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Year: 2025

  • Wrapped up in warm hats and scarves, Dan and a tweenage girl stand in the snowy street of a Lapland town.

    Found GCAC54Z Aquarium

    QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

    Read more - about 1 minutes (18 words)

    • Checkin
    • to GCAC54Z
    • posted 27 October, 2025
  • Screenshot from Layoutit! Terra showing an isometric view of a gridded temperate landscape alongside controls to tweak the amount of land, terrain type, etc.

    Layitout! Terra is a CSS-only implementation of a customisable Transport Tycoon-like terrain generator, and it's left me impressed and confused!

    Read more (255 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 27 October, 2025
  • Good morning Lapland!

    Full image of

    • Note
    • posted 26 October, 2025
  • You've got mail

    Jo of Dead.Garden wrote a poem, seemingly inspired by a particular variety of spam email, that I really enjoyed.

    Read more (243 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 25 October, 2025
  • A white person with long black hair sits in a a room with fairy lights and a foil curtain, making a 'grabbing' gesture to the camera.

    The Reason I Have 12 Birthdays

    The ever-excellent Blackle Mori posted this about 18 months ago but I don't think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you've never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it's an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.

    Read more (147 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 24 October, 2025
  • 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.

    Read more (407 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 23 October, 2025
  • Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op!

    Full image of Brick building stencilled with SPΒ£ND in two places.
    Alt

    Brick building stencilled with SPΒ£ND in two places.

    • Note
    • 1 comment
    • posted 23 October, 2025
  • I reimplemented Al Sweigart's "Pipe Swap" scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP Refresh header:

    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.

    • Note
    • posted 20 October, 2025
  • 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...

    😬

    • Note
    • 1 comment
    • posted 19 October, 2025
  • Screenshot of a website that says it's best viewed at a resolution of 1382Γ—958 pixels, which is a pretty weird resolution!

    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...

    Read more (272 words)

    • Article
    • posted 18 October, 2025
  • One the left, how you see your code. On the right, the reality - a mixture of library code and what you wrote

    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.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (527 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 15 October, 2025
  • A wall of ASCII art skulls in white text on black, with large ASCII art hearts superimposed above them.

    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...

    Read more (314 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 15 October, 2025
  • 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.

    Full image of Screenshot from an Android phone at vole.wtf/one-percent, showing a picture of Dan alongside other people.
    Alt

    Screenshot from an Android phone at vole.wtf/one-percent, showing a picture of Dan alongside other people.

    • Note
    • posted 14 October, 2025
  • A password form with the password S1dfCeg7!Ex;C$Ngban9-A entered; an error message shows 'Your password must be at least 12 characters log, contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and one special character'

    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!

    Read more - about 3 minutes (650 words)

    • Article
    • 3 comments
    • posted 14 October, 2025
  • 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.

    • Note
    • posted 14 October, 2025

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