Articles – Dan Q

Hive’s Password Policy Makes Me Cry

Hey, let’s set up an account with Hive. After the security scares they faced in the mid-2010s, I’m sure they’ll be competent at making a password form, right?

Your password must be at least 8 characters; okay.

Just 8 characters would be a little short in this day and age, I reckon, but what do I care: I’m going to make a long and random one with my password safe anyway. Here we go:

I’ve unmasked the password field so I can show you what I tried. Obviously the password I eventually chose is unrelated to any of my screenshots.

Now my password must be at least 12 characters long, not 8 as previously indicated. That’s still not a problem.

Oh, and must contain at least one of four different character classes: uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters. But wait… my proposed password already does contain all of those things!

Let’s simplify.

The password 1111AAAAaaaa!!!! is valid… but S1dfCeg7!Ex;C$Ngban9-A is not. I guess my password is too strong?

Composition rules are bullshit already. I’d already checked to make sure my surname didn’t appear in the password in case that was the problem (on a few occasions services have forbidden me from using the letter “Q” in random passwords because they think that would make them easier to guess… wot?). So there must be something else amiss. Something that the error message is misleading about…

A normal person might just have used the shit password that Hive accepted, but I decided to dig deeper.

Using the previously-accepted password again but with a semicolon in it… fails. So clearly the problem is that some special characters are forbidden. But we’re not being told which ones, or that that’s the problem. Which is exceptionally sucky user experience, Hive.

At this point it’s worth stressing that there’s absolutely no valid reason to limit what characters are used in a password. Sometimes well-meaning but ill-informed developers will ban characters like <, >, ' and " out of a misplaced notion that this is a good way to protect against XSS and injection attacks (it isn’t; I’ve written about this before…), but banning ; seems especially obtuse (and inadequately explaining that in an error message is just painfully sloppy). These passwords are going to be hashed anyway (right… right!?) so there’s really no reason to block any character, but anyway…

I wondered what special characters are forbidden, and ran a quick experiment. It turns out… it’s a lot:

Characters Hive forbids use of in passwords include - , . + = " £ ^ # ' ( ) { } * | < > : ` – also space
“Special” characters Hive they allow: ! @ $ % & ?

What the fuck, Hive. If you require that users add a “special” character to their password but there are only six special characters you’ll accept (and they don’t even include the most common punctuation characters), then perhaps you should list them when asking people to choose a password!

Or, better yet, stop enforcing arbitrary and pointless restrictions on passwords. It’s not 1999 any more.

I eventually found a password that would be accepted. Again, it’s not the one shown above, but it’s more than a little annoying that this approach – taking the diversity of punctuation added by my password safe’s generator and swapping them all for exclamation marks – would have been enough to get past Hive’s misleading error message.

Having eventually found a password that worked and submitted it…

…it turns out I’d taken too long to do so, so I got treated to a different misleading error message. Clearly the problem was that the CSRF token had expired, but instead they told me that the activation URL was invalid.

If I, a software engineer with a quarter of a century of experience and who understands what’s going wrong, struggle with setting a password on your site… I can’t begin to image the kinds of tech support calls that you must be fielding.

Do better, Hive.

Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?

There’s a question being floated around my corner of the blogosphere, but I think my experience of the answer differs from other bloggers:

It started when David Bushell observed that, despite having his email address unobscured on his website, he gets more spam via his contact form. Luke Harris followed-up, providing a potential explanation which basically boils down to the idea that it’s both more cost-effective and provides better return-on-investment to spam contact forms than email addresses. And then Kev Quirk described his experience of switching from contact forms to “bare” email addresses and the protections he put in place (like plus-addressing), only to discover that he didn’t need it at all.

Disappearing Contact Forms

It makes me sad to see the gradual disappearance of the contact form from personal websites. They generally feel more convenient than email addresses, although this is perhaps part of the reason that they come under attack from spammers in the first place! But also, they provide the potential for a new and different medium: the comments area (and its outdated-but-beautiful cousin the guestbook).

Comments are, of course, an even more-obvious target for spammers because they can result in immediate feedback and additional readers for your message. Plus – if they’re allowed to contain hyperlinks – a way of leeching some of the reputability off a legitimate site and redirecting it to the spammers’, in the eyes of search engines. Boo!

But I’ve got to admit: there have been many times that I’ve read an interesting article and not interacted with it simply because the bar to interaction (what… I have to open my email client!?) was too high. I’d prefer to write a response on my blog and hope that webmention/pingback/trackback do their thing, but will they? I don’t know in advance, unless the other party says so openly or I take a dive into their source code to check.

Your Experience May Vary

I’ve had both contact/comment forms and exposed email addresses on my website for many years… and I feel like I get aproximately the same amount of spam on both, after filtering. The vast majority of it gets “caught”. Here’s what works for me:

My contact/comments forms use one of a variety of unobtrustive “honeypot”-style traps. These “reverse CAPTCHAs” attempt to trick bots into interacting with them in some particular way while not inconveniencing humans.

Antispam Bee provides the first line of defence, but I’ve got a few tweaks of my own to help counteract the efforts of determined spammers.
Once you’ve fallen into a honeypot it becomes much easier to block subsequent contacts with the same/similar content, address, (short-term) IP, or the poisoned cookie you’re given.
Keyword filtering provides a further line of defence. E.g. for contact forms that post directly back to the Web (i.e. comment forms, and perhaps a future guestbook form), content with links goes into a moderation queue unless it shares a sender email with a previously-approved sender. For contact forms that result in an email, I’ve just got a few “scorer” rules relating to geo IP, keywords, number and density of links, etc. that catch the most-insidious of spam to somehow slip through.

I also publish email addresses all over the place, but they’re content-specific. Like Kev, I anticipated spam and so use unique email addresses on different pieces of content: if you want to reply-by-email to this post, for example, you’re encouraged to use the address b27404@danq.me. But this approach has actually provided secondary benefits that are more-valuable:

The “scrapers” that spam me by email would routinely send email to multiple different @danq.me addresses at the same time. Humans don’t send the same identical message to me to different addresses published on my site and from different senders, so my spam filter picks up on this rightaway.
As a fringe benefit, this helps me determine the topic on an email where it’s unclear. E.g. I’ve had humans email me to say “I tried to follow the guide on your page but it didn’t work for me” and I wouldn’t have had a clue which page had they not reached out via a page-specific email alias.
I enjoy the potential offered by rotating the email address generation mechanism and later treating all previously-exposed addresses as email honeypots.

Works For Me!

This strategy works for me: I get virtually no comment/contact form spam (though I do occasionally get a false positive and a human gets blocked as-if they were a robot), and very little email spam (after my regular email filters have done their job, although again I sometimes get false positives, often where humans choose their subject lines poorly).

It might sound like my approach is complicated, but it’s really not. Adding a contact form honeypot is not significantly more-difficult than exposing automatically-rotating email aliases, and for me it’s worth it: I love the convenience and ease-of-use of a good contact/comments form, and want to make that available to my visitors too!

(I also allow one-click reactions with emoji: did you see? Scroll down and send me a bumblebee! Nobody seems to have found a way to spam me with these, yet: it’s not a very expressive medium, I guess!)

Impossible Countdown

Or: Sometimes You Don’t Need a Computer, Just a Brain

I was watching an episode of 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown the other night¹ and I was wondering: what’s the hardest hand you can be dealt in a Countdown letters game?

Sometimes it’s possible to get fixated on a particular way of solving a problem, without having yet fully thought-through it. That’s what happened to me, because the first thing I did was start to write a computer program to solve this question. The program, I figured, would permute through all of the legitimate permutations of letters that could be drawn in a game of Countdown, and determine how many words and of what length could be derived from them². It’d repeat in this fashion, at any given point retaining the worst possible hands (both in terms of number of words and best possible score).

When the program completed (or, if I got bored of waiting, when I stopped it) it’d be showing the worst-found deals both in terms of lowest-scoring-best-word and fewest-possible-words. Easy.

Here’s how far I got with that program before I changed techniques. Maybe you’ll see why:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
WORDLIST = File.readlines('dictionary.txt').map(&:strip) # https://github.com/jes/cntdn/blob/master/dictionary
LETTER_FREQUENCIES = { # http://www.thecountdownpage.com/letters.htm
  vowels: {
    A: 15, E: 21, I: 13, O: 13, U: 5,
  },
  consonants: {
    B: 2, C: 3, D: 6, F: 2, G: 3, H: 2, J: 1,
    K: 1, L: 5, M: 4, N: 8, P: 4, Q: 1, R: 9,
    S: 9, T: 9, V: 1, W: 1, X: 1, Y: 1, Z: 1,
  }
}
ALLOWED_HANDS = [ # https://wiki.apterous.org/Letters_game
  { vowels: 3, consonants: 6 },
  { vowels: 4, consonants: 5 },
  { vowels: 5, consonants: 4 },
]

At this point in writing out some constants I’d need to define the rules, my brain was already racing ahead to find optimisations.

For example: given that you must choose at least four cards from the consonants deck, you’re allowed no more than five vowels… but no individual vowel appears in the vowel deck fewer than five times, so my program actually had free-choice of the vowels.

Knowing that³, I figured that there must exist Countdown deals that contain no valid words, and that finding one of those would be easier than writing a program to permute through all viable options. My head’s full of useful heuristics about English words, after all, which leads to rules like:

None of the vowels can be I or A, because they’re words in their own right.
Five letter Us is a strong starting point, because it’s very rarely used in two-letter words (and this set of tiles is likely to be hard enough that three-letter words are already an impossibility).
This eliminates the consonants M (mu, um: the Greek letter and the “I’m thinking” sound), N (nu, un-: the Greek letter and the inverting prefix), H (uh: another sound for when you’re thinking or hesitating), P (up: the direction of ascension), R (ur-: the prefix for “original”), S (us: the first-person-plural pronoun), and X (xu: the unit of currency). So as long as we can find four consonants within the allowable deck letter frequency that aren’t those five… we’re sorted.

I enjoyed getting “Q” into my proposed letter set. I like to image a competitor, having already drawn two “U”s, a “J”, and a Y”, being briefly happy to draw a “Q” and already thinking about all those “QU-” words that they’re excited to be able to use… before discovering that there aren’t any of them and, indeed, aren’t actually any words at all.

Even up to the last letter they were probably hoping for some consonant that could make it work. A K (juku), maybe?

But the moral of the story is: you don’t always have to use a computer. Sometimes all you need is a brain and a few minutes while you eat your breakfast on a slow Sunday morning, and that’s plenty sufficient.

Update: As soon as I published this, I spotted my mistake. A “yuzu” is a kind of East Asian plum, but it didn’t show up in this countdown solver! So my impossible deal isn’t quite so impossible after all. Perhaps U J Y U Q V U U C would be a better “impossible” set of tiles, where that “C” makes it briefly look like there might be a word in there, even if it’s just a three or four-letter one… but there isn’t. Or is there…?

Footnotes

¹ It boggles my mind to realise that show’s managed 28 seasons, now. Sure, I know that Countdown has managed something approaching 9,000 episodes by now, but Cats Does Countdown was always supposed to be a silly one-off, not a show in it’s own right. Anyway: it’s somehow better than both 8 Out Of 10 Cats and Countdown, and if you disagree then we can take this outside.

² Herein lay my first challenge, because it turns out that the letter frequencies and even the rules of Countdown have changed on several occasions, and short of starting a conversation on what might be the world’s nerdiest surviving phpBB installation I couldn’t necessarily determine a completely up-to-date ruleset.

³ And having, y’know, a modest knowledge of the English language

Two Days Offline

This week, I spent two days on a shoestring Internet connection, and it was pretty shit.

As you might anticipate, we run a complicated network at our house, and so when my connection dropped a quarter of an hour into the beginning of three and a half hours of scheduled meetings on a busy afternoon, my first thought was to check that everything was working locally. Internal traffic all seemed to be going the right way, so then I checked the primary router and discovered that the problem was further upstream. I checked our fibre terminator, and sure enough: it said it wasn’t getting a signal.

I checked the status page for our ISP – no reported problems. So I called them up. I was pleased that (after I relayed what tests I’d done so far) they treated me like a network specialist rather than somebody who needed hand-holding and we skipped over the usual “have you tried turning it off and on again” and got straight to some diagnosis and scheduling an engineer for the next day. That’d do.

A child leans out of an open window into a rainy garden, holding her phone outdoors to watch a YouTube video which shows the words 'I GUESS' over a blue-tinted forest background. — Our village has pretty weak cellular reception, and what little there is struggles to penetrate our walls, some of which are made of stone. And so for a little while, “leaning out of the window” was the only way to get Internet access while (mostly) dodging the rain.

The end of a workday being ruined was a bit of a drag, but for Ruth it was definitely worse, as she was overseeing a major project the following morning (from 5am!) and so needed to arrange for emergency out-of-hours access to her office for the next day to be able to make it work. As for me: I figured I’d be back online by lunchtime, and working a little into the evening would give me a rare opportunity for an increased overlap with my team – many of which are on the Pacific coast of the US – so it’d all work out.

The engineer arrived the next morning, just as a storm hit. He traced the problem, waited for the rain to ease off, then stomped off up the street to get it fixed. Only a matter of time now, I thought.

But nope: he came back to say that wherever the fault had occurred was found somewhere under the road that he couldn’t access by himself: it’d need a team of two engineers to get down there and fix it, and they wouldn’t be able to come… until tomorrow.

So I went up to the attic to work, which is just about the only place in the house where – by balancing my phone against a window – I can consistently tether at 4G/5G. Well… semi-consistently. Inconsistently enough to be immensely frustrating.

A phone, displaying a tethering configuration screen, is propped on top of several decks of cards on a cluttered window ledge. — Earlier efforts to tether from downstairs were even less successful.

There’s this thing, I find: no Internet access is annoying, but tolerable.

Slow Internet access is similar.

But intermittent Internet access is, somehow, a nightmare. Applications hang or fail in unpredictable ways, their developers not having planned for the possibility that the connection they detected for when they were opened might come and go at random. Shitty modern “web applications” that expect to download multiple megabytes of JavaScript before they work show skeleton loaders and dehydrated <div>s that might one day grow up to be something approximating a button, link, or image. It’s just generally a pretty crap experience.

It’s funny how we got so dependent upon the Internet. 26+ years ago, I used to write most of my Web-destined PHP and Perl code “offline”! I’d dial-up to the Internet to download documentation or upload code, then work from my memory, from books, and what I’d saved from the Web. Can you imagine asking a junior Web developer to do that today?

A Gigaclear van sits parked on a gravel driveway. — The *second* team of engineers were fortunate enough to arrive on a less-torrential day.

In a second ironic twist, a parcel arrived for me during our downtime which contained new network hardware with which I planned to eliminate a couple of WiFi weak spots at the edges of our house. The new hardware worked perfectly and provided a wonderful improvement to signal strength between our computers… but of course not to computers outside of the network.

There’s another interesting thing that’s changed over the decades. When I first started installing (bus!) networks, there was no assumption that the network would necessarily provide Internet access. The principal purpose of the network was to connect the computers within the LAN to one another. This meant that staff could access one another’s files more easily and make use of a shared printer without walking around carrying floppy disks, for example… or could frag one another at Doom and Quake at the LAN parties that I’d sometimes run from my mum’s living room!

But nowadays, if you connect to a network (whether wired or wireless) there’s an expectation that it’ll provide Internet access. So much so, that if you join a wireless network using your mobile phone and it doesn’t provide Internet access, your phone probably won’t route any traffic across it unless you specifically say that it should. That’s a reasonable default, these days, but it’s an annoyance when – for example – I wanted my phone to continue using Syncthing to back up my photos to my NAS even though the network that my NAS was on would no longer provide Internet access to my phone!

The second team of engineers quickly found and repaired a break in the fibre – apparently it was easier than the first engineer had expected – and normalcy returned to our household.

But for a couple of days, there, I was forcibly (and unpleasantly) reminded about how the world has changed since the time that “being on a network” wasn’t assumed to be synonymous with “has Internet access”.

The Beer Token

Duration 11:16

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1979

The novelisation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, just a smidge before I was born. There’s a well-known scene in the second chapter featuring Ford Prefect, an alien living on Earth, distracting his human friend Arthur Dent. Arthur is concerned about the imminent demolition of his house by a wrecking crew, and Ford takes him to the pub to get him drunk, in anticipation of the pair attempting to hitch a lift on an orbiting spacecraft that’s about to destroy the planet:

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”

The barman of the Horse and Groom didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pulling pints.

He tried again.

“Going to watch the match this afternoon then?”

Ford glanced round at him.

“No, no point,” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal without a chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

“No, not really,” he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. “There you are sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off,” said Ford, “They’re ours,” giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.”

“What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.”

There’s a few great jokes there, but I’m interested in the final line. Ford buys six pints of bitter, pays with a five-pound note, and says “keep the change”, which surprises the barman. Presumably this is as a result of Ford’s perceived generosity… though of course what’s really happening is that Ford has no use for Earth money any longer; this point is hammered home for the barman and nearby patrons when Ford later buys four packets of peanuts, also asking the barman to keep the change from a fiver.

A pint of light-coloured beer on wooden board, with the sea in the background. An orange towel sits alongside. — Beer’s important, but you also need to know where your towel is.

We’re never told exactly what the barman would have charged Ford. But looking at the history of average UK beer prices and assuming that the story is set in 1979, we can assume that the pints will have been around 34p each¹, so around £2.04 for six of them. So… Ford left a 194% tip for the beer².

1990

By the time I first read Hitch-Hikers, around 1990, this joke was already dated. By then, an average pint of bitter would set you back £1.10. I didn’t have a good awareness of that, being as I was well-underage to be buying myself alcohol! But I clearly had enough of an awareness that my dad took the time to explain the joke… that is, to point out that when the story was written (and is presumably set), six pints would cost less than half of five pounds.

But by the mid-nineties, when I’d found a friend group who were also familiar with the Hitch-Hikers… series, we’d joke about it. Like pointing out that by then if you told the barman to keep the change from £5 after buying six pints, the reason he’d express surprise wouldn’t be because you’d overpaid…

Stock photo of a barman serving two patrons, annotated with speech bubbles. One patron says "Keep the change." The barman, smiling, says "What, from a a fiver. Fuck you sir." — In his defence, Ford’s an alien and might not fully understand human concepts of inflation. Or sarcasm.

1998

Precocious drinker that I was, by the late nineties I was quite aware of the (financial) cost of drinking.

Dan, then with long black hair, sits with another young white man in a garden, in front of a table laden with several bottles of wine and around 80 cans of beer. — Sure, this seems like a responsible amount of alcohol for a party thrown by a couple of tearaway teenagers. Definitely nothing going to go wrong here, no siree.

And so when it was announced that a new denomination of coin – the £2 coin – would enter general circulation³ I was pleased to announce how sporting it was of the government to release a “beer token”.

With the average pint of beer at the time costing around £1.90 and a still cash-dominated economy, the “beer token” was perfect! And in my case, it lasted: the bars I was drinking at in the late 1990s were in the impoverished North, and were soon replaced with studenty bars on the West coast of Wales, both of which allowed the price of a pint to do battle with inflationary forces for longer than might have been expected elsewhere in the country. The “beer token” that was the £2 coin was a joke that kept on giving for some time.

Close-up of a 1998 £2 coin; bimetallic, with an inner ring of cogs expanding outwards into several interlocking spirals. — The one thing I always hated about the initial design for the bimetallic £2 coin was – and this is the nerdiest thing in the world with which to take issue – the fact that it had a ring of **19 cogs** to represent British industry. But if you connect a circuit of an odd number of cogs… it won’t function. Great metaphor, there. Photo courtesy of the late Andy Fogg, used under a Creative Commons license.

2023

As the cost of living rapidly increased circa 2023, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK finally got to the point where, rounded to the nearest whole pound, it was closer to £5 than it is to £4⁴.

And while we could moan and complain about how much things cost nowadays, I’d prefer to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity for a new beer token: a general-release of the £5 coin. We already some defined characteristics that fit: a large, heavy coin, about twice the weight of the £2 coin, with a copper/nickel lustre and struck from engravings with thick, clear lines.

And the design basically comes up with itself. I give you… the Beer Token of the 2020s:

It’s time for the beer token to return, in the form of the £5 coin. Now is the time… now is the last time, probably… before cash becomes such a rarity that little thought is evermore given to the intersection of its design and utility. And compared to a coin that celebrates industry while simultaneously representing a disfunctional machine, this is a coin that Brits could actually be proud of. It’s a coin that tourists would love to take home with them, creating a satisfying new level of demand for the sinking British Pound that might, just might, prop up the economy a little, just as here at home they support those who prop up the bar.

I know there must be a politician out there who’s ready to stand up and call for this new coin. My only fear is that it’s Nigel Fucking Farage… at which point I’d be morally compelled to reject my own proposal.

But for now, I think I’ll have another drink.

Footnotes

¹ The recession of the 1970s brought high inflation that caused the price of beer to rocket, pretty much tripling in price over the course of the decade. Probably Douglas Adams didn’t anticipate that it’d more-than-double again over the course of the 1980s before finally slowing down somewhat… at least until tax changes in 2003 and the aftermath of the 2022 inflation rate spike!

² We do know that the four packets of peanuts Ford bought later were priced at 7p each, so his tip on that transaction was a massive 1,686%: little wonder the barman suddenly started taking more-seriously Ford’s claims about the imminent end of the world!

³ There were commemorative £2 coins of a monometallic design floating around already, of course, but – being collectible – these weren’t usually found in circulation, so I’m ignoring them.

⁴ Otherwise known as “two beer tokens”, of course. As in “Bloody hell, 2022, why does a pint of draught cost two beer tokens now?”

MS Paint-grade QR Codes?

What if a QR code could look like a maze, hand-drawn with MS Paint?

Inspired by Oscar Cunningham‘s excellent “working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrain” and Andrew Taylor‘s “logical extension of the idea”, earlier this week, I decided to extend upon my much-earlier efforts to (ab)use QR codes and throw together the disgusting thing you see above.

Here’s how I made it:

Generated a QR code as usual, minimising its size by making the URL uppercase (allows a smaller character set to be used) and maximising its resilience by ramping up the error correction to the maximum.
Masked off all but the central 7% of each row and column, leaving just a grid of spots, and then re-adding the three large and one small square and the “zebra crossing” stripes that connect the large squares, to ensure rapid discovery.
With a pink mask in place to help me see where I was working, drew lines, dots, and whatever else I liked over the black spots but not touching the white ones, to build a maze.
Removed the pink mask, leaving just black and white. Tested a bit.

Obviously this isn’t a clever idea for real-world scenarios. The point of QR codes’ resilience and error correction is to compensate for suboptimal conditions “in the field”, like reflections, glare, dust, grime, low light conditions, and so on.

But it’s kinda fun, right?

Details/summary lightboxes in pure HTML + CSS

💤 Tired: `<dialog>`-based HTML+CSS lightboxes

A few years ago I implemented a pure HTML + CSS solution for lightbox images, which I’ve been using on my blog ever since. It works by pre-rendering an invisible <dialog> for each lightboxable image on the page, linking to the anchor of those dialogs, and exploiting the :target selector to decide when to make the dialogs visible. No Javascript is required, which means low brittleness and high performance!

It works, but it’s got room for improvement.

One thing I don’t like about it is that it that it breaks completely if the CSS fails for any reason. Depending upon CSS is safer than depending upon JS (which breaks all the time), but it’s still not great: if CSS is disabled in your browser or just “goes wrong” somehow then you’ll see a hyperlink… that doesn’t seem to go anywhere (it’s an anchor to a hidden element).

A further thing I don’t like about it is it’s semantically unsound. Linking to a dialog with the expectation that the CSS parser will then make that dialog visible isn’t really representative of what the content of the page means. Maybe we can do better.

🚀 Wired: `<details>`-based HTML+CSS lightboxes?

Here’s a thought I had, inspired by Patrick Chia’s <details> overlay trick and by the categories menu in Eevee’s blog: what if we used a <details> HTML element for a lightbox? The thumbnail image would go in the <summary> and the full image (with loading="lazy" so it doesn’t download until the details are expanded) beneath, which means it “just works” with or without CSS… and then some CSS enhances it to make it appear like a modal overlay and allow clicking-anywhere to close it again.

Let me show you what I mean. Click on one of the thumbnails below:

Each appears to pop up in a modal overlay, but in reality they’re just unfolding a <details> panel, and some CSS is making the contents display as if if were an overlay, complete click-to-close, scroll-blocking, and a blur filter over the background content. Without CSS, it functions as a traditional <details> block. Accessibility is probably improved over my previous approach, too (though if you know better, please tell me!).

The code’s pretty tidy, too. Here’s the HTML:

<details class="details-lightbox" aria-label="larger image">
  <summary>
    <img src="thumb.webp" alt="Alt text for the thumbnail image.">
  </summary>
  <div>
    <img src="full.webp" alt="Larger image: alt text for the full image." loading="lazy">
  </div>
</details>

The CSS is more-involved, but not excessive (and can probably be optimised a little further):

.details-lightbox {
  summary {
    display: block;
    cursor: zoom-in;

    &::before {
      content: '';
      backdrop-filter: none;
      transition: backdrop-filter 0.5s, background 0.2s;
      background: transparent;
    }
  }

  & > div img {
    max-width: 95vw;
    max-height: 95vh;
    box-shadow: 0 0 12px #fff6;
    opacity: 0;
    transition: filter 0.3s, opacity 0.6s;
    filter: blur(6px);
  }

  &[open] > div {
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100vw;
    height: 100vh;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
    z-index: 110;
    pointer-events: none;

    img {
      opacity: 1;
      filter: none;
    }
  }

  &[open] > summary {
    cursor: auto;

    &::before {
      content: '';
      background: #000a;
      backdrop-filter: blur(6px);
      position: fixed;
      top: 0;
      left: 0;
      width: 100vw;
      height: 100vw;
      z-index: 109;
    }
  }
}

body:has(.details-lightbox[open]) {
  overflow: hidden;
}

Native CSS nesting is super nice for this kind of thing. Being able to use :has on the body to detect whether there exists an open lightbox and prevent scrolling, if so, is another CSS feature I’m appreciating today.

I’m not going to roll this out anywhere rightaway, but I’ll keep it in my back pocket for the next time I feel a blog redesign coming on. It feels tidier and more-universal than my current approach, and I don’t think it’s an enormous sacrifice to lose the ability to hotlink directly to an open image in a post.

What do you think?

Internet Services^H Provider

Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.

ISPs twenty years ago

It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:

A handful of email inboxes, plus SMTP relaying
Shared or private FTP storage¹
Hosting for small Websites/homepages
Usenet access
Email-to-fax and/or fax-to-email services
Caching forward proxies (this was so-commonplace that it isn’t even listed in the “standard services” screenshot above)
One or more local nodes to IRC networks
Sometimes, licenses for useful Internet software
For leased-line (technically “broadband”, by the original definition) connections: a static IP address or IP pool

ISPs today

The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:

A pretty-shit router²
Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service³

The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a) you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.⁴

Are we getting a bum deal?

An xternal 33.6kbps serial port dial-up modem. — Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.

Would you even want those services?

Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!

Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.

But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet, nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.⁵

But the Web hosting, for example, wasn’t useless. In fact, it served an important purpose in lowering the barrier to entry for people to publish their first homepage! The magical experience of being able to just FTP some files into a directory and have them be on the Web, as just a standard part of the “package” you bought-into, was a gateway to a participatory Web that’s nowadays sadly lacking.

Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.

And that makes me sad.

Footnotes

¹ ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!

² ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.

³ These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.

⁴ Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse customer service, to boot.

⁵ The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that it’s what their customers want.

⁶ I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).

Quesapizza-pizza

A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings.

A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza… constructed using a quesapizza as its base. Quick to make and pretty delicious, it’s among my go-to working lunches.

The one you see above (and in the YouTube version of this video) is topped with a baked egg and chilli flakes. It might not be everybody’s idea of a great quesapizza-pizza, but I love mopping up the remainder of the egg yolk with the thick-stuffed cheese and tomato wraps. Mmm!

Heterophonic Homonyms

The elder of our two cars is starting to exhibit a few minor, but annoying, technical faults. Like: sometimes the Bluetooth connection to your phone will break and instead of music, you just get a non-stop high-pitched screaming sound which you can suppress by turning off the entertainment system… but can’t fix without completely rebooting the entire car.

A car dashboard with five amber and one red warning lights lit. — There’ve been other “this car is getting a bit older” technical faults too. One of his tyre pressure sensors broke the other month and caused a cascade of unrelated errors that disabled the traction control, ABS, auto-handbrake, parking sensors, and reversing camera… but replacing the pressure sensor fixed everything. Cars are weird, and that’s coming from somebody working in an industry that fully embraces knock-on regression bugs as a fact of life.

The “wouldn’t you rather listen to screaming” problem occurred this morning. At the time, I was driving the kids to an activity camp, and because they’d been quite enjoying singing along to a bangin’ playlist I’d set up, they pivoted into their next-most-favourite car journey activity of trying to snipe at one another¹. So I needed a distraction. I asked:

We’ve talked about homonyms and homophones before, haven’t we? I wonder: can anybody think of a pair of words that are homonyms that are not homophones? So: two words that are spelled the same, but mean different things and sound different when you say them?

This was sufficiently distracting that it not only kept the kids from fighting for the entire remainder of the journey, but it also distracted me enough that I missed the penultimate turning of our journey and had to double-back²

…in English

With a little prompting and hints, each of the kids came up with one pair each, both of which exploit the pronunciation ambiguity of English’s “ea” phoneme:

Lead, as in:
- /lɛd/ The pipes are made of lead.
- /liːd/ Take the dog by her lead.
Read, as in:
- /ɹɛd/ I read a great book last month.
- /ɹiːd/ I will read it after you finish.

These are heterophonic homonyms: words that sound different and mean different things, but are spelled the same way. The kids and I only came up with the two on our car journey, but I found many more later in the day. Especially, as you might see from the phonetic patterns in this list, once I started thinking about which other sounds are ambiguous when written:

Tear (/tɛr/ | /tɪr/): she tears off some paper to wipe her tears away.
Wind (/waɪnd/ | /wɪnd/): don’t forget to wind your watch before you wind your horn.
Live (/laɪv/ | /lɪv/): I’d like to see that band live if only I could live near where they play.
Bass (/beɪs/ | /bæs/): I play my bass for the bass in the lake.
Bow (/baʊ/ | /boʊ/): take a bow before you notch an arrow into your bow.
Sow (/saʊ/ | /soʊ/): the pig and sow ate the seeds as fast as I could sow them.
Does (/dʌz/ | /doʊz/): does she know about the bucks and does in the forest?

(If you’ve got more of these, I’d love to ~~hear~~ read them!)

…in other Languages?

I’m interested in whether heterophonic homonyms are common in any other languages than English? English has a profound advantage for this kind of wordplay³, because it has weakly phonetics (its orthography is irregular: things aren’t often spelled like they’re said) and because it has diverse linguistic roots (bits of Latin, bits of Greek, some Romance languages, some Germanic languages, and a smattering of Celtic and Nordic languages).

With a little exploration I was able to find only two examples in other languages, but I’d love to find more if you know of any. Here are the two I know of already:

In French I found couvent, which works only thanks to a very old-fashioned word:
- /ku.vɑ̃/ means convent, as in – where you keep your nuns, and
- /ku.və/ means sit on, but specifically in the manner that a bird does on its egg, although apparently this usage is considered archaic and the word couver is now preferred.
In Portugese I cound pelo, which works only because modern dialects of Portugese have simplified or removed the diacritics that used to differentiate the spellings of some words:
- /ˈpe.lu/ means hair, like that which grows on your head, and
- /ˈpɛ.lu/ means to peel, as you would with an orange.

If you speak more or different languages than me and can find others for me to add to my collection of words that are spelled the same but that are pronounced differently, I’d love to hear them.

Special Bonus Internet Points for anybody who can find such a word that can reasonably be translated into another language as a word which also exhibits the same phenomenon. A pun that can only be fully understood and enjoyed by bilingual speakers would be an especially exciting thing to behold!

Footnotes

¹ I guess close siblings are just gonna go through phases where they fight a lot, right? But if you’d like to reassure me that for most it’s just a phase and it’ll pass, that’d be nice.

² In my defence, I was navigating from memory because my satnav was on my phone and it was still trying to talk over Bluetooth to the car… which was turning all of its directions into a high-pitched scream.

³ If by “advantage” you mean “is incredibly difficult for non-native speakers to ever learn fluently”.

Clapham South Deep Shelter

At the weekend, JTA and I – along with our eldest child – explored the Clapham South Deep Shelter as part of one of Hidden London‘s underground tours, and it was pretty great!

A circular tunnel with a flat floor and low ceiling, wrapped in white-painted iron and concrete, with exposed wiring and WWII-era signage, leads deeper into a subterranean bunker past a small guard post in which a figure can barely be seen, reading a book. — Anybody else get *Fallout* vibes from this place?

I’ve done a couple of bits of exploration of subterranean London before: in the service tunnels around Euston, and into the abandoned station on the Aldwych branch line. But I was especially impressed by the care and attention that had gone into making this particular tour fun and engaging.

Broad staircase reminiscent of those found around the London Underground, but sparsely lit and decorated. Looking up the stairs, it ends in a brick wall. — Had this deep shelter gained a second life as a new tube station, as was originally hoped, this staircase would have connected it to the Northern Line platforms. Instead, it ends at a brick wall.

The site itself is deep: trains on the Northern Line – already one of the deepest lines on the London Underground – can be heard passing above you, and any noise from street level is completely gone (even the sounds of bombing couldn’t be heard down here, WWII residents reported). It’s also huge: long interconnected tunnels provided space for 8,000 beds, plus canteens, offices, toilets, medical bays, and other supporting architecture.

Table with basins, kidney bowl, old-style medical vials, kettle, jug, and WWII-era shrapnel dressing kit, in an iron-framed subterranean tunnel. — Significant parts of the bunker contain original furniture, including the metal-frames triple-bunk-beds (some of which show signs of being temporarily repurposed as archival storage shelves). But other bits have been restored to make them feel contemporaneous with the era of its construction.

To extend the immersion of the theme even further, there’s a “warden” on-site who – after your 179-step descent – welcomes you and checks your (replica) night admission ticket, identifying which bed’s bed assigned to you. The warden accompanies your group around, staying in-character as you step through different eras of the history of the place! By the time you get to the interpretative space about the final days of its use for human habitation – as a budget hotel for the “Festival of Britain” national exhibition in 1951 – he speaks fondly of his time as its warden here and wonders about what will become of the place.

In an extremely long semicircular concrete tunnel, a tween girl wearing a green hoodie stands near signage made to look like 1940s newspapers. — The long, long double-helix staircases that brought us deep into the earth represented only a fraction of the distance we walked on the tour, through these long networks of tunnels.

All of which is to say that this was a highly-enjoyable opportunity to explore yet another hidden place sprawling beneath London. The Hidden London folks continue to impress.

Small pink replica ticket reading 'Clapham South Shelter: Admit One Person for One Night Only', ticket number L0281. — I’m glad I’ve got a bed of my own in a house of my own that’s not being bombed by the Luftwaffe, actually, thanks.

If you want to see a little more, they’ve released a video just yesterday: or for the full experience, see if there are any slots you can make to visit the place for yourself.

Lock All The Computers

I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:

There’s optional audio in this video, if you want it.

One button. And everything locks. Nice!

Here’s how it works:

The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through CTRL+ALT+F22¹ when one of its keys are pressed.
The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines².
That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
- The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml to set a <keybind> that executes xscreensaver-command -lock.
- For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs pmset displaysleepnow as a shell script³, and then connected that via Keyboard Shortcuts > Services.
- On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run { DllCall("LockWorkStation") } when it hears the keypress.

That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.

Footnotes

¹ F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments, of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!

² Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.

³ These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you might need a more-sophisticated script.

Buldak

We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur It, of course.

Framegrab from Jet Lag: The Game, showing Adam Chase, a young white man, sitting in a South Korean urban centre, blindfolded, holding chopsticks and preparing to eat from three bowls of instant noodles, captioned Buldak, Buldak Stew, and Carbonara. — The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.

In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go¹.

In a kitchen, a hand holds a purple foil packet of Samyang Buldak noodles, "Habenero Lime" flavour. — Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens (닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of *the noise a chicken makes*?²

So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn³, and a soft-boiled egg.

It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.

So now I’m keen to try some of the other flavours (some of which we’ve got). But perhaps not the one that was so spicy it got banned in Denmark last year.

Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.

Footnotes

¹ I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of noodle-centric pop culture .

² Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?

³ I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.

Please Fix This Site? Okay!

This week, digital agency Humidity Studios launched PleaseFixThisSite.com, a website with a deliberately awful design aesthetic.

Screenshot of PleaseFixThisSite.com, featuring all of the design sins described below. — Honestly, I’ve seen worse.

Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.

Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.

XKCD comic. Transcript: [A single panel containing a large, elevated sign with Ponytail standing in front of it.] [Title, slightly off horizontal, more to the right than central and the character spacing is not entirely consistent/aesthetic:] Doanate[sic] to fix this sign! [To the left of the lower part of the sign there is an 'QR code', tilted slightly with a plaintext link beneath it:] https://[illegible].com [To the right are several dollar values, in one column, and 'fixes', in a second, some of which have their own self-demonstrating quirks.] [The letters "R" and "N" may be too close together:] $10 fix kerning [Both dollar value and fix text are shifted left of their respective columns:] $20 align columns [This line is in a smaller font:] $20 fix text size $50 fix typo $50 fix centering $100 fix rotation [Ponytail stands looking at the sign, apparently in the process of using a smartphone:] Grrr... [Caption below panel:] My new company's business model is based on extorting graphic designers. — I can’t criticise Humidity Studios for taking a stupid idea from XKCD and taking it way too far, because, well, there’s *this* site that I run…

That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!

A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration, I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to install my (open source) script.

I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.

Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.

The Local Historian

Back in 2021, as part of a course I was doing at work, I made a video talking about The Devil’s Quoits, a henge and stone circle near where I live.

Video screengrab of Dan standing in front of some standing stones. — It started with a fascination after discovering a little-known stone circle near my new house. It grew into an obsession with the history of the place.

Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.

And so when their teacher arranged for a school trip to the Devil’s Quoits, she asked if I could go along as a “local expert”. And so I did.

On a sunny day, Dan sits with his back to a stone, more of the circle visible in the background. — It turns out “local expert” just means “I read the only book ever written about the archaeology of the stones, and a handful of ancillary things.”

And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.

I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions¹, and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).

But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:

A hand-coloured card, saying 'Thank you so much', with a child's drawing of somebody talking about Bell Beaker people and a photo of Dan showing pictures of pots to a class of schoolchildren. — I particularly enjoy the pencil drawing of me talking about the breadth of Bell Beaker culture, with a child interrupting to say “cool!”.

I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again²: perhaps I should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.

But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so interesting!

Footnotes

¹ Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold. One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument was being constructed…

² By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!

Disappearing Contact Forms

Your Experience May Vary

Works For Me!

Footnotes

Podcast Version

1979

1990

1998

2023

Footnotes

💤 Tired: <dialog>-based HTML+CSS lightboxes

🚀 Wired: <details>-based HTML+CSS lightboxes?

ISPs twenty years ago

ISPs today

Would you even want those services?

Footnotes

…in English

…in other Languages?

Footnotes

Footnotes

Footnotes

Footnotes

💤 Tired: `<dialog>`-based HTML+CSS lightboxes

🚀 Wired: `<details>`-based HTML+CSS lightboxes?