https://colinwalker.blog
60 posts
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# Last night, I suddenly remembered that it was // is 808 Day on Saturday and I had // have nothing prepared. I released All raw sound and emotion for 303 Day, then proceeded to forget 505, 606, and 707 days. Call myself a techno guy?
# Some further CSS tweaks have been made so that the theme affects a few more elements. I won't bore everyone by listing them, but things should now be a bit more consistent. # In other news, I have uninstalled Brave. I set Ecosia as my default browser when I started testing and hadn't needed to revert for any reason. That's good enough for me to consider the testing a success and I've made the switch permanent. There is one thing that takes a couple more taps than in Brave, but it's something…
# The first wave of CSS tweaks are complete. I was getting a bit bored (no surprise there) so wanted to mix things up a little bit. Cue user selected colour themes: Choosing an option from the menu simply sets a key-value pair in the browser's local storage. Before the page loads, a quick bit of JavaScript checks this value and sets a page level data value: <html lang="en-GB" data-theme="blue"> The CSS then loads the right colours: :root[data-theme="blue"] { ... } The theme affects the title…
# I'm in the middle of making some CSS changes to the site but it's time for bed. I'll finish off tomorrow, but until then, excuse things looking a bit weird.
# After my recent dalliance with Vivaldi, the quest for a Brave replacement continues. On a strange whim I installed the Ecosia browser for the first time since it came out. It's improved! Obviously, it's YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser) but the ad-blocking seems more reliable than DuckDuckGo and it's not got all the bloat of Brave. It also properly respects the viewport zoom unlike some others I could mention.
# Kev Quirk links to a couple of posts on the topic of using feed readers vs visiting the actual sites, the first of which has the rather inflammatory title _"Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You". The argument is that if you only read posts in a feed reader then you are not seeing the post as it was intended to be viewed. I have written a number of posts about this over the past few years. I built /reader with the intent of having an integrated environment where I could reply and send webmentions…
# Got the colophon page updated with the latest details. I hadn't touched it for a while and it was sorely out of date. It's still called /specs. I've deliberately kept the Hello page as /EHLO (Extended Hello - an SMTP command used by servers to request extended features). It's geeky but also cycles back to my old blog from 2003. The tech posts on that site focused on Microsoft Server products, especially SharePoint (which I used to host it, yes SharePoint) and Exchange, so EHLO is a fitting…
# I disappeared to the studio for about an hour-and-a-half last night. As is the way when I'm struggling,1 I started something new rather than returning to the couple of works in progress. I kept to the approach of only having a few things connected at any one time. Last night it was the LM Drum (with the 505 kit), both TD-3s, and the Kobol Expander. I resisted the 'new shiny' temptation of hooking up the Spice and trying to force it into what I was doing. It will, no doubt, become a workhorse…
# I need to get back in the studio and spent some quality time making music. Working solely in the box is okay, especially with the Launch Control for recording automation, but I get too bogged down. I find it far more freeing to jam with hardware. In fact, I tend to record a lot of things by playing the different elements or layers live. One at a time, building on what I've done before. I'll know roughly how things will come together as I almost always do test versions, often recorded live, or…
# Congratulations to our daughter who has just got her university results and has passed her degree with a first! She can now officially use BSc after her name. 🎉
# What an amazing couple of days! It was our 31st wedding anniversary on Wednesday (15th) so we went out for a nice meal. My wife booked a night away on Thursday — we stayed in Pontefract — so didn't have to waste time travelling yesterday, my birthday. We went to Pontefract Castle and did some exploring before checking in. Yesterday we headed for York and had a great time at the Minster. I love the architecture and history, and York Minster has a lot of both to explore. We were having such a…
# Reply to: Colin Walker - Jul 14, 2026... # I have now added an on-the-fly RSS feed for post comments. If there are any comments for a particular post, the link gets added to the live RSS feed using the <source:comments> attribute, e.g. <source:comments>https://colinwalker.blog/blog/comments-feed.php?post=2426</source:comments> The post ID is passed to a new page which builds and returns the specific feed.
# Back in November 2023, Dave Winer wrote: "I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed." If that sounds familiar, I mentioned it in the context of the MyStatusTool (MST) created by Andy Sylvester, of which I made a test PHP version. Dave is now scratching that itch by building (and testing) rss.chat: We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only…
# Happy Monday! It's been a while since I've said (or felt) that. Following on from last week, it feels so freeing to decline and delete whole series of meetings this morning. Friday saw me finally catch up with all messages and emails — the first time in the five weeks I've been back at work — so having nothing outstanding when I logged on today was so refreshing. Just being able to start the week with nothing hanging over me makes such a difference; not having that dread build up during the…
# Yesterday, I had what I thought was going to be a difficult conversation at work. Since covid, my employer has gradually been increasing the required time in office for staff. This week they announced that everyone under a certain grade will have to start going in three days a week, everyone else (more senior staff) 4 days. I fall into the first category so would need to go from my current two days a week to three. 1 I currently struggle with those two days — mental health reasons etc. — so…
# I finally charged the watch last night, not because it needed charging, but because I was having a bath and thought it was the ideal opportunity. It still had over 30% battery so would have lasted well into a second month. It's amazing the difference turning off "raise to wake" makes.
# There's a joke about bloggers building a custom CMS or devs trying to make an RSS reader. It's actually become less of a joke recently. Or, maybe, more of a joke depending on your point of view. Kev, fresh off the back of building Pure Blog, linked to a post from Amit Gawande: Built for exactly one. Amit has built his own CMS, called Jot, because, in his words: I got tired of almost. Almost the right editor. Almost the right publishing flow. Almost the right feature set. That's exactly why I…
# The migraine started to ease a bit last night. I managed to put a little bit of work in on of the outstanding tracks after attending the listening party for the excellent Feral Grace by The Black Dog. What an album! Beautifully melancholic, with a more hopeful final track leading to who knows where for the next release in the series. Today has been mostly clear, except for the usual postdrome fuzziness. Some more time this evening sees it almost finished. I need to tidy up levels and EQ, but…
# No work today, and most likely tomorrow, due to a bad migraine. I've had a nagging headache all week. It started getting so much worse in the early hours of this morning, forcing me to get up and take some pills. I've been popping them all day. Any further changes to the site have obviously been postponed until my head clears, and there has been no work on any of the in-progress tracks. I have dummy arrangements in place for all three, just waiting for the attention they need.
# I think the standard.site integration is now done! Some tweaks were needed to the additional code to ensure that posts displayed how I wanted and that the publication icon was set correctly. 1 While it would be nice if Bluesky supported text formatting and a longer character count, this isn't going all in on a network. No, it's supporting a protocol. Bluesky itself is still centralised, although some are hosting their own PDS, but the AT protocol allows for so much more. This is just one…
# I've been making some changes. I scrapped the front page again a few days ago. I just wasn't feeling it. I'm going to revert some of the page names but I like a few of them as they're quite geeky. Prior to that, I changed the menu to a page on its own, rather than the slide-in panel, as I wanted to start simplifying things. I'm going to be working on a different way to present comments as well. Something I've wanted to do for a while was to replace the current cross-posting to Bluesky with…
# Watch update I'm now 16 days in and the watch still has 46% battery left! It was described as lasting 7-10 days but I could get three weeks out of this. Also, once it runs out of battery for the smart features, it will still act as a normal watch for a further two days. Colour me impressed.
# RIP Om It was so sad to see yesterday that Om Malik — OG tech blogger, founder of GigaOm, photographer, investor, and all round nice guy — passed away at just 59. I've been reading Om's work for as long as I can remember, but it was the post GigaOm era where I feel he really came into his own. He had a way of writing that conveyed such passion and made you feel like you knew him, even if you had only ever interacted through comments. He paved the way for so many others and his voice on the…
# Well, my dalliance with Vivaldi didn't last very long; less than 24 hours, in fact. I had issues with some sites I visit regularly and only turning off Vivaldi's ad blocking fixed it. Not good enough. # In other news, it's now been a week since I started wearing the Sekonda hybrid watch and I still have 66% battery! I'm going to get two weeks out of this with room to spare. Very happy.
# Mobile Browsers I have documented my search for the 'perfect' email client on many occasions. Spoiler alert: I've largely given up. Now, I've returned to mobile browsers. I've tried my fair share over the years. When I used an iPhone there was no real discussion — you used Safari.1 It's a different picture on Android. I gave up on Chrome years ago. I don't use system-wide ad blocking so Chrome is not an option seeing as it doesn't support extensions on mobile. Firefox has never really clicked…
# Today marks 23 years since I started blogging! It seems a lifetime ago, but it's less than half my lifetime. I've been struggling to post lately, only getting going again over the past few days, but I've got some ideas about things I want to do to the site. Not necessarily in relation to what I post, more how it works. I want to redesign things and simplify the code. Still, that's for another day. For now, let's just celebrate the anniversary. 🥳
# Approaching three years since getting the Amazfit GTR 2 watch, battery life has really taken a nosedive. What started out as up to 14 days (generally around 10) has dropped to barely 3. It was time (no pun intended) to think about replacing it. Rather than getting another fully smart watch, I decided to go for a hybrid. If money was no object I would buy a Withings — I think they're the gold standard for hybrid watches — but as it is I opted for something far more conservative: a Sekonda…
# It's the third anniversary of my first Bandcamp release: the acid clan EP. It still annoys me that the production isn't up to scratch, especially on False Pretences where there is some clipping on the claps. I recently remastered Round and Around but's there's only so much you can do when all the hardware elements were recorded onto one channel (I only had my mixer at the time and no audio interface). It just goes to show how far I've come in three years, but also that I have been…
# The new randomelements ep "silver machine" is out now! You can read all about it over on the randomelements site. The title track is on YouTube:
# Subvert launches today Today's the day... Subvert, the cooperative-owned music marketplace, is officially live today! And yours truly is there as a founding member. I have, so far, uploaded a recent selection of releases with plans to upload most of my tracks. Subvert is different. Subvert is for the people, by the people, where every member is part owner. It allows for "member tier" pricing so that you can offer fellow members a reduced price. You don't have to be a member to browse and buy…
