Category: Personal
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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.
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How to Set Up Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account in 2026
James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this.
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My piano came home from the hospital
Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it!
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Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?
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Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you...)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
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Grïgnyr the Ecordian by Geoff Bottone
I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement.
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I bought a Sony Walkman
Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful.
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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me!
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Exploiting Thoughtcrime in LLMs
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too...
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Taking A Dive
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well.
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Trouble brewing at the village carnival's decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance.
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A cardboard longship collides with an X wing in a grassy field.
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A postcard from a distant friend
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!
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You don't have to blog like me
You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here.