Blog
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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.
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Screenshot from an Android phone at vole.wtf/one-percent, showing a picture of Dan alongside other people.
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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!
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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.
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Dogspinner
Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed.
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Lowriders & websites
Praise for a blog post by Adam Stoddard, defending the handcrafting of software even where it serves no direct purpose other than the satisfaction of its creator.
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I'd never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.
They're both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the slow cooker aims to maintain as low a temperature as possible until the food finally cooks itself out of boredom.
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A seared shoulder of pork rubbed with spices sits in a syrupy cider mix atop some sliced white onions in a slow cooker pot.
Anyway, this is going to be pulled pork in like 8-10 hours. 😋
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Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?
David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why...
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Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don't know.
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Slider from a web questionnaire, asking "In a scale of 0 to 10: How likely are you to recommend Flogas for bulk gas?". The slider below, though, is a scale from 0 to 100, not 0 to 10. The value 10 is selected on the slider, but this is only one-tenth of the way along its length.
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Whenever I'm writing a rhyme,
I can't do the third and fourth line.
Dah-de-da-dah-duh,
Dah-de-de-dah-duh.
But somehow it still works out fine. -
Impossible Countdown
Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a few minutes thought... because it turns out computers aren't always the right answer!
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I'm looking at a listing for a ¼" to ⅝" screw adapter, for which the seller warns that I should "please allow 1-3cm error".
A 3cm error would mean that a ⅝" screw could result in a screw thread anywhere between 1⅘" and... minus half an inch, I guess? (I don't even know how to make the concept of negative lengths fit into my brain.)
I suppose this seller could send me an empty envelope and declare that it contained an infinitesimally small adapter. At which point... I'd be the one that was screwed!
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Highlighted item description from an eBay listing. The highlighted section shows that the listing is for a quarter inch to a five-eighth of an inch adapter made of a premium aluminium alloy, and that the buyer should "please allow 1-3cm error due to manual measurement".
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Egencia Mailing List Accessibility
A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia's mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the "unsubscribe all" one isn't. Click the words "unsubscribe all" and... nothing happens.
But it gets better: try keyboard-navigating through the form, and it's hard not to unsubscribe from everything, even if you didn't want to! As soon as the "unsubscribe all" checkbox gets focus, you get instantly unsubscribed: no interaction necessary. -
The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh
Cory Doctorow paints a bleak picture of the future world economy in the aftermath of the bursting of the AI bubble. I agree that we're in a bubble, but I'm slightly more-optimistic that we can survive it without a total economic catastrophe.
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We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo.
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog in a teal jumper lies in a soft brown dog bed in the corner of an office. She looks over her shoulder at the photographer, her tongue sticking pretty-much entirely out in a long blep. In front of her, a handwritten sign is marked with a pawprint and a heart and the words 'Happy Bleptember 2025! See you next year!'
Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year!
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Somehow, even when she's alert and focussed, our dog's bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey.
It's the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we're almost done for another year!
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog, with her tongue sticking our, sits upright in a dog bed in the corner of an office.