This checkin to GC6RW31 1# Levin kierros reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The second of three caches hunted on this, the final morning of my brief stay in Lapland. Found on the second host I tried. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC!
This checkin to GCBBVQN Magic of Lapland reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
It’s the final morning of my short visit to Sirkka. Having 90 minutes until I need to set off for the airport, I decided to come out for a quick geocaching expedition first.
This was the first cache on my list, and I was so glad to choose it. A truly beautiful and well-maintained cache in a wonderful spot. FP awarded. TFTC!
[09:55 local time]
Second “surprising Finnish confectionary” is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means “green balls”, which doesn’t tell me much.
Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visited) I had to try them, but I couldn’t place the flavour. They were tasty, though. We finished eating them before I looked it up.
Turns out it’s pear flavour, which apparently I have a blind spot for (back in 2013 at an “eat mystery food in the dark” restaurant I failed to identify that I was eating poached pears for dessert).
Now I need to be on the lookout for actual green balls.
Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn’t have been surprised (given the country’s love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured.
And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was.
(Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.)
This checkin to GCAC54Z Aquarium reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
[13:16 local time]
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Layoutit Terra is a CSS terrain generator that leverages stacked grids and 3D transforms.
Inspectable spikes, wedges, ramps and flats are stitched together into a voxel landscape.
Inspired by Transport Tycoon and all ’90s isometric classics.
Built from the southern hemisphere with Vue, Nuxt, and lots of love ♥
+------+ +------+ /| /| |\ |\ +-+----+ | | +----+-+ | | | | | | | | | +----+-+ +-+----+ | |/ |/ \| \| +------+ +------+…
It’s not often these days that I have the experience of “I didn’t know the Web could do that‽”
Once was when I saw DHTML Lemmings, for example, at a time when adding JavaScript to a page usually meant you were doing nothing more-sophisticated than adding a tooltip/popover or switching the images in your mystery meat navigation menu. Another was when I saw Google Earth’s browser-based implementation for the first time, performing 3D manipulations of a quality that I’d previously only seen in dedicated applications.
But I got that today when I played with Layoutit! Terra (from the folks behind one of the better CSS grid layout generators). It’d be pretty cool if it were “just” a Transport Tycoon-like landscape generator and editor, but the thing that blew my mind was discovered that it’s implemented entirely in HTML and CSS… not a line of JavaScript to be seen. Even speaking as somebody who played… and then reverse-engineered… things like Blackle Mori’s CSS Puzzle Box, I can’t even begin to fathom how I’d begin to conceive of such a thing, let alone implement it.
Well done, Layitout! team.
Good morning Lapland!
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Subject: “Re-Design and Promotion Strategy for Dead.Garden”
Subject: “About your Dead.Garden”
Subject: “Errors in your Dead.Garden”Dear Dead,
your website is not good enough, in fact, it is actively bad.
Don’t you know that you need Search Engine Optimization?
What are you, some kind of idiot?
Your site is currently ranked on page 1,000,000 of Google,
and if we know anything (in fact, we know everything),
this means that you are wasting not only your time,
but much more importantly
money.
We’ve had a quick look at your site
and noticed a few areas that could be improved.
We’ve discovered that your website’s UI is,
frankly,
complete ass.
Your mobile experience is bad, your CTAs should be shinier and rounder;
Maybe put a gradient here and there.
How are you ever going to get someone to buy your product
without manipulating their behaviour?You’re not selling anything?
Well then, what ARE you doing?…
A fantastic poem that feels exactly like the subtext of every one of these emails I ever receive.
My blog is for me, first and foremost; I suspect Jo feels a similar way about their digital garden. I’m not interested in making money with it, and I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that it costs me money. These things are all fine. I don’t need an SEO merchant to tell me how they can improve it.
Anyway: go enjoy Jo’s poem.
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or, how to fuck your shit up by ignoring obvious birthday inflammation symptoms. don’t be like me. seek help.
sorry for this barely scripted and low quality video, the next one will be worse.
special thanks to doctor jacobi for the excellent care, and to the manna charitable foundation for the flight logistics.
The ever-excellent Blackle Mori1 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.
1 If the name’s familiar but you can’t quite place it, here’s the previous two times I’ve talked about Blackle’s work: my analysis of the construction of the Basilisk Collection, and the (now-famous) Cursed Computer Iceberg.
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New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.
…
Key findings:
- 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
- 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
- 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
…
In what should be as a surprise to nobody, but probably still is (and is probably already resulting in AI fanboys coming up with counterpoints and explanations): AI is not an accurate way for you to get your news.
(I mean: anybody who saw Apple Intelligence’s AI summaries of news probably knew this already, but it turns out that it gets worse.)
There are problems almost half the time and “major accuracy issues” a fifth of the time.
I guess this is the Universe’s way of proving that people getting all of their news from Facebook wasn’t actually the worst timeline to live in, after all. There’s always a worse one, it turns out.
…
Separately, the BBC has today published research into audience use and perceptions of AI assistants for News. This shows that many people trust AI assistants to be accurate – with just over a third of UK adults saying that they trust AI to produce accurate summaries, rising to almost half for people under-35.
…
Personally, I can’t imagine both caring enough about a news item to want to read it and not caring about it enough that I feed it into an algorithm that, 45% of the time, will mess it up. It’s fine to skip the news stories you don’t want to read. It’s fine to skim the ones you only care about a little. It’s even fine to just read the headline, so long as you remember that media biases are even easier to hide from noncritical eyes if you don’t even get the key points of the article.
But taking an AI summary and assuming it’s accurate seems like a really wild risk, whether before or after this research was published!
Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op!
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.
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…
😬
Way back in the day, websites sometimes had banners or buttons (often 88×31 pixels, for complicated historical reasons) to indicate what screen resolution would be the optimal way to view the site. Just occasionally, you still see these today.
Folks who were ahead of the curve on what we’d now call “responsive design” would sometimes proudly show off that you could use any resolution, in the same way as they’d proudly state that you could use any browser1!
I saw a “best viewed at any size” 88×31 button recently, and it got me thinking: could we have a dynamic button that always shows the user’s current resolution as the “best” resolution. So it’s like a “best viewed at any size” button… except even more because it says “whatever resolution you’re at… that’s perfect; nice one!”
Turns out, yes2:
Anyway, I’ve made a website: best-resolution.danq.dev. If you want a “Looks best at [whatever my visitor’s screen resolution is]” button, you can get one there.
It’s a good job I’ve already done so many stupid things on the Web, or this would make me look silly.
1 I was usually in the camp that felt that you ought to be able to access my site with any browser, at any resolution and colour depth, and get an acceptable and satisfactory experience. I guess I still am.
2 If you’re reading this via RSS or have JavaScript disabled then you’ll probably see an “any size” button, but if you view it on the original page with JavaScript enabled then you should see your current browser inner width and height shown on the button.
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This post advocates minimizing dependencies in web pages that you do not directly control. It conflates dependencies during build time and dependencies in the browser. I maintain that they are essentially the same thing, that both have the same potential problems, and that the solution is the snappy new acronym HtDTY – Host the Damn Thing Yourself.
…
If your resources are large enough to cause a problem if you Host the Damn Things Yourself then consider finding ways to cut back on their size. Or follow my related advice – HtDToaSYHaBRW IMCYMbT(P)WDWYD : Host the Damn Thing on a Service You Have A Business Relationship With, It May Cost You Money But They (Probably) Won’t Dick With Your Data.
…
Host the Damn Thing Yourself (HtDTY) is an excellent suggestion; I’ve been a huge fan of the philosophy for ages, but I like this acronym. (I wish it was pronounceable, but you can’t have everything.)
Andrew’s absolutely right, but I’m not even sure he’s expressed all the ways in which he’s right. Here are my reasons to HtDTY, especially for frontend resources:
So yeah: HtDTY. I dig it.