Year: 2026
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This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who's researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.
I'm seeing more and more interest in this period - even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it - as the countercultural "web renaissance" tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.
Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.
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Is midnight in the middle of the night?
Niki wondered whether "midnight" is actually the middle of the night and discovered that it pretty much is. I explain that this is because he's in Berlin, which sits very close (only about 6 minutes out) from the solar UTC+1
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I want my friends to have blogs too
Daniel loves blogs and loves blogging, but wishes that more of the people in his 'real life' blogged too. I get it, Daniel!
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AI is not a person
And it's important to remember that. Chris Ferdinandi has some direct words, and I expand upon them.
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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
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115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what's beneath and whether it's stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody's coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we'll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).
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Several vehicles parked in the rain on the rural residential driveway of 'The Green'.
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So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It
DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search.
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"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm."
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A fawn-coloured French Bulldog wrapped in a blanket in a way reminiscent of robes. This, combined with her wrinkled features, makes her look a little like Yoda.
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F-Day plus 113
It's been 113 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving.
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Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.
Then I realised the method didn't have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn't have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.
But it didn't. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.
Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.
Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.
Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱
Now I've got more work to do.
Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.
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Got to say, it's very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional.
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Screenshot of dropdown field labelled 'Will you will comply with AWS Service Terms and AUP - optional', currently set to 'Yes'. The label is saying that the field is optional, but the joke is that it sounds like complying with the terms of service is optional.
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Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts.
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Note to self: ignore search results that say to install a plugin; the absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation (assuming you're using WP-CLI) is just to run something like:
wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");' -
![Screengrab from a YouTube video showing a white woman with brown-and-red hair saying "please see the FAQs for any questions you have have around deed polls[sic] and the rules." alongside a logo for "Change Names".](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2026/06/changenames-youtube-video-978x480.jpg#29349)
The "ChangeNames.co.uk" Scam
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.
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Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis
Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and flag emoji.