Year: 2024
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Building a Secret Cabinet
As part of efforts to build myself a new bedroom in our attic, I expanded my carpentry, electronics, and Python skills by building a remotely-triggered secret cabinet in my bookcase!
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Ladybird Browser
Y'know how I predicted that we'd never again see a new fully-featured Web browser engine after the death of EdgeHTML? It turns out that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong. And that's brilliant.
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Ranking Every Elevator in the Myst Series
Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today's example comes from this YouTuber who's made an hour long video demonstrating and ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.
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Humans invented Wikipedia, which made accessing information highly-convenient, at the risk of questions about its authenticity1.
Then humans invented GPTs, which made accessing information even more-convenient2 at the expense of introducing hallucinations that can be even harder to verify and check.
Is humanity's long-term plan to invent something that spews complete nonsense that's simultaneously impossible to conclusively deny?3
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Shonky MSPaint-grade graph showing ease of access increasing as ease of verification decreases, with a trend line going through Wikipedia (2001) through ChatGPT (2022) to an unknown future in 2043.
Footnotes
1 I'm well aware that in many subject areas Wikipedia routinely outranks many other sources for accuracy. But the point remains, because you've no idea what the bias of
randomuser123is; even if you check the sources they cite, you don't know what sources they omitted to include. I love Wikipedia, but I can't deny its weaknesses.2 Sure, ChatGPT and friends aren't always more-convenient. But if you need to summarise information from several sources, you might find them a more-suitable tool than those which came before. Why do I feel the need to add so many footnotes to what should have been a throwaway comment?
3 Actually, now I think about it, I'm confident that I can name some politicians who are ahead of the machines, for now.
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Science Weekend
It was a weekend full of science, starting with a visit to the excellent open day at Harwell Campus and a trip to the Diamond Light Synchrotron, and finishing with a series of medical tests on my lungs and why they're not working as well as they ought to. With graphs!
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llswater Steamers and the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway have introduced a season ticket for dogs. And it's called the "Rover" ticket. 😘🤌
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A Stupid Joke About Elephants
It was too hot to sleep, so I learned about how to differentiate species' of elephant from one another instead. And then I thought of a really, really stupid joke, which you now get to experience too...
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Special Roads
Today I learned why some British roads have seemingly-unnecessary speed limit signs, e.g. "70" signs on something that appears to be a motorway.
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ARCC
I've finally reached a point at which I've seen almost everything in ARCC, so it's time for me to shout a glowing review about why you should give it a go , too.
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Power's out yet again at my house (though not for the last reason nor because of our weird wiring: this time it's for tree trimming), so here I am in my favourite coworking-friendly local cafe with The Signal And The Noise (which I've talked about before) in my ears and a whole lot of sprint planning at my fingertips.
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Dan sits at his laptop in a cafe; his phone is playing music to his earbuds.
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Awtomattig
If Automattic had been founded in Wales instead of the USA, it'd probably be called Awtomattig.
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Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters
I've tried a variety of unusual anti-spam solutions. Here's how they worked out for me.
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Woke Kids
The other weekend I took our 10-year-old to her first Pride parade, and she blew my mind with the level of allyship she's already achieved.
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Framing Device
This weekend I repaired an ill-fitting door, which I learned to do by watching my grandfather, over thirty years ago.
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Multi-Phase Maps in FoundryVTT
Using FoundryVTT's powerful API and a little bit of JavaScript code, we can easily produce a battlemap that changes through a series of phases as the adventure progresses. Here's how...