After seeking (and finding, surprisingly) the 2026-09-13 51 -1 geohashpoint down in the Brook Hill nature reserve, the
geohound and I came to try to find this cache, too. After finding the correct way into the nature reserve (access from Verinia Court now being disallowed, apparently) we quickly found
the relevant board and, after pushing some plants aside, found the requisite six digit number.
A short walk later we found a solid candidate hiding spot that matched the hint, but an extended search in and around it yielded nothing. Possibly my geosense is off this morning (in my
defence, I got stung in the crotch by a wasp about 20 minutes ago!) or maybe this cache is missing. Either way, a DNF from the pupper and I today.
I woke early after a series of nightmares about having to move house yet again (I’ve done that a
lot, this year, on account of the flood that rendered my house uninhabitable in February), except this
time the house we moved into was occupied by some kind of bear-like monster that chased me around the place.
Anyway: having woken up I decided to take the dog out for a walk, and I noticed that the hashpoint up here in Woodstock might be accessible. The maps show it as being not in
the nature reserve but in what could be the gardens of the nearby houses, so this might all come to naught.
Expedition
The dog and I parked at Union Street Car Park and set out on our walk. I’d originally anticipated entering the nature reserve via a footpath marked from Brook Hill, but when we got
there I discovered a “danger – no entry” sign. I decided to ignore it – it was probably there back from when this valley flooded, and wasn’t relevant any more. Tempting fate, I moved to
walk past it, snapping a photo of the sign on the way.
This is all I managed to capture of the sign, though, because something distracted me…
That’s when I noticed the wasps. Lots of them, buzzing around a nearby tree. Probably their nest was nearby and they were coming over to investigate me and decide whether or not I was a
threat (I don’t think they were the reason for the danger sign!). In any case, this is where the next problem began: I have a hole in the crotch of the trousers I’m wearing.
It’s not a big hole, but it turns out that it didn’t need to be.
It turns out that a wasp had managed to fly up inside the groin area of my trousers and I didn’t notice until… it got partially-squished between the sensitive parts on the
inside of my inner thigh… and the even-more-sensitive parts next to them! I became aware of a sharp stinging sensation, and then another, and it quickly became a burning sensation as I
swatted at my legs to try to liberate, or else kill, the monster. Meanwhile, all of the wasp’s friends were now heading my way, providing reinforcements for their companion.
So I ran.
The doggo had a great time and couldn’t tell what I was complaining about.
The dog and I had to sprint deep into the woods before we were sure that none of the little bastards were still following us. I’d been working on adrenaline (and the dog had been
working on her general desire to run around and be crazy), and hadn’t noticed until I was able to slow down quite how unpleasant my sore and swollen parts were as they rubbed against
one another. Ugh.
Do not recommend.
We regrouped by a stream and found our bearings. We’d come some way from our intended course, but I plotted a series of paths that would take us close, and the pupper and I
bravely pressed on.
Refilling the tanks.
Soon we were close to the hashpoint and I observed to my delight that it lay in what seemed to be a no-mans-land; a deeply-overgrown patch between the nature reserve and the nearby
housing estate. The undergrowth would be too much for the doggo’s little legs, so I left her behind and pushed on alone for the final hundred metres, stomping through swampy conditions
and brambles as I approached the coordinates.
The hashpoint is somewhere near the centre of this image, next to a tree.
After some stomping around, Geohashdroid was able to draw a small circle of uncertainty within which the hashpoint clearly lay.
I can’t manage a silly grin. Will a silly grimace do?
I hacked my way back to the dog (who was happily living her best life, pretending to be a wild wolf, living in the forest) and we made our way home via an attempt at a nearby geocache and checking and updating some OpenBenches data.
Proof, thanks to Geohashdroid.
A success, but not one without a significant amount of pain. I can’t believe I’m saying this but: from personal experience, I do not recommend using your genitals to crush
wasps.
Tracklog
My primary GPSr’s been missing since… my house flood, I think. But I was able to use the fitness tracker in my watch for a decent GPS tracklog.
This piece of experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated
changes to an established codebase.
If you’ve got the time, it’s worth playing right the way to the “end”. I hope you like blue (you’re going to be talking about it a lot)!
I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made:
I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs…
I loved this post when I saw it earlier this year, but only just got around to sharing it. I’d highly recommend visiting the full post to see the full list of features that this laptop
has, according to Chad’s 7-year-old (and the laptop’s inventor). I especially love the ghost/no-ghost buttons.
A network of circles, linked together and covered with ones and zeroes. And the zeroes are crossed-through in what the kid, almost a decade on, still refers to as “programmer-style”.
Excellent. It’s one of my favourite pieces of child-art ever and it’s framed on the landing outside my bedroom (the one in my still-being-rebuiltreal house, not the damn Chicory House I’m so sick of living in).
Anyway, Chad’s son’s laptop is brilliant and now I want a “ghost” button on my laptop.
Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.
…
Matt Mullenweg is out
This morning’s been full of the media coverage that Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress and founder of (my former employer) Automattic, has been ousted from his CEO position at Automattic by his board. The article linked
above is my favourite so far; there are plenty more (or, if you prefer drama, go look on Twitter or Reddit 🤮).
I think this is probably for the best. I’ve previously observed that Automattic has been a ship on fire for a while,
and – both for the last few years that I was employed by him, and even more since then – Matt has seemed… distracted and unfocussed. There’ve been huge challenges (some of his own
making, admittedly) in both his professional and personal life, and I’d like to imagine that it’s these that led to him making the many… questionable… decisions he’s made over the last
few years. I’ve been concerned that he’s leaned-away from open source commitments, over-focussed on lawsuits and AI, and opened his mouth without turning on his brain (something we’ve
all done from time to time, but it’s a problem when doing so lands you – or your company – in hot water with the community, the media, the law, or – heaven help you –
Tumblrites).
This is good for Automattic
So yeah: I think this can only be good for Automattic, in the long term. I hope that my friends who still work there don’t find the inevitable upcoming shake-up too painful and
dramatic. And I hope that this whole thing does not lead to any… further weaponisation of the WordPress project (which remains closely under Matt’s
control, even as Automattic does not).
But mostly… I hope that Matt gets the help and support that I think he needs. His sabbatical the other year included “a lot of solo
time and introspection”, but perhaps that’s not the right answer this time.
This is good for Matt
I’ve corresponded with Matt on a few occasions (occasionally even publicly e.g. here’s him reblogging me; here’s him graffifi’ing on this blog). As a very early WordPress adopter, back in the day I exchanged emails with him and
talked to him on IRC (I remember one time we argued about HTML vs XHTML; in hindsight, he was right on that one). It’s funny: I used a different name back
then and so I don’t imagine he ever made the connection that it was the same “me” on the rare opportunities that we connected on Slack when – many years later on – I was his
employee!
But my point there is that: for a while, at least, it felt like once upon a time, his heart was in the right place. Which makes me feel like all of his problematic behaviour
and questionable choices and acting-out is a result of his environment. A lot of big-tech CEOs seem to get kinda… weird and paranoid and right-wing (if they weren’t already: some of
them, of course, were!): maybe the toxicity of the environment erodes at a person who was once well-meaning-but-flawed and turns them into something else.
This should be seen as an intervention
To that end, I optimistically see his removal as CEO as… perhaps a kind of intervention? I think it’s good that he’s been ousted (although I wish he could have done it
himself). I think it’ll benefit Automattic in the long run. And I hope that it’ll be good for Matt, too. I hope that he’ll take six… twelve… twenty-four months – whatever it takes – and
work out what went wrong. Get some therapy. Write some code (really write it; not get an AI to do it). Play some music. Get some more therapy.
Until he can unpick where his life diverged from that of the WordPress community, the feeling in Automattic, and his younger-self’s idealism… I don’t think he should be in charge of
Automattic.
Automattic has a “take what you need” leave policy, and Matt needs to use it. I’m sorry that he couldn’t see that for himself and that he had to be
forced to… but in my opinion: it’s the right thing.
Incidentally, this blog post… was proudly written on ClassicPress.
I’m… honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there’s a list view available too). And ‘pixel’ seems to
be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my ‘pixel’ comprises… 169 pixels). It’s got a little bit of a “million dollar homepage” (remember that) feel to it… though at least it’s not
operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it’s home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it’s a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it’s “space” and hop to neighbours?)
So… yeah; I’m undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
People complain about Firefox. The most recent grievance is the addition of AI features in the browser, and they will tell you they’re switching to another browser as a result.
I’m here to tell you not to do it.
At best, that person switched to a fork of Firefox, which still depends on the same browser engine. But the worst case scenario is a browser based on Blink and Chromium.
Firefox is the last major independent browser engine1. The web is a vibrant commons because of browser engine diversity. Multiple engines serve as a
check on power and support the wide review process that underpins standards work on the
web.
…
Ramkumar is right. This is a drum I’ve been beating ever since EdgeHTML got pulled out of Edge, which effectively represented a one-third
reduction in real-world browser diversity. It’s more-important than ever that Firefox continues to be used, continues to exist, continues to thrive.
I mean: it’s a perfectly good browser too! I use it as my daily driver on all of my devices and I love it. But even if it weren’t for that, I’d still be pushing people towards Firefox
because the Internet needs it to exist. If it stops existing, or even reaches a level of technical irrelevance, then Google gains an unprecedented level of control over
the direction of the Web… which – even despite their monopoly abuses via Google Search and other integrations – they’ve shown they can’t be trusted with: consider how they (yet again) exempted themselves from their own privacy controls this week, or else look back over
technologies they’ve strongarmed onto the Web, benefitting themselves at the
expense of the Web, like FLoC and AMP, or else look at the gradual enshittification of their browser – which no longer supports deep integration by
adblockers – or of the Android operating system – which you’re getting locked-out of this year.
So yeah. Use Firefox. You can keep a Blink/WebKit-based browser for secondary purposes, like for when you’re saving battery on a MacBook (I’d use Safari) or for when
you want to use a badly-implemented application that thinks it requires Chrome (I’d use Edge). But making Firefox – or failing that, a fork of it that meets your needs, maybe Waterfox
or LibreWolf – your daily driver is one of the single easiest things you can do to help keep the Web free and open.
And you get some cool perks on the side, like mobile plugins (uBlock on mobile… yes please!), better tab management (and adding Multi-Account Containers is life-changing!), stronger privacy protection, lower RAM usage, etc. So yeah: use Firefox.
AI peaked in 20141
with the invention of the Taco Bot 30002.
With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see
again3.
Footnotes
1 Yes, Taco Bot’s song
came out in 2019, teaching us about the far-reaching capabilities of this high-powered platform, but a prototype Taco Bot with a reduced featureset was seen in 2014’s Raining Tacos.
2 Is it AI? The term gets thrown-around a lot nowadays and refers to a lot of different
technologies, let’s not forget that that’s always been the case. Was the El Ajedrecista machine (1914) AI?
Arguably, yes: even though it was effectively using a ruleset, it achieved its goal of exhibiting a behaviour that had previously been argued to be demonstrative of human
intelligence, and beyond the capability of an automaton (consider also the Nimatron from 1940). Looking for something
less-deterministic? The Ising Model (1920) could be argued to have been the first neural net. It didn’t attempt to “act” in a
way that most humans think of when they consider “AI”, but it used fundamentally the same model as future artificial neural nets did. By 1950, Turing and von Neumann had laid-out
more-concrete definitions of machine “thought”, some of which had, at least conceptually, already been demonstrated by the above examples, but if you don’t consider response
precomputation a valid AI strategy, then consider Prinz’s Chess (1951) which calculated on-the-fly
solutions. Or if your view on AI is sufficiently narrow that you only consider a “chatbot” to count, let’s not forget that ELIZA got there in 1965. My point is that there’s a whole lot of things that can and have been legitimately called AI, and a
walking, talking, bad-guy-fighting, taco-dispensing robot might certainly count, in my mind.
3 By which I mean to say, the Raining Tacos saga by Parry Gripp (whom you’ve almost certainly come across either from his silly videos or else because he performed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer
theme song) finally came to an end in April of this year after taking 14 years to release 9 short songs. If you blinked and
missed the last decade and a half of Internet wackiness, go watch the director’s cut of the whole thing, which came out last
month.
Roald Dahl does not use fronted adverbials for time and coordinating conjunctions, he deliberately makes his work simple and frenetic, the stream of consciousness of a curious child
, the turbocharged imagination of youth in prose it can easily understand.
…
To Tories, Art Is Not Proper. Grammar is Proper.
Of course, this handily explains the move towards metrics obsession in the UK, but this is a long term phenomenon that predates Michael Gove. Our education system was advocated for
and partially financed by industrialists, who saw that teaching the necessary mathematical and numerical skills to perform middle management tasks could be funded by the taxpayer.
This is in the bones of our education system, the set structure. Metrics obsession isn’t just a class thing, it’s factory floor thinking. Everything must be quantified in terms of
output, you are performing mock standardised tests every 6 weeks from the age of 8.
…
A political but fair look at the mass-production standardisation of English-language education in British schools. In an effort to make work measurable and objectively assessable, it
argues, we’re stripping the joy out of the art of writing.
Having seen the kinds of things our children are assessed on at school, it’s a reasonable hypothesis.
I’m still lagging way-behind on writing-up the nonfiction I’ve been reading this year, and I’m long
overdue1 to share my love of
Holly Gramazio‘s debut novel, The Husbands. Which is excellent; truly
un-put-downable. I’d come across Holly’s writing before by playing Dicey Dungeons, but I hadn’t realised that until later when,
four chapters into this book, I decided to look her up (in the hope, perhaps, that she’d written any other books I could add to my reading list – the answer is… not yet).
Here’s the skinny. Lauren comes home from a night out to find her husband waiting for her. Which is immediately confusing and concerning, because when she left for the evening, she
wasn’t married. But all the evidence suggests that now, somehow, mysteriously, she has a husband: she finds letters addressed to the pair of them, her phone is full of photos of them
together going back through their wedding and beyond, and all of her friends back up the fact that she really has made a life with this man… that she just can’t remember.
But the weirder bit she discovers a little later. Whenever her husband goes up into the attic, he’s replaced with a different husband. A different man, it seems, that
she could conceivably have married, in some strange alternate timeline. By controlling how and when they do so, she comes to discover that she can cycle through a
seemingly-endless supply of husbands, and as she comes to accept and understand her new life, begins to use this as a kind-of… dating superpower? “Trying on” a husband for
as many minutes, hours, days, or months it takes to decide whether or not to “keep” him2.
That’s the premise, and it’s perfectly fun (although occasionally dark) – sort of a parody of “swipe-left/swipe-right” modern dating, taken to an extreme – but wouldn’t by itself be
reason enough to recommend it. But what comes next is what makes it so special.
Aaand… I feel like I can’t say more without spoiling it. And you really should read it! Suffice to say that the writing is compelling, and engaging, and there are plenty sufficient
twists and turns to keep you interested even if you wouldn’t normally go in for… what I’m going to describe as a romantic-comedy. Our protagonist’s situation feels relatable
even while it’s unfamiliar, and I enjoyed both laughing at her exploits while also grieving her losses. And again: the surprises and quirks are really fun.
As far as I can tell, www.google.com is the only site exempted by Chrome. Looking inside the ~/Library/Application
Support/Google/Chrome/Default folder, it appears that the saved site data consists of Cookies, Local Storage, and Session Storage.
..
I wish the government would move fast and break up the Google Search monopoly. Don’t even get me started about how when you’re not signed in to Google, all Google Search results are
now opaque https://www.google.com/goto?url= garbage rather than the site URLs!
So yeah: Google have (not for the first time, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise) nerfed the privacy features of their own browser. Now it only fully respects the user’s privacy wishes
when the user isn’t accessing a Google product. So when they use Google Search, GMail, Google Maps, YouTube, or – I suppose – any website with Google Analytics installed…
the user’s privacy settings might not be respected.
I increasingly struggle to understand why so many folks use Chrome as their daily driver: it feeds the monopoly of Google, who time and time again show that they’re not trustworthy with
that power. Meanwhile, if you really need Chrome-compatibility, there are no shortage
of Chromium-powered browsers to meet every need. There is no need to specifically use Chrome, and doing so supports unethical digital surveillance by the world’s
eighth-largest company.
HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.
Which I’m reminded of as I write about progress on our house repairs following the flood that swept through our home on Friday 13 February… 204 days ago. Because that’s how the summer’s repairs have felt: No updates. Nothing to say.
It was already pretty jarring to return from an epic holiday and get back into work-mode. But it was doubly-regrettable to discover that
the various tradespeople who’d been given access to our house in our absence had done… pretty-much nothing.
No work done. And also: no update messages. Everything had just… stopped.
I tell a lie: the restoration of the kitchen floor – a one-day task that didn’t block any of the other next-tasks on the list – happened at the start of August.
So we gathered the builders and the loss adjuster and demanded an update. Sometimes you just have to step up and say “hey, what the fuck guys, are we ever gonna get to move back into
our house?”
It turns out there’d been a few blockers. The contractor who’d been sourced to lay the new underfloor screed in the living room and library had not turned up. The new tiles that would
replace the flooring across the ground floor were still being quarried. The electrical work had complexities that had caused it to overrun be split into two visits, separated by the
electricians’ other contracts.
When I visited this week the living room’s condition was identical to how it had looked six weeks prior. Sigh.
Which is frustrating, of course, but it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of communication.
Anyway: our meeting with the various parties led to a new timeline, and it optimistically proposes that we might be able to move back into our home as soon as November… so, F-Day plus
262 through 291, I guess? Here’s hoping. (Obviously any update will make it into my now long-running series of posts about our experience of getting
flooded-out.)
We’re really keen to be back home by Christmas. The Chicory House is okay as temporary accommodation but there are plenty of things I dislike about it, and I’m ready to move back into our actual house now, thanks.
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content,
David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more
personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
…
In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between
that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to
trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they
a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds
of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the
intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
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