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Year: 2025

  • A man wearing an army beret and a jacket with a pride-rainbow heart on the sleeve plays acoustic guitar on a festival stage.

    Hetero Awesome... Hijacked

    I somehow missed the news from June about Daniel Hamrick, who courageously got on stage to play a anti-transphobia protest song at a 'heterosexual pride' event in one of the most deeply-conservative parts of the USA. Here's the video of his (short!) set.

    Read more (261 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 7 August, 2025
  • "I still get that powerful feeling that anything is possible when I open a web browser โ€” itโ€™s not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but itโ€™s still there." - Geoff Graham

    Read more (107 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 7 August, 2025
  • The rise of Whatever

    A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It's ultimately uplifting, I feel, but it's full of bitterness until it gets there.

    Read more (455 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 6 August, 2025
  • An xternal 33.6kbps serial port dial-up modem.

    Internet Services^H Provider

    When you signed up with an ISP, you used to get Web space, email, shared FTP access, a nearby IRC node, newsgroups, and a software bundle. Nowadays you get a shit router, a voucher for a free month of a streaming service you didn't want, and crap customer service. Where did we go wrong?

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1200 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 6 August, 2025
  • Finished work. Figured I'd chill in the hammock for a bit as it's so nice out.

    The dog decided she wanted to lie in it too.

    So now I am a pillow for a dog.

    Full image of Dan, a middle-aged white man with long hair and a goatee beard, lies on a striped hammock in a verdant garden. He's wearing a t-shirt which says "love" over a ribbon in pride colours, and on his chest lies a contented-looking champagne-coloured French Bulldog.
    Alt

    Dan, a middle-aged white man with long hair and a goatee beard, lies on a striped hammock in a verdant garden. He's wearing a t-shirt which says "love" over a ribbon in pride colours, and on his chest lies a contented-looking champagne-coloured French Bulldog.

    • Note
    • posted 5 August, 2025
  • Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.

    Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.

    The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.

    • Note
    • posted 5 August, 2025
  • In the event of a fire on my bus, I'm concerned that the head of the man sitting in front of me is flammable.

    Full image of On a bus, back abs sides of a man's head. His hat has a label which reads "keep away from fire", but it's hanging out in such a way that it looks like it might be his head that's labelled.
    Alt

    On a bus, back abs sides of a man's head. His hat has a label which reads "keep away from fire", but it's hanging out in such a way that it looks like it might be his head that's labelled.

    • Note
    • posted 3 August, 2025
  • In my first few weeks at my new employer, my code contributions have added 218 lines of code, deleted 2,663. Only one of my PRs has resulted in a net increase in the size of their codebases (by two lines).

    Full image of GitHub change summary showing +218 lines added, -2,663 lines removed.
    Alt

    GitHub change summary showing +218 lines added, -2,663 lines removed.

    I need to pick up the pace if I'm going to reach the ultimate goal of deleting ALL of the code within my lifetime. (That's the ultimate aim, right?)

    • Note
    • posted 1 August, 2025
  • You MUST listen to RFC 2119

    Have you ever wanted to hear a (sarcastic, passive aggressive) dramatic reading of RFC 2119? Eric Bailey - and the actor he found - have got you covered!

    Read more (217 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 1 August, 2025
  • A Castle Built From Random Rooms

    A Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is wonderful!

    Read more (213 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 31 July, 2025
  • On a white plate on a kitchen table, a knife is about to make a first cut to slice a quesapizza that's topped with tomato, cheese, a baked egg, and chilli flakes.

    Quesapizza-pizza

    A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings. A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza... constructed using a quesapizza as its base! Watch me make one in a 90-second timelapse.

    Read more (97 words)

    • Article
    • posted 31 July, 2025
  • A car dashboard with five amber and one red warning lights lit.

    Heterophonic Homonyms

    On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?

    Read more - about 4 minutes (935 words)

    • Article
    • 51 comments
    • posted 30 July, 2025
  • Thanks to the community's invention of a "Region unlocked" achievement, I've been able to instantly (and retroactively!) tick another one off my geohashing list, for my expedition on Trinidad early this year!

    (Possibly I've achieved it other times, too: I haven't yet determined whether anybody successfully hashed in County Mayo or County Galway before I did last year, on account of both counties spanning multiple graticules and so requiring more research!)

    • Note
    • posted 29 July, 2025
  • Academic bibliography, citing six papers related principally to probability. The third paper, highlighted for the picture, is: Lobachevsky, "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds" (Unpublished)

    Do you know the story of how Tom Lehrer hid an Easter Egg in an academic paper he wrote at the NSA, and his joke wasn't discovered for almost six decades?

    Read more (313 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 29 July, 2025
  • A circular tunnel with a flat floor and low ceiling, wrapped in white-painted iron and concrete, with exposed wiring and WWII-era signage, leads deeper into a subterranean bunker past a small guard post in which a figure can barely be seen, reading a book.

    Clapham South Deep Shelter

    This weekend I once again found myself underground beneath London; this time exploring the Camden South Deep Shelter with the help of the Hidden London folks. And it was pretty damn cool.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (496 words)

    • Article
    • posted 28 July, 2025

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