Month: July 2026
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(Feeling Fucking) Fabulous in Blackpool
This year, MEEK's Fabulous has been stuck on a loop in my head, but I only just got around to watching the music video. Which, to my delight, is shot in the region of what I reckon is Britain's gayest pub crawl. Let's take a tour together...
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I want to write a successful YA fiction where all the characters are boats. Just 'cos I want to see people 'shipping ships.
Also, one of my characters will be called Slash.
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Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that "Chuck Wagon" sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vomit trough. 😂
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Faux Old-West building painted with lettering identifying it as the Chuck Wagon Cafe.
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Contactless Transport in London vs Paris
Paris is rolling-out contactless tap-in payments for its transport network. Sounds like London's... except that Paris's includes a "convenience tax" that seems to disproportionately target short-term visitors. What might this say about each city's relationship with tourism?
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Reply to: This blog is written in en-GB
Terence Eden's blog is (like mine!) unapologetically in en-GB. But maybe his particular cultural references need to be slightly more-specific still?
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"You saved my life!" (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)
A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger.
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An unexpected start to the kids' and I's glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze.
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A static caravan is engulfed in flames behind a dome tent, at night.
(Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)
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Hashcard #2
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!
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Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don't Understand
Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from early in my career...
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The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers
Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly.
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How I (Don't) Collect Blog Statistics
I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.
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A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden's starting to get a little wild, this summer: we've been periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided that this could be the year that it will consume the gate once and for all...
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In a verdant garden, an unkempt hedge of various species grows into the space of a green-painted wooden gate, beginning to hide it.
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I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already.
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Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers?
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach profitability.
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Recreating a 1990 Book Cover (in HTML + CSS)
This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do.