Month: October 2025
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AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
The BBC and EBU did some research and discovered that AI assistants tasked with bringing you news get it right only slightly more-often than they get it wrong, and they get it catastrophically wrong about one time in five. This should be a surprise to nobody.
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Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op!
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Brick building stencilled with SP£ND in two places.
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I reimplemented Al Sweigart's "Pipe Swap" scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP
Refreshheader:https://textplain.blog/scroll-art-viewer/pipe-swap
This was a stupid idea, but it was about the level of code sophistication that my illness-brainfog can handle today.
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Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden.
Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you?
Guy 2: Dunno. But we can't dig round it soo...😬
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Best Viewed at: Your Resolution!
As the latest in a series of stupid things I've done on or for the Web, I've made a website that dynamically generates 'best viewed at' buttons... for exactly the Web visitor's current screen resolution...
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It Is A War Out There - Take Control of Your Supply Lines with HtDTY
Andrew Stephens reminds us to HtDTY (Host the Damn Thing Yourself) to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks and improve privacy. But I think the argument goes further than this.
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The Scroll Art Museum
The Scroll Art Museum demonstrates a surprisingly cool way of generating animation using ASCII art in a scroll buffer and... look, it's just cool, okay? And it inspired me to dust off a copy of QBASIC for a moment, too...
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vole.wtf's 1% guild wasn't the easiest club to gain membership of, but somehow keeping my phone alive for long enough to snap this screenshot was even harder.
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Screenshot from an Android phone at vole.wtf/one-percent, showing a picture of Dan alongside other people.
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Hive's Password Policy Makes Me Cry
Hive's password form can't decide whether you need 8+ or 12+ characters, gives misleading error messages and... requires that you use a 'special character' except most special characters (including most common punctuation) is secretly banned, and gives you a misleading error message if you try to use it. Do better, Hive!
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Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn't sure I'd heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text.
It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three Rings, managed to connect that to my mobile number, and called me.
If Siri's decided that I represent Three, this could work out even worse than that time Google shared my phone number.
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Dogspinner
Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed.
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Lowriders & websites
Praise for a blog post by Adam Stoddard, defending the handcrafting of software even where it serves no direct purpose other than the satisfaction of its creator.
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I'd never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.
They're both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the slow cooker aims to maintain as low a temperature as possible until the food finally cooks itself out of boredom.
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A seared shoulder of pork rubbed with spices sits in a syrupy cider mix atop some sliced white onions in a slow cooker pot.
Anyway, this is going to be pulled pork in like 8-10 hours. 😋
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Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?
David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why...
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Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don't know.
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Slider from a web questionnaire, asking "In a scale of 0 to 10: How likely are you to recommend Flogas for bulk gas?". The slider below, though, is a scale from 0 to 100, not 0 to 10. The value 10 is selected on the slider, but this is only one-tenth of the way along its length.