated account of our journey home from the lodge in Cumbria. Our daughter set off before us and wanted to call into the MacArthur Glen outlet place on her way back home. We went north to Keswick to the Derwent Pencil Museum. This is a small museum devoted to the history of pencil making and the Cumberland Pencil Company. It was worth visiting and I learnt a few facts. The café was excellent, and there was a half decent company shop (don't expect big discounts…
My weight and my attempts to exercise have been mentioned here many times. I am more than happy to hear constructive comments and suggestions, but bear in mind that what I’m really about to discuss is my emotional habits, not the fact that I eat more than I should, and don’t move my body often enough. I’ve been weighing myself weekly since the turn of the year —to be fair, I’ve been weighing myself on a fairly regular pattern for almost three decades now— yet despite that or maybe because of…
A few months back, Ars Technica published Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true. I haven't used an online password manager in 5 years. Previously I had been using Bitwarden, which is fine, I just prefer to take ownership of as much of my digital life as I can. My setup is KeepassXC to manage all my passwords in a database and Syncthing to sync all my passwords across my smartphone, laptop, and server. I read a comment on HN recently about how a couple…
I find the trend of people posting about the way they use generative AI to be fascinating at an anthropological level. I do not remember the last time a piece of technology pushed so many different people into writing about the way they use it, or not use it, or abuse it, or misuse it. To me, this is way more interesting and intriguing than the technology itself. I obviously do not know why so many people are doing so, and I suspect they must all have their own specific reasons, but I currently…
We've been living in our new house for just over a month now. I wanted to look back and see what we've learned about the renting process - particularly when you move out - and share our findings in a blog post. This is a fairly general guide, but please note any legal bits will be specific to the UK. What we did wrongWe learned a few harsh lessons and they largely amount to being too trusting. This is a shame as our new landlord is very casual and yet we will need an element of formality to…
This is how I start new blog posts: $ ./new.sh permalink-for-new-post This sends a command to Hugo, the static site generator I use, to create a new file with that permalink, and generate the requisite front matter (dates, default categories, etc). It also derives the title of the post from the permalink. For example, this is how I started this post: $ ./new.sh i-just-realised-something I don’t normally do clickbait titles. But in starting this post with such a title, I forgot what this post…
