Why I log every board game I play, where MyLudo fell short, and how a homemade MCP server lets me log plays just by talking to Claude. Read the full post on the blog.

Today’s theme from That Artsy Reader Girl is a little less bookish than some! This time we’re talking about “Things That Make Up My Perfect Day”, which is a fun prompt. Plenty of time to read! I’m sure variations on this will be common answers among this crowd, but it’s nonetheless true for me. If I can carve out at least an hour overall for reading, that’s ideal, though I haven’t been super good at meeting that recently. New books. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but I can’t help but enjoy…

I cast Loop of Improvement™️

“Your potentially distinctive 2026-30 niche isn’t “AI”, “legal geography”, “bunkers’ or even “future of work”. It is the study and practice of how humans navigate profound technological and institutional change – with AI providing the contemporary case, and your accumulated experience providing the unsually broad analytical toolkit” ChatGPT, September 2026 So, I prompted ChatGPT to review my last few years of writings and outputs and asked it to tell me what it thought I was heading towards,…

This post started with a chat with a friend. We were talking about wars and climate, and he threw a question at me: does the war in Ukraine change the weather, through the change in emissions that the conflict causes? And then, more to the point, how would you actually answer that? I didn't have a good answer, but I liked the second part of the question more than the first. Most of my work is short-term forecasting, hours to days ahead, where the atmosphere you start from matters more than…

DAZ 1516 is a 1994 Volvo B10M-16 with an Alexander Q body. Entered service with Ulsterbus as fleet number 1516, now preserved at the Scottish Vintage Bus Museum.

I was sitting in a pub last week (like you do) and Boolean logic came up. So, the Boolean expression for this scenario evaluates to True because I was sitting in a pub at that precise moment in time talking about it! If we wanted to model the general probability of this niche conversation happening in a British pub, we can express it through the following logical conditions: Chances=(NerdInPub\lor (ExamCram\land \neg LastOrders))\land \neg FootballIsOn\ And if that leaves you a little…

Gabriel’s Moon – William Boyd Gabriel Dax – travel writer, insomniac, orphan, spy? Excellent! I couldn’t remember why I’d added this novel to my Library Reservations list, and thought maybe it was a bit like Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons. Instead it turned out more akin to Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie strand – crime / noir by A Proper Author. Author page: Gabriel’s Moon – William Boyd

My old darkroom (2013) STATUS: Picking at a few projects around the house TODO: Clean garage LISTENING: Zeal and Ardor, GREIF WATCHING: "The Diplomat" season 4 I miss out on a lot by constantly going online to see what I've missed out on. ✍️ Reply by email

9719/21638Finally writing a blog every day for almost 24 years has paid off. The people behind Horrible Histories liked my blog about Ernie and me enjoying the show and invited us to go to the studios.Not since I wrote about wanting to have sex with Funella from the Furchester Hotel in the Metro and then slightly weirdly being invited to Salford to meet her and Mr Tumble (I signed an NDA so can't tell you about everything we got up to), have I ever got anything from writing this crap.W

After part 9 we were done with the thread scheduling part of our data-driven tick system and getting ready to move on to the data storage part of the problem. But in the interval I got to do some performance audits on mobile and ran into some interesting results that I feel I should share before we go on. Scheduling tick tasks In the past articles we focused on how to turn our list of tick updates into a task graph, but we did not go into the specifics of how to schedule and execute them. This…

I finished my roll of Fujicolor 200 in the Olympus XA at the Zionsville car show in September. I want to kick this off with this Brazilian Chevrolet C-10 truck. Honest to god, if I wasn’t standing right in front of it I would have thought it was an AI slop response to a prompt of “show me a vintage Chevy truck.” I’ve seen a few ’57 Buicks in my time, but never a post coupe. I’m a sucker for the Karmann-Ghia. This is probably the only old car I could be talked into buying right now. And that’s…

At Moneybox, I built our custom icon library alongside the foundations of the design system. Working with icons gives you plenty of opportunities to see how a component can be laid out correctly and still look a bit off; every drawing brings its own shape and weight into the space you’ve given it. Put an icon beside a label, centre both with flexbox and you can still end up with a button that looks slightly wrong. The browser has done what you asked. It’s just aligning rectangles, and the thing…

Just to let you know link testing was completed here at the hub today - a number of bad links were removed. Virtually free of link rot at the moment (the way I like it). 😎 -joe jenett

Sit in a boardroom, a Whitehall ministry, or a tech company product review for more than 15 minutes and somebody will explain to you that human beings are irrational. People are primitive monkeys running on a defective “System 1” brain, you’ll be told. We panic over small losses, we can’t weigh probabilities, we get subconsciously “primed” by stray words on a page, and we need enlightened experts to arrange our “choice architecture” and “nudge” us into eating our vegetables and saving for…

2026-10-20 Serial Crossover Today, OpenBSD 8.0 was released so it's time to think about upgrading my servers. A few days ago I noticed that my firewall had reached nearly a year of uptime which made me realise that I must have missed upgrading to OpenBSD 7.9. So it's overdue for a refresh. My firewall is a headless machine running on a Unifi Security Gateway 4. It has a console port which I connect to using a rollover cable, which for some reason requires the use of a crossover adapter when I…

Created a small script that allows you to save Windows groups so that when you focus one you focus all. Handy for companion apps.

My fourth iOS app now has an icon.

A dull cool morning but a nice sunny afternoon. Mopped the office out this morning. Brushed up around bins. Burnt heap at back of Joe’s. Cut 2 trees.

London is twice as big as Colorado on the Actual Scale map.Size comparison maps are nothing new. You’ve almost certainly used The True Size Of ... to drag the outlines of countries around a world map and compare their geographical sizes.Actual Scale uses a similar drag-to-compare interface, but instead of geographical size, it compares population. Search for any city, state or country and drag its outline anywhere on the world map. The outline will grow or shrink to reflect the population…

The Cincinnati Board of Health was mightily confused in 1915. The board clerk handed president George Fackler a request to approve the purchase of something called “Dimethylparaphenylenediamine.”John O’Neil, clerk of the board, mumbled a shaky attempt at pronunciation. Fackler, a bona fide medical doctor, asked the clerk what that unpronounceable something was. Health Officer John Landis, who was also a physician, and board members Dr. Gustav Zinke and Dr. Samuel Allen confessed ignorance.…

How does it actually work, and what are your options? I found this slightly fiddly so I thought I'd arrange it differently to try to make more sense of it.

DEVON IZARA 3 3/4-Inch Debut The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch basic figure Item No.: Asst. G2786 No. G2625 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: #408 Includes: Lightsaber, hilt, cape Action Feature: Removable hat Retail: $19.99 Availability: August 20206 Appearances: Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord Bio: On the run from the Empire with her Jedi Master, Devon is a well-trained and savvy Padawan, adept with her blue lightsaber. Her desire to take action sometimes conflicts with her master's wish to stay…

I’ve been playing around with map visualisations a fair bit again recently, both using JS libraries like D3.js for interactive ones, and the R Project for non-interactive static ones. I’ve also been using LLM/AI agents a bit for help - especially with R, which I have no previous experience with (and LLMs being pretty good at ‘gathering’ information from various manpages and examples in their training data). I had previously implemented a basic interactive globe visualisation with Three.js…

The Full Moon is Monday October 26. Occultation of Beta Tauri 29th. Saturn is past opposition, but still magnificent in telescopes. The waxing Moon is close to Saturn on the 24th. Mars is not far from Jupiter low in the morning sky and the pair come closer over the week. In the evening, Venus is lost in the twilight as Mercury sinks towards the horizon. The Orionid meteor shower is best on the mornings of the 22nd and 23rd. The Full Moon is Monday October 26. The Moon at perigee, when it is…

I have structed this as a two-part post, where the second part is about one of the two winners of this year’s Nobel prize for economics. Both parts are directly connected, but I’ve split them because the second part is more of interest to those who know some economics. The Decline of Knowledge Based Policy I have written about this before, prompted by a post from Chris Dillow, who has returned to the theme more recently. Rereading all this I think we have a classic problem of overdetermination,…

I don't get it. According to Reddit and the tech bros, The Algorithm knows everything about us. It hoovers up everything we do on the internet and builds a profile so amazingly accurate it can deliver adverts to us with the pinpoint precision of a laser-guided missile of Capitalism. Last month I wanted to replace our old bed. So I made a few Google searches. Almost instantly the adverts in my YouTube feed were suddenly all for bed and mattress related businesses. The Algorithm knows!!! There's…

So you’ve been shamefully using US Big Tech giant Clownflare? It’s time to find an inopportune time to migrate away to a “European alternative”. You absolute must not follow these steps on a busy weekend when you must leave for hours on short notice.Just remove itStep 1: Just remove your website from Cloudflare.Step 2: When the “are you sure?” modal pops up you’re forced to type the domain name. How patronising! Show them who’s boss by copy and pasting the domain name from the field label.…

Attention Conservation Notice: optimality in a one-dimensional parametric model is so 1960s. Wikipedia says “For practical statistics problems, it is important to determine the MVUE if one exists, since less-than-optimal procedures would naturally be avoided, other things being equal”, but they’re not using the word “practical” to mean what I would use it to mean In the Laplace (or double exponential) distribution, with density \[f(x;\theta) =\frac{1}{2} \exp(-|x-\theta|)\] the maximum…

I became a software engineer because I wanted to create products. Not because I wanted to write code.