https://blog.omgmog.net
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A retro-computing heavy week over on social.omgmog.net, 27 July to 2 August: Half-Life on Mac OS 9, a new GammaOS handheld firmware build, and a demoscene UI retrospective, alongside the usual scattering of tech and web links.
A short one from social.omgmog.net for 20 to 26 July, spent the week mostly lake-side at Llyn Tegid in Snowdonia rather than online. While I was there I also put out a new post rebuilding my Wordle stats from years of WhatsApp chat logs.
Yes, I’m still playing Wordle in 2026. According to Wordle, I’ve played 1,559 games, I win 99% of the time, my current streak is 107 days and my longest is 278. Four numbers, and they’re mostly correct. What I don’t get is anything behind them, no per-game history, no way to compare a Tuesday to a Sunday, no sense of whether I’ve actually got better at this over four years. Each day I’ve played, I’ve also shared the result to WhatsApp (a habit, not a data strategy), and it turns out that habit…
Another week of links from social.omgmog.net, 13 to 19 July. Two of Fabien Sanglard’s forensic engineering write-ups landed days apart, a new daily word game snuck into the morning coffee routine, and a share-menu tool I didn’t know I needed.
Two consecutive titles on the HN front page yesterday had a 6 in them. This means nothing. But it’s the sort of nothing that lodges in your brain until you do something about it, so what is the most popular number in Hacker News titles? ClickHouse hosts the full HN dataset in their public playground, and I am exactly the kind of person who finds that exciting. The obvious query is barely a query at all: SELECT num, count() AS c FROM ( SELECT arrayJoin(extractAll(title, '\d+')) AS num FROM…
Lots of links shared on social.omgmog.net between 6 and 12 July, from old handheld games to a live map of Britain’s railways.
I was waiting for Claude to answer a token-heavy question at work the other day, the little “Thinking…” label flickering into “Wibbling…” and then “Moseying…”, and I caught myself doing the thing I always do when a spinner takes too long, staring at it, trying to divine meaning from the word choice. Is it nearly done? There’s no percentage, no bar, just a word standing in for “trust me, something is happening.” It sent me down a rabbit hole into where progress bars came from, and it turns out…
In the old days of the web, animating between pages meant faking it with jQuery. Then came pjax, which used pushState to swap in fetched content and fake a full navigation without one, still relying on popState to stop the back button breaking. Every single-page app since has done some version of the same trick, intercept the link click, fetch the new content, swap it in, animate the swap yourself. It works, but it means every navigation runs through a JS router, even on a static blog that…
A few things I shared over on social.omgmog.net between 29 June and 5 July, without much comment at the time, but worth a second look.
For years I was firmly in the mechanical keyboard camp, and specifically a 60% person. No numpad, no function row, no arrow cluster, just the keys I actually used, in a footprint small enough to leave room for the mouse. A handful of boards came and went, but they all had the same shape: clacky, and a bit of a statement piece on the desk. There’s still a couple in the photo on my now page, left over from that era. Lately though, I’ve drifted somewhere unexpected: low-profile, and further than…
Between March 2011 and October 2021 I backed 19 Kickstarter projects, spending £386 and $565 across the lot. Here they all are, in order, with what became of each. March 2011 Minecraft: The Story of Mojang $30filmstandalone My first ever Kickstarter was 2 Player Productions’ documentary about Mojang’s first year. It delivered in late 2012, and I took the DVD tier, so my name is in the credits. I no longer own anything that can play the disc, but it’s a neat thing to have. On launch day 2PP…
A few things I shared over on social.omgmog.net between 22 and 28 June, without much comment at the time, but worth a second look.
The Group Stage of the 2026 World Cup finished today, so it’s time to mark the homework. Back in the launch post five AI models, a deterministic lookup table, and one football fan predicted the same 72 fixtures before a ball was kicked. I’ve been scoring the results on AIWC26 each day as they came in. I’ve got no real opinion on the teams; I’m interested in what the scoring reveals about the models. Final table Entrant Points Exact scores Correct results Claude Sonnet 4.6 67 10 37 Claude Fable…
I keep finding new gaps in my webmention implementation. Mentions coming in from Bluesky, Lemmy and Lobsters were showing up with no author at all, just a blank avatar and an empty name. Reddit and Hacker News bookmarks fared a bit better, with a username attached, but got flattened into a generic “bookmarked” icon with no indication of where the post had actually been shared. Lobsters mentions also carried the wrong published date. None of these felt like they were pulling their weight…
GIMP has always had an interface problem. I’m not blaming the GIMP team (they’ve built something powerful on a shoestring). They’ve been clear they’re not interested in copying Photoshop wholesale; their FAQ argues that designing around actual user research beats imitating someone else’s interface decisions. Fair enough in principle, but coming from years as a Photoshop user, that design still feels hostile to me. I’m just one user story out of many they’ve had to design for, but it still…
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Selamat, Neil Brown, joelchrono, and moddedbear among them), so I got curious and ordered one. First impressions Out of the box, the X4 is lightweight, properly light, the kind where I’d forget it’s in my pocket. The display is crisp for its size, and the device ships with a branded 16GB microSD card (cute touch) plus a card reader and…
I run Tailscale on my laptops, phone and NAS, and wanted to add an exit node so I could route traffic through my own connection when I’m out and about. The obvious place to put it was the NAS, since it’s already always on, but the NAS also holds everything I’d least like exposed if something went wrong. Making it double up as an exit node, with every device’s outbound traffic flowing through it, didn’t sit right. What I wanted instead was a disposable, isolated VM living on the same machine…
I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the receiving end of webmentions, from adding support for them in the first place through to fetching them at build time and rendering them server-side so the discussion section doesn’t flicker in over JS. What I’d never actually done was send the other half. Every link I’ve ever made out to another IndieWeb site has just sat there, silently not telling anyone I’d linked to them. Webmentions are two-sided. When I publish a post that links to someone else’s site,…
My default for making coffee for two is a cafetière. French press if you insist. It requires almost no thought, produces a consistent result, and has no moving parts to break. When I’ve got a bit more time and want a cleaner cup for two or more, I’ll reach for a Bodum pour-over instead. When it’s just me, I’ve been using a Clever Dripper more lately (it suits the days where I want slightly more control without committing to the full V60 ritual). The Hario V60 was my main single-cup pour-over…
While updating scores for AIWC26 this week I came across BBC Sport’s 3D World Cup viewer, which launched on 12 June for matches broadcast on the BBC. Every match played so far is sitting there to replay in full, not just the live ones. It’s UK-only, it’s a beta, and somehow this is my second football post in a row, despite still having zero interest in the sport itself. The engineering underneath it is another matter. The viewer is a Unity WebGL build, compiled to WebAssembly and running…
The World Cup rolls around every four years, and with it the office sweepstake, the ritual where everyone gets handed a team at random and pretends to care how it does. I have no interest in football (I had to read a beginner’s guide to how it all works just to follow what’s going on), and I definitely don’t know enough to make an informed prediction of my own. So I thought I’d hand the job to five AI models instead, get them to commit their predictions in public, and keep score. The result is…
Anbernic sent me an RG DS to review. It’s a clamshell Android handheld designed to evoke the Nintendo DS, running Android 14 on a Rockchip RK3568 with dual 4-inch screens. At around $95 (roughly £75), it sits in the same budget bracket as the Mangmi Air X I reviewed last year, but where that was a capable general-purpose handheld, this one has a much narrower brief. The form factor is immediately recognisable. At 160 x 91 x 22mm it’s a near-match for the 3DS XL (156 x 93 x 22mm), similar button…
Run git log --graph on most team projects and you’ll see the problem. Parallel lines everywhere, merge commits that just say “Merge branch ‘feature/x’ into develop”. None of it useful. It’s noise. I’ve been using a rebase-based workflow for years to avoid this. The history stays linear and the diffs stay readable. This post covers both the argument and the specific branch structure I use for team feature work. I use Git Fork as my day-to-day git GUI, so some of this is written from that…
My daily reading is deliberate at this point. I’ve settled on a small set of tools that surface the kind of internet I actually want, rather than whatever’s performing well today. Hacker News I use hcker.news rather than the main site, mainly to filter down to “smallweb” content and sort chronologically by submission time rather than by rank. The default HN front page surfaces whatever has caught fire in the last few hours, which can feel samey. Sorting by submission time means I catch things…
Hyde from lazybea.rs runs a blog interview series called Over/Under, where bloggers rate a mix of topics as overrated or underrated, then pass a question along to the next person. I’m issue 61.
I’ve been having a bit of a think about data I’ve left entirely in someone else’s hands. Specifically Google Photos, which has photos going back to 2011 and no local copy anywhere. I’m not going anywhere dramatic with it, but having a backup I actually control felt overdue.
Back in 2022 I added webmention support to this blog. The implementation worked but it was entirely client-side, so the page would load, JS would fire, fetch from webmention.io, and render the results into the DOM. With JS disabled, on a slow connection, or in an RSS reader, the discussion section was just empty. It worked well enough that I didn’t touch it for three years, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some yak shaving.
The Game Boy Camera was brilliant and stupid in equal measure, a 128x112 pixel sensor bolted on top of a cartridge, printing to thermal paper on a Game Boy Printer the size of a brick. I got both for Christmas when I was 12 and somehow spent hours with them. The minigames are absurd, the image quality is aggressively awful, and the whole thing looks like a prop from a cheap sci-fi film. I loved it.
