The Walkman is the Sony WM-EX521 from 2002, which is a pretty late model. It’s not one of the classics from the 80s, but I really
like the design, the case is made out of metal so it looks and feels really solid and with it being relatively young, I don’t expect too many problems. In fact, I had a suspicion
that the only thing that was wrong with it might be the belt. Tape drives have rubber belts in them which link the motor with the tape mechanism, and these wear out over time. They
can become loose or lose their elasticity, some break and some also try to turn themselves back into crude oil, which leaves a giant mess behind.
So when the Walkman arrived, I opened the back to see how it looked on the inside, which required putting it on a heat plate for a few minutes to soften the adhesive, and then I
could carefully insert a plastic tool between the frame and the back cover and start prying… nah, I’m kidding. This was made before all of that nonsense. You take out five screws
and you’re in. Which is how it should be.
Anyway, I took the back off, stuck a battery in, pressed play and I could see that the motor was spinning, but the belt was loose and wasn’t moving. Suspicion confirmed, the belt
was bad. Thankfully it was just worn out and hadn’t disintegrated yet, so that’s an easy fix.
I ordered a new belt here, which arrived a few days later from Portugal, and replaced the old one. I also sprayed some contact cleaner into
the volume potentiometer while I was at it, because it sounded very noisy and scratchy. Here are some pictures, and you can see the old, worn out belt next to the new one. It’s
literally twice as long! No wonder it wasn’t working anymore.
…
This entire post is amazing. Every step Andreas takes, from selecting and buying an (old) Walkman, to repairing its belt, to using the (known) frequency of the first note of a song to
“tune” it by recalibrating the speed control potentiometer while playing into a guitar tuner app… feels like you’re being taken along on the journey with him.
I really enjoy Andreas’ writing style and posts, so I’ll be adding him to the blogroll. A delightful and serendipitous find (courtesy of Bubbles).
On March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time. In March, they did the spring forward one hour with their clocks to
UTC-7, but they won’t fall back to UTC-8 in November. Going forward, the UTC offset for America/Vancouver timezone is permanently UTC-7.
Let’s use this as an opportunity to talk about date and time zone storage. In the most basic examples, the default is to store the UTC value, then calculate local time relative to
UTC. However, people using calendar systems think in terms of local time (i.e. wall clock time), and never consider UTC. After modifying time zone data, these time calculations from
UTC for a region will differ from the user’s input value.
If you stored timestamps in a UTC-based column for British Columbia-based appointment in 2026 and beyond, your November through March appointments may be off by an
hour!
…
A fascinating read into a problem that I knew existed… and fear!
This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night every time I expand on Three Rings‘ timezone support. Right
now, Three Rings stores the times of “shifts” (when volunteers do things) as UTC timestamps but treats them as “local time” to the voluntary organisation
using them. If they say a shift starts at 8pm, that’s probably what they mean: they mean 8pm local time, no matter where they happen to be in the world and whether or not their region
uses daylight saving time.
But this approach, while simple, has limitations:
Three Rings doesn’t correctly respect shift duration variance as a result of daylight saving time clock changes. Suppose a Samaritans branch has a four-hour
shift starting at midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Twice a year, that shift will intersect with the clocks going forwards or backwards. Is it still a “four hour” shift? Well
that depends: does the volunteer stay for four hours regardless of the clock change, or do they always go home at 4am? Three Rings assumes the former
because it’s mathematically simpler, but in reality the latter is probably true (and the volunteer actually worked three or five hours).
Three Rings isn’t suited to organisations that span multiple timezones. When an Australian charity started using Three Rings they were
interested in getting an overview of how many of their helplines – which are spread across three to four timezones (depending on whether daylight saving is in effect: half of
central Australia observes daylight savings and half doesn’t!) – are open at any given time. Three Rings currently isn’t designed in a way to make it easy to answer that
question.
Three Rings makes some suboptimal choices if you’re a long way from the Prime Meridian. This one’s easier to fix, and we probably will,
but if you’re far from the UK and especially if you’re West of the UK then our scheduled tasks to e.g. “lock” shifts that appear to have “started” and prevent their easy modification…
triggers at the wrong time.
Items 1 and 2 on that list are hard problems to solve, especially starting from where we are with our vast corpus of 24 years worth of “assumed local” time data. We’re
improving on this kind of thing by increments, but it takes a while…
…and then, just sometimes, some country decides to fiddle with its timezone or its observance of daylight saving time and makes programmers’ lives hell.
Still; I’ll be referring to this blog post by Christopher Winslett the next time I’m working on a big set of timezone-related enhancements for Three Rings, for sure!
I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche
blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the
heat!).
Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a
traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the
blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!
You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript.
…
Machines get the clean version.
I enjoy this take. If there’s a “clean version”: something simpler, easier to read, lower-bandwidth… why aren’t we giving that to the humans in the first place!
Though I’ll tell you what: if this pattern becomes widespread, I’ll absolutely use (or implement!) a browser plugin that spoofs being an LLM, so that I can
get the clean content, and then Markdown-to-HTML converts it back so my browser can display the “readable” version of the page.
And what a world that would be. Humans, pretending to be robots, that pretend to be humans! We live in interesting times.
I’ve stopped thinking that’s the right question. The better one: do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?
Clock 1: can costs fall fast enough, soon enough?
Clock 2: will the money last long enough?
Clock 3: does real demand arrive fast enough to replace the circular kind?
Bull and bear mostly agree the technology is real. They disagree on the clocks.
…
A relatively balanced discussion on the economic prospects of GenAI. Of course, the author attracts responses on… 😬 Twitter… so I’m not replying there. But I enjoyed the relative
neutrality of Emile’s piece.
I’m not sure, of course, whether asking about the economic stability of GenAI is the right question in the first place. It sort of presupposes that it’s a net good (note that I
didn’t say “has value”: there are definitely things it’s useful for), right, to ask whether it’s something that we can afford to pay to keep around?
Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he
programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters.
…
OMG I remember Matt’s Script Archive. I taught myself Perl with (among other things) his scripts.
I took his Counter/ImageCounter script and adapted it into my own FireCounter, which stitched together (non-animated) GIFs of digits (which I made using a filter in Corel Photo-Paint, I
think) into the kinds of edgy hit counter I was into, back in the day.
This is a recreation. It probably looks better than the original!
Later, I even added parameter handling to allow the webmaster to specify a different set of digit images, and referrer detection so that it could track different sites:
each got its own text file with its count in it! For a while, a dozen or so of my friends had my counter visible on their Geocities and Angelfire pages!
I’m sure that my script had many, if not more, of the kinds of security vulnerabilities discussed in the linked article. But man, it felt like magic at the time!
The field-sizing property is coming to Firefox 152, making it available across all major engines. It allows
you to control the sizing behavior of elements with a default preferred size, such as form elements.
…
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately “get it”. Like: that’s a cool new feature, I can already see how it’ll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve
accessibility, or allow me to do something new.
Other times, like this one, I initially shrug. What’s the point?, I think…
…and then later in the very same day find occasion to wish it was already mainstream. Hah!
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully
self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few
self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.)Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than
that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Muskpromisedthat each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
a few unqualified successes (Tesla leading the charge on the EV rollout; Starlink providing widespread Internet), and
a lot more unfulfilled promises and vapourware (Twitter’s post-takeover nosedive, the failure to deliver anything-of-use by Neuralink, The Boring Company/Hyperloop, the
worse-than-pointless Grokipedia, all the things SpaceX hasn’t yet done…).
The vast majority of his wealth comes from investment, not from returns: people buy his stock if they buy his hype. I’m not saying he’s
producing nothing of value… but yeah: the “world’s first trillionaire” is… unfortunate.
But then again, I’d be quite happy for him to be the world’s last trillionaire, too.
For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link
was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.
That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a
widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom.
The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the
content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.
Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar,
your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the
kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.
…
An excellent piece by Matthias Ott, discussing revelations from this year’s Google I/O. In particular, the imminent pivot of Google Search from its lifelong “query in, list of links
out” model to a wholesale “query in, LLM output out” one.
This isn’t just about putting AI output at the top of the search results, as I gather they do today, but about getting rid of search “results” entirely, and
running everything through the model.
To which Matthias wisely asks: well, how will ads work then? Google’s business model is based on mining your personal data and shoving ads in your face. Where do they go in a search
interface that it’s really a search but a “helpful” AI.
It turns out there’s a few approaches that Google seem to be considering, but what they’ve all got in common is the idea that marketers will be able to “influence” the LLM’s token
generation, perhaps by using an LLM of their own to decide whether you (based on everything Google knows about you) are worth marketing to, and how much they’ll pay to do so, and then
this input being “weighted” against competing advertisers and actual ingested data in order to feature advertiser-influenced content woven directly into the output of the LLM.
Superficially, this sounds a little like product placement, like you sometimes see in American-made TV shows and movies. You know, where one character says, of “I’m going to go get a
drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want… and it’s free?”, and the next says “It’s a wonderful restaurant.”, while they’re sitting in Burger King.
Except this isn’t about saying “hey, people who watch this show are probably high and want a snack, let’s push our fast food their way”. It’s individualised.
It’s more like if the characters, knowing that your GMail account had a recent email about some test results, and your Google Calendar had an appointment tomorrow at the doctor, started
talking about a particular brand of medication to, y’know, put the idea into your head.
The future presented in Futurama was supposed to be a joke, right?
We’re not at the point of completely-customised TV shows – nor the injection of commercials into dreams – yet. But Google’s plans, which blur the already-grey boundaries between organic
and advertising content, are pretty insidious.
Assuming you’re in their ecosystem already, and possibly even if you’re not… Google may already be looking at your search terms, your calendar, your emails, your location and schedule,
who you communicate with and how often, which web pages you visit, which apps you use, where you spend money, etc. (Seriously: if you somehow haven’t begun de-googling already, what are
you waiting for?)… there’s a huge potential for misuse there.
But the arms race between people blocking or learning-to-ignore ads and advertisers trying to foist them upon us continues, and Google thinks this is an acceptable next step in
escalating that. Using an insane amount of energy to recycle other people’s work without crediting them, in order to mash up the result with information they know about you in order to
deliver you an unverifiable soup of words which might answer your question but with no clue how much or little commercial interest went into producing it, or by whom.
That’s some proper Darkest Timeline shit, right there.
You don’t need to take my nor Matthias’s word on it (although you should read his full post because it’s excellent): just look at the concept videos in Google’s blog post on the subject. You’ll also notice that almost-nowhere
in their demos do Google even hint at the possibility of linking-out to anybody else’s website: there’s like one “visit site” button that appears at the very end of
one of the flows, after the agent has done its things. Google is building a walled garden where they hope you’ll live, served by their AI butler on behalf of the companies
who pay Google to tell you about their products.
🚫 Regrettably you have been locked out of diamond geezer
pending age verification protocols.
You may be UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE and therefore you must not read anything here UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE THAT YOU’RE
NOT.
The government is taking urgent action to ensure that children are no longer able to access harmful social media apps. At the personal behest of the Prime Minister a raft of
carefully thought-through definitely-not-rushed non-kneejerk policies designed to restrict inappropriate content is to be introduced forthwith.
There is some absolutely terrible stuff online, much of which has already tarnished the minds of innocent youth. It is therefore imperative that all potentially terrible stuff must
now be wrapped in a secure plain cover and placed on the digital top shelf. It’s for everyone’s own good.
…
Despite being parody, diamond geezer’s new age-gating – which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn’t actually block access to the site – somehow perfectly
straddles the line between “invasive” and “ineffective”… in exactly the same way that I expect the UK’s legal implementation will manage in a year or two.
Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone’s perspective. That’s what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the
carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs.
…
I guess to bring this post to an end… if you don’t have a blog, change that! (especially if I know you IRL, seriously). I wanna hear about you and your life! Start that quirky and
personalised website. If you already do, tell me and share! Every one of them is awesome; from digital gardens to byte-based megacities. Fill them with you and share! I
can’t wait to start reading :)
Oh, so very much this.
There was a time, a couple of decades and change ago, when almost all of the people I spent time with in my real life blogged. Nowadays, it’s far fewer. Ruth shares interesting bits of tech (plus Thames Path walks!), and I keep an eye out in case Gareth shares
more ‘plane-related news or Andy takes a deeper dive into his music… but nowadays the active
blogs I follow are, for the most part, people I know online (or, at least, people I knew online first, even if I’ve subsequently met them in person).
Blogs allow for a deeper level of thought; not everything is well suited to an in-person chat. We sometimes need time to get our thoughts in order and detailed concepts are often
much better understood in writing. It’s honestly a shame that we have confined ourself to short processing times and quick responses. A back and forth can sure be fun, but so can
the meticulous; and nothing’s stopping you from chatting over the stuff you’ve written – imagine how insightful that could? Blogging really recaptures that “handwritten letter”
spark.
Getting updates from people over text is kinda hard too. While I’ve been abroad, I have missed so many moments in peoples lives (good and bad), of which I usually only hear a
summarised fraction. I get it though, asking is hard and responding is even harder; retyping a shortened version of something for the 5th time isn’t much fun. I dream of a time
where more of my friends write blogs, a world where I can easily grasp and know the wheres and whats in someone’s life without feeling like I am nagging for details; where the focus
is being a friendly part of their lives…
I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!
It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.
AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.
…
A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.
LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis,
pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.
But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.
It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take
all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a
fashion, a prediction of what comes next.
As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.
Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive,
they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.
But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.
Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with
the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account,
and Sephora’s account.
…
Well this is unsurprising and unshocking. Turns out that if you give your chatbot help interface unrestricted access to your backend systems – rather than, say, the access level of the
human talking to it – then obviously hackers are going to try to jailbreak it in ways that you can’t possibly predict or guardrails against and, if/when they succeed,
they’ll break into all the systems to which you’ve given the system access.
This shouldn’t even have to be said. Meta’s mistake here is so self-evident that they should be embarrassed.
Because I have access to wp-config.php, I added the following to my file:
define( 'WP_AI_SUPPORT', false );
…
A useful tip.
Personally, I’ve got what feels like an even-better approach (for me, at least) I switched to ClassicPress a year and a bit ago, and haven’t
looked back! It’s a stripped-down fork of WordPress with no Gutenberg, lighter JavaScript, and a handful of other features… plusClassicPress is already AI-free and staying that way.
This isn’t to say that you can’t use AI with ClassicPress. Just that you’re not having to install the feature if you’re never going to use it. With WordPress’s good plugin architecture
it seems strange to me that such divisive features would become part of the core product, but that just seems to be the direction that the project’s been going in for a while now.
Three Rings CIC is, and always has been, a fully-remote organisation. We were doing remote working almost two decades before the Pandemic
made it cool (and well before tools like Slack and Zoom were a thing: we cut our remote-first teeth using IRC as our collaboration
tool!), but, there are still sometimes occasions when it’s good to have as many people as possible physically in a room.
When, last year, the Nightline Association announced it was closing down, it put one of their key services, Nightline Portal, which helps
Nightlines to take and handle calls these days, in serious risk: someone had to host and maintain it, and that had always been the Association. At the point the announcement was
made, in February, the Portal team had about four months to find it a new home.
It took me some degree of back-and-forth with the Nightline Association on one side, and it required some careful governance and planning at our end (as well as a few shifts in
short-term priorities!), but – helped by the fact we all wanted the best possible outcome for Nightlines – we got an agreement in place, a budget plan agreed, and were able to ensure Portal would keep going, for free faster than I think anyone had
expected.
That mattered to Nightlines, because to them, it’s critical infrastructure. And it mattered to us, because Nightlines were where Three Rings began, back in 2002. Today, we
support everything from major national charities to tiny community shops, but Nightlines remain close to our heart. Almost all our team – across a wide range of “x decades ago”! –
started as Nightline volunteers; we’ve nearly all spent the night awake, quietly waiting out the small hours, in case one of our fellow students needs someone to talk to in a crisis
and offering a listening ear when they called. We weren’t going to let that community lose something it relied on.
But adopting Portal meant a lot of work, against the clock. Data validation, new agreements, rebudgeting, and, once that was all done, a full migration to shift Portal from the
Nightline Association’s server infrastructure to ours. So to get that done, we organised an in-person meetup, “Portal Camp,” in a reasonably central hotel. Volunteers gave up their
weekend, left their homes on Friday evening for two more days of work, and we brought everyone together. We spent Saturday morning planning, carrying out test migrations, preparing
comms, and agreed yes – we can go.
…
About a year ago I helped look after the technical side of the “lifeboating” of Portal into Three Rings, right through the point that everything went wrong and my developers almost missed dinner (and, indeed, had to eat at their laptops!). I mentioned at the time my awe and pride of
them, but JTA’s post goes deeper and further and hints at the (much bigger) structural and procedural changes that were needed to adopt Portal.
A great thing about volunteering with Three Rings is that we get to ask, on any given day “how can we do the most good?” Not “will this give value to shareholders?” Not “what’s the
marketing strategy for this?” Not “can this deliver return on investment?” Those are questions for a very different kind of organisation to us. We get to ask, each and every day, “how
can we do the most good?”
That question is why, for me, adopting Portal into the Three Rings family, last year, was a no-brainer. Dozens of voluntary organisations depended upon it, and we had the skills and
volunteers and technical infrastructure to stop it from dying.
Anyway: JTA’s post on LinkedIn is better, and more-interesting, and
somehow also funnier than mine, so go read that. And if you want to talk volunteering with me, I’d love to chat!
