BBC News RSS… your way!

It turns out my series of efforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).

Screenshot of BBC News RSS Feeds (that don't suck!).
The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.

So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds, filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.

The entire thing is open source under an ultra-permissive license, so you can run your own copy if you don’t want to use mine.

Enjoy!

Blog Questions Challenge

Since Kev Quirk made an adaptation of Ava‘s Blog Questions Challenge I’ve been seeing it everywhere in my blogosphere circle. I’ve gotta be the last person left on Earth to do it, but it has that old-school pass-it-along meme feel, like that 2006 one about describing your friends. I’ve not been tagged by name, but both Jeremy and Garrett did a broad “you” tag, so I’m taking it.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It felt like a natural evolution of my second vanity-site. It was 1998, and my site – Castle of the Four Winds – was home to a selection of the same kinds of random crap that everybody put on their homepages at the time. I figured I’d start keeping an online diary: the word “blog” hadn’t been coined yet, and its predecessor “weblog” had only been around for a year and I hadn’t come across it.

So I experimentally started posting a few times a week.

Castle of the Four Winds in early 1999: a very-90s website of white and red text on black, with Times New Roman text, a flaming hit counter, and a blue ribbon campaign button.
I don’t have many of my posts from 1998, but I know from other records that my first deliberately “blog”-like post was on 27 September. But the posts shown in this screenshot, from January 1999, survive and can still be read here1.
By the way, if you liked how my site looked back in the 1990s, you can wind the clock back! Give it a go!

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

1998: Static HTML and a bit of Perl

When I started blogging my site was almost entirely plain HTML2. So my original “platform” was probably Emacs.

2000: Static files indexed by PHP

In the Summer of 2000 I registered avangel.com and moved my diary there. I was still storing posts in static files, but used PHP wrappers to share the structure and menus across the pages. It was a massive improvement.

Later, I moved everything to the (ill-advised?) domain name scatmania.org and reimplemented in pretty-much the same way. Until…

2003: Flip

The first real “blogging engine” I used was Flip.

The first version of Scatmania.org: a Flip-powered weblog.
Flip was a bit of a pain to theme, which is why my Flip-powered blog looked quite a bit like most other Flip-powered blogs.

I liked Flip3: it had a raw simplicity that I’d later come to love in young versions of WordPress. And being able to edit from the Web was a huge improvement over having to edit files, especially when I was out and about: I managed to post from my dad’s BlackBerry while cycling across the Outer Hebrides, for example.

2004: WordPress

I’d have outgrown Flip eventually, but I got a nudge in that direction in July 2004. At the time, I was sharing a server with some friends and operated by Gareth, and something went wrong and the server went completely offline. The co-located server disappeared back to Gareth’s house, eventually, and while I’d recovered many of the posts from my own backups, 61 posts remain partially-incomplete to this day (if you happen to have a copy of any of them I’d love to see it!).

I brought my blog back online using WordPress, whose then-new release version 1.2 included an RSS-powered importer: this allowed me to write a little code to convert my entire previous archive into a fat RSS file and then import it wholesale. WordPress was, as remains, pretty magical – a universal blogging platform that evolved into a universal CMS – and I back in the day I occasionally argued online with Matt about technical aspects of the future direction of the project4.

Scatmana.org version 2 - now with actual web design
Those drop-shadows! Those gradients! Those naked hyperlinks differentiated only by being a slightly different colour! That aggressive use of sans-serif fonts with expanded line-heights! Those RSS links, front-and-centre! The only thing that could make this more-obviously “Web 2.0” would be the addition of a wonky “beta” star in the corner.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see more of my blog’s design history over the last 26+ years, I shared a lot of screenshots back in 2018.

If you didn’t know better, you might well not know I’m running WordPress. My theme and custom plugins are… well, they’re an ecosystem all by themselves. And that’s before you even get to things like CapsulePress, my WordPress-to-Gopher/Gemini/Spartan/Nex bridge, the pile of scripts I use to sync-up with the Fediverse, the PWA I use to post notes while I’m on the move, and so on.

2025: ClassicPress

Earlier this year I experimentally switched to ClassicPress; a fork of WordPress. There’ll doubtless be lots more to say about that, down the line5, but here’s the skinny: I don’t use Gutenberg on my blog anyway6, I appreciate having my backend be almost as high-performance as I’ve worked to make my frontend, and I enjoy most of the feature differences7.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

With the exception of notes (most of which are written in a tool of my own creation and then pushed to one or both of my Mastodon and my blog simultaneously), I mostly write right into the WordPress/ClassicPress post editor.

I often write ideas, concepts, and first drafts into my Obsidian notebook and then copy/paste out when the time comes.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There’s no particular pattern, though it feels like I’m most-inspired to write exactly when I should be prioritising something else! That’s why it’s so helpful to be able to write three sentences into Obsidian and then come back to it later!

I’ve been on a bit of a blogging kick these last few years, though. Last year I wrote a massive 436 posts, although that admittedly includes PESOS‘d checkins from geocaching and geohashing expeditions. I’m a fan of Kev’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, and I’m on course to achieve it earlier than ever before, this year (my sixth consecutive year: I do the challenge strictly by calendar years!), as this post is already by 48th… all within the first 38 days of this year8.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

A mixture of both. Probably most of my posts are written in a single sitting… or, at least, are written in a tab that stays open for the entire time during which it’s written.

But others spend a long time in-progress. You remember how almost a year ago I gave a talk about why Oxford’s area code is 01865? And I promised that there’d be a blog/vlog/maybe-podcast version of that talk later? Yeah: that’s been 90%-there and sitting in a draft pretty-much since then, just waiting for me to make the finishing touches (and record the vlog/podcast variants, if that’s the direction I decide to go in).

And I’ve dusted off drafts that’ve been much older than that, before, too. So it really is a mixture.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I couldn’t pick out a favourite that I wouldn’t change my mind about five minutes later. But a recent favourite might have been last Spring’s “Let Your Players Lead The Way”, which aimed to impart some of the things I’ve learned about gamemastering (especially) while being the dungeon master for The Levellers these last few years9.

Not only was it a post that had been a long time coming, and based on months of drafts and re-drafts, but also I really enjoyed writing some post-specific CSS to give it just a slightly more-magical feel.

Screenshot from Let Your Players Lead The Way, showcasing its design in the style of the D&D Players' Handbook.
The downside is that I’ve now got one more thing to try not to break the next time I re-write my blog’s stylesheet.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I want to redesign the homepage to be simpler, less-graphical, and more-informational. I’m not sure how that’s going to look, yet.

I’ve been wondering about integrating some of my personal-geotracking into the design (Aaron Parecki does an amazing job of this with his dynamic site background image, for example).

I’m playing with the idea of adding a guestbook, like it’s 1998 again or something.

I’d like to tidy up my tagging taxonomy, and I’m not convinced AI is up to the task.

I need to decide how I feel about the emoji reactions feature I added in 2023. I’m still undecided. What do you think? 👍? 👎?

And as I mentioned: I’m experimenting with ClassicPress. It’s working out mostly-okay so far, but that’s a story for another post.

Next?

I feel like I’m the last person in the universe to do this quiz. But if you haven’t – and you have anything approximating a blog – then you should go next.

Footnotes

1 I wouldn’t recommend actually reading my older posts, though. I was a teenager, and it shows.

2 I had a slightly-fancier kind of hosting, by this point, that gave me a cgi-bin directory into which I could compile binaries (in C) or write scripts (in Perl). My hit counter? That was a Perl script I adapted from Matt Wright’s counter.pl and “enhanced” with some flaming text using Corel Photo-Paint.

3 While writing this post, I hunted down the original developer of Flip. He seems cool.

4 A year later he launched WordPress.com, which then evolved into the foundation of Automattic, and there soon came a point where I thought “I should work there, someday!” It took me a further 14 years before I applied for such a job, though.

5 Right off the bat, though, let me stress that trying ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with the drama in the WordPress space right now: in fact I’ve been planning to give it a try ever since the project got its shit together, re-forked WordPress, and released ClassicPress 2.0 a year ago.

6 I don’t have anything against Gutenberg – I use it on other blogs, and every day at work! – and Block Themes are magical… but I’ve never found any benefit to them here: I’ve no need for it, and I’ve got plugins I’ve written for my own use that I’ve never bothered to make Gutenberg-compatible.

7 My biggest gripe with ClassicPress so far is that in removing the jQuery dependency on the post editor’s tag selector they’ve only replaced it with a <datalist>, which is neat and all but kills the ability to autocomplete multiple comma-separated tags at once. But it looks like that’s getting fixed, so I’m going to hang in there for a bit before I decide whether I’m sticking with ClassicPress or not.

8 I’ll save you from doing the maths: if I complete 48 posts in 38 days, I’d expect to complete 100 posts on my 80th day: as it’s not a leap year, that would be Friday 21 March 2025. Let’s see how I get on!

9 Although I’ve been horribly neglecting them for the last couple of months, for various reasons.

× × ×

God’s Adviser

Duration

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.

Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.

I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common1 at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.

A group of children dressed as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, kings, angels, and a variety of barn animals crowd a stage.
Maybe they’re just higher-budget nowadays, or maybe I grew up in a more-deprived area, but I’m pretty sure than when I was a child a costume consisted mostly of a bedsheet if you were an angel, a tea-towel secured with an elastic band if you were a shepherd, a cardboard crown if you were a king, and so on. Photo courtesy Ian Turk.

As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful2.

I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.

Dan, as a young child, superimposed against a background with a star, with a speech bubble reading 'Hark! A star! In the East!'
“Let us go now to Bethlehem. The son of God is born today.”

In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas3, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:

  • God is going to send His only son to Earth and wants to advertise His coming.
  • “What kind of marker can he put in the sky to lead people to the holy infant’s birthplace?”, He wonders.
  • So He auditions a series of different natural phenomena:
    • The first candidate is a cloud, but its pitch is rejected because… I don’t remember: it’ll blow away or something.
    • Another candidate was a rainbow, but it was clearly derivative of an earlier story, perhaps.
    • After a few options, eventually God settles on a star. Hurrah!
  • Some angels go put the star in the right place, shepherds and wise men go visit Mary and her family, and all that jazz.

So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.

Edited watercolour of magi crossing a desert on camels, with a large meteor inserted into the sky.
What the Meteor Strike of Bethlehem lacked in longevity, it made up for in earth-shattering destruction.

I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.

The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines4 and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.

To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?5

“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher6.

The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.

But I wouldn’t let it go:

  • “But Miss, are we saying that God could make mistakes?”
  • “Couldn’t God try out the cloud and the rainbow and just go back in time when He knows which one works?”
  • “Why does God send an angel to tell the shepherds where to go but won’t do that for the kings?”
  • “Miss, don’t the stars move across the sky each night? Wouldn’t everybody be asking questions about the bright one that doesn’t?”
  • “Hang on, what’s supposed to have happened to the Star of Bethlehem after God was done with it? Did it have planets? Did those planets… have life?”

In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.

And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.

Footnotes

1 I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.

2 I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.

3 And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.

4 Our teacher was probably correct.

5 In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!

6 I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.

× × ×

Sabbatical Lesson #2: Burnout

If the most-important lesson I learned from my sabbatical was about boundaries and my work/life balance, then the second most-important was about burnout.

A matchstick, burned almost to the end.
Once all the matches have been burned, you can’t use them to light any more fires. It’s not the best metaphor, but it’s the one you’re getting.

If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.

Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!

When I got back to work2, I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this” experiences:

The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too long, without compassion for yourself and your needs

I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!

Footnotes

1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely surprising.

2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.

×

BBC News RSS… with the sport?

Earlier today, somebody called Allan commented on the latest in my series of several blog posts about how I mutilate manipulate the RSS feeds of BBC News to work around their (many, and increasingly so) various shortcomings, specifically:

  1. Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
  2. Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
  3. All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.

Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.

FreshRSS screenshot with many unread items, but focussing on a feed called "BBC News (with sport)" and showing a story titled: 'How England Golf's yellow cards are tackling blight of slow play'
Some people actually want to read this crap, apparently.

I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed, I’ve got you covered:

So there you go, Allan, and anybody in a similar position. I hope that fulfils your need for sports news… without the crap.

×

Trump’s Strategy

Portrait of Donald Trump in the style of the DOS version of 1991 strategy video game Sid Meier's Civilization, saying: "The Gulf of Mexico shall now be known as the Gulf of America."

Pixel art portrait of Claudia Sheinbaum in Civilization-style, against a background reminiscent of Mexico City, saying: "You're fucking kidding, right?"

Pixel-art of convicted felon Donald Trump, now saying: "We're also renaming the State of Canada, the State of Greenland, and the State of Panama. They all belong to me now."

Newspaper in the style of Sid Meier's Civilization, titled The Final Broadsheet, published February 1 2025 AD. The headline is "Donald Trump claims domination victory", with the subheadline "Google Maps now shows 100% of world is part of America". Below is the pixel-art portrait of Trump and a pixel-art world map with a stars-and-stripes pattern applied to the entire world. A pullquote reads "That's not how any of this works! - rest of world". A secondary story has the headline "Putin, Netanyahu, demand do-over: 'We didn't realise you could invade places by just renaming them yours!'".

What do you reckon? Is he trying to go for a domination victory without ever saying “MY THREATS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS!”? His track record shows that he’s arrogant enough to think that the strategy of simply renaming things until they’re yours is actually viable!

After I saw Mexico’s response to Google following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, this stupid comic literally came to me in a dream.

Adapts screenshots from Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991 DOS version), public domain assets from OpenGameArt.org, and AI-assisted images of world leaders on account of the fact that if I drew pixel-art world leaders without assistance then you’d be even less-likely to be able to recognise them.

Can AI retroactively fix WordPress tags?

I’ve a notion that during 2025 I might put some effort into tidying up the tagging taxonomy on my blog. There’s a few tags that are duplicates (e.g. ai and artificial intelligence) or that exhibit significant overlap (e.g. dog and dogs), or that were clearly created when I speculated I’d write more on the topic than I eventually did (e.g. homa night, escalators1, or nintendo) or that are just confusing and weird (e.g. not that bacon sandwich picture).

Cloud-shaped wordcloud of tags used on DanQ.me, sized by frequency. The words "geocaching" and "cache log" dominate the centre of the picture, with terms like "fun", "funny", "geeky", "news", "video games", "technology", "video", and "review" a close second.
Not an entirely surprising word cloud of my tag frequency, given that all of my cache logs are tagged “cache log” and “geocaching”, and relatively-generic terms like “technology”, “fun”, and “funny” appear all over the place on my blog.

Retro-tagging with AI

One part of such an effort might be to go back and retroactively add tags where they ought to be. For about the first decade of my blog, i.e. prior to around 2008, I rarely used tags to categorise posts. And as more tags have been added it’s apparent that many old posts even after that point might be lacking tags that perhaps they ought to have2.

I remain sceptical about many uses of (what we’re today calling) “AI”, but one thing at which LLMs seem to do moderately well is summarisation3. And isn’t tagging and categorisation only a stone’s throw away from summarisation? So maybe, I figured, AI could help me to tidy up my tagging. Here’s what I was thinking:

  1. Tell an LLM what tags I use, along with an explanation of some of the quirkier ones.
  2. Train the LLM with examples of recent posts and lists of the tags that were (correctly, one assumes) applied.
  3. Give it the content of blog posts and ask what tags should be applied to it from that list.
  4. Script the extraction of the content from old posts with few tags and run it through the above, presenting to me a report of what tags are recommended (which could then be coupled with a basic UI that showed me the post and suggested tags, and “approve”/”reject” buttons or similar.

Extracting training data

First, I needed to extract and curate my tag list, for which I used the following SQL4:

SELECT COUNT(wp_term_relationships.object_id) num, wp_terms.slug FROM wp_term_taxonomy
LEFT JOIN wp_terms ON wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
WHERE wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'post_tag'
AND wp_terms.slug NOT IN (
  -- filter out e.g. 'rss-club', 'published-on-gemini', 'dancast' etc.
  -- these are tags that have internal meaning only or are already accurately applied
  'long', 'list', 'of', 'tags', 'the', 'ai', 'should', 'never', 'apply'
)
GROUP BY wp_terms.slug
HAVING num > 2 -- filter down to tags I actually routinely use
ORDER BY wp_terms.slug
Many of my tags are used for internal purposes; e.g. I tag posts published on gemini if they’re to appear on gemini://danq.me/ and dancast if they embed an episode of my podcast. I filtered these out because I never want the AI to suggest applying them.

I took my output and dumped it into a list, and skimmed through to add some clarity to some tags whose purpose might be considered ambiguous, writing my explanation of each in parentheses afterwards. Here’s a part of the list, for example:

Prompt derivation

I used that list as the basis for the system message of my initial prompt:

Suggest topical tags from a predefined list that appropriately apply to the content of a given blog post.

# Steps

1. **Read the Blog Post**: Carefully read through the provided content of the blog post to identify its main themes and topics.
2. **Analyse Key Aspects**: Identify key topics, themes, or subjects discussed in the blog post.
3. **Match with Tags**: Compare these identified topics against the list of available tags.
4. **Select Appropriate Tags**: Choose tags that best represent the main topics and themes of the blog post.

# Output Format

Provide a list of suggested tags. Each tag should be presented as a single string. Multiple tags should be separated by commas.

# Allowed Tags

Tags that can be suggested are as follows. Text in parentheses are not part of the tag but are a description of the kinds of content to which the tag ought to be applied:

- aberdyfi
- aberystwyth
- ...
- youtube
- zoos

# Examples

**Input:**
The rapid advancement of AI technology has had a significant impact on my industry, even on the ways in which I write my blog posts. This post, for example, used AI to help with tagging.

**Output:**
ai, technology, blogging, meta, work

...(other examples)...

# Notes

- Ensure that all suggested tags are relevant to the key themes of the blog post.
- Tags should be selected based on their contextual relevance and not just keyword matching.

This system prompt is somewhat truncated, but you get the idea.

Now I was ready to give it a go with some real data. As an initial simple and short (and therefore also computationally cheap) experiment, I tried feeding it a note I wrote last week about the interrobang’s place in the Spanish language, and in Unicode.

That post already has the following tags (but this wasn’t disclosed to the AI in its training set; it had to work from scratch): , , (a bit of a redundancy there!), , and .

Testing it out

Let’s see what the AI suggests:

curl https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_TOKEN" \
  -d '{
  "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "system",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "[PROMPT AS DESCRIBED ABOVE]"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "My 8-year-old asked me \"In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽\" I assume the answer is yes A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ = U+203D, ⸘ = U+2E18. Nice. And yet we dont have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar \"cifrão\" dollar signs..."
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "response_format": {
    "type": "text"
  },
  "temperature": 1,
  "max_completion_tokens": 2048,
  "top_p": 1,
  "frequency_penalty": 0,
  "presence_penalty": 0
}'
Running this via command-line curl meant I quickly ran up against some Bash escaping issues, but set +H and a little massaging of the blog post content seemed to fix it.

GPT-4o-mini

When I ran this query against the gpt-4o-mini model, I got back: unicode, language, education, children, symbols.

That’s… not ideal. I agree with the tags unicode, language, and children, but this isn’t really about education. If I tagged everything vaguely educational on my blog with education, it’d be an even-more-predominant tag than geocaching is! I reserve that tag for things that relate specifically to formal education: but that’s possibly something I could correct for with a parenthetical in my approved tags list.

symbols, though, is way out. Sure, the post could be argued to be something to do with symbols… but symbols isn’t on the approved tag list in the first place! This is a clear hallucination, and that’s pretty suboptimal!

Maybe a beefier model will fare better…

GPT-4o

I switched gpt-4o-mini for gpt-4o in the command above and ran it again. It didn’t take noticeably longer to run, which was pleasing.

The model returned: children, language, unicode, typography. That’s a big improvement. It no longer suggests education, which was off-base, nor symbols, which was a hallucination. But it did suggest typography, which is a… not-unreasonable suggestion.

Neither model suggested spain, and strictly-speaking they were probably right not to. My post isn’t about Spain so much as it’s about Spanish. I don’t have a specific tag for the latter, but I’ve subbed in the former to “connect” the post to ones which are about Spain, but that might not be ideal. Either way: if this is how I’m using the tag then I probably ought to clarify as such in my tag list, or else add a note to the system prompt to explain that I use place names as the tags for posts about the language of those places. (Or else maybe I need to be more-consistent in my tagging).

I experimented with a handful of other well-tagged posts and was moderately-satisfied with the results. Time for a more-challenging trial.

This time, with feeling…

Next, I decided to run the code against a few blog posts that are in need of tags. At this point, I wasn’t quite ready to implement a UI, so I just adapted my little hacky Bash script and copy-pasted HTML-stripped post contents directly into it.

Hand-drawn wireframe application with a blog post shown on the left (with 'previous' and 'next' buttons) and proposed tags on the right (with 'accept' and 'reject' buttons), alongside conventional tag management tools.
If it worked, I decided, I could make a UI. Until then, the command line was plenty sufficient.

I ran against three old posts:

Hospitals (June 2006)

In this post, I shared that my grandmother and my coworker had (independently) been taken into hospital. It had no tags whatsoever.

The AI suggested the tags hospital, family, injury, work, weddings, pub, humour. Which at a glance, is probably a superset of the tags that I’d have considered, but there’s a clear logic to them all.

It clearly picked out weddings based on a throwaway comment I made about a cousin’s wedding, so I disagree with that one: the post isn’t strictly about weddings just because it mentions one.

pub could go either way. It turns out my coworker’s injury occurred at or after a trip to the pub the previous night, and so its relevance is somewhat unknowable from this post in isolation. I think that’s a reasonable suggestion, and a great example of why I’d want any such auto-tagging system to be a human assistant (suggesting candidate tags) and not a fully-automated system. Interesting!

Finally, you might think of humour as being a little bit sarcastic, or maybe overly-laden with schadenfreude. But the blog post explicitly states that my coworker “carefully avoided saying how he’d managed to hurt himself, which implies that it’s something particularly stupid or embarrassing”, before encouraging my friends to speculate on it. However, it turns out that humour isn’t one of my existing tags at all! Boo, hallucinating AI!

I ended up applying all of the AI’s suggestions except weddings and humour. I also applied smartdata, because that’s where I worked (the AI couldn’t have been expected to guess that without context, though!).

Catch-Up: Concerts (June 2005)

This post talked about Ash and I’s travels around the UK to see REM and Green Day in concert5 and to the National Science Museum in London where I discovered that Ash was prejudiced towards… carrot cake.

The AI suggested: concerts, travel, music, preston, london, science museum, blogging.

Those all seemed pretty good at a first glance. Personally, I’d forgotten that we swung by Preston during that particular grand tour until the AI suggested the tag, and then I had to look back at the post more-carefully to double-check! blogging initially seemed like a stretch given that I was only blogging about not having blogged much, but on reflection I think I agree with the robot on this one, because I did explicitly link to a 2002 page that fell off the Internet only a few years ago about the pointlessness of blogging. So I think it counts.

Dan, in his 20s, crouches awkwardly in front of a TV and a Nintendo Wii in a wood-panelled room as he attempts to headbutt a falling blue balloon.
I was able to verify that I’d been in Preston with thanks to this contemporaneous photo. I have no further explanation for the content of the photo, though.

science museum is a big fail though. I don’t use that tag, but I do use the tag museum. So close, but not quite there, AI!

I applied all of its suggestions, after switching museum in place of science museum.

Geeky Winnage With Bluetooth (September 2004)

I wrote this blog post in celebration of having managed to hack together some stuff to help me remote-control my PC from my phone via Bluetooth, which back then used to be a challenge, in the hope that this would streamline pausing, playing, etc. at pizza-distribution-time at Troma Night, a weekly film night I hosted back then.

Four young people, smiling in laughing, sit in a cluttered and messy flat.
If you were sat on that sofa, fighting your way past other people and a mango-chutney-barrel-cum-table to get to a keyboard was genuinely challenging!

It already had the tag technology, which it inherited from a pre-tagging evolution of my blog which used something akin to categories (of which only one could be assigned to a post). In addition to suggesting this, the AI also picked out the following options: bluetooth, geeky, mobile, troma night, dvd, technology, and software.

The big failure here was dvd, which isn’t remotely one of my tags (and probably wouldn’t apply here if it were: this post isn’t about DVDs; it barely even mentions them). Possibly some prompt engineering is required to help ensure that the AI doesn’t make a habit of this “include one tag not from the approved list, every time” trend.

Apart from that it’s a pretty solid list. Annoyingly the AI suggested mobile, which isn’t an approved tag, instead of mobiles, which is. That’s probably a tokenisation fault, but it’s still annoying and a reminder of why even a semi-automated “human-checked” system would need a safety-check to ensure that no absent tags are allowed through to the final stage of approval.

This post!

As a bonus experiment, I tried running my code against a version of this post, but with the information about the AI’s own prompt and the examples removed (to reduce the risk of confusion). It came up with: ai, wordpress, blogging, tags, technology, automation.

All reasonable-sounding choices, and among those I’d made myself… except for tags and automation which, yet again, aren’t among tags that I use. Unless this tendency to hallucinate can be reined-in, I’m guessing that this tool’s going to continue to have some challenges when used on longer posts like this one.

Conclusion and next steps

The bottom line is: yes, this is a job that an AI can assist with, but no, it’s not one that it can do without supervision. The laser-focus with which gpt-4o was able to pick out taggable concepts, faster than I’d have been able to do for the same quantity of text, shows that there’s potential here, but it’s not yet proven itself enough of a time-saver to justify me writing a fluffy UI for it.

However, I might expand on the command-line tools I’ve been using in order to produce a non-interactive list of tagging suggestions, and use that to help inform my work as I tidy up the tags throughout my blog.

You still won’t see any “AI-authored” content on this site (except where it’s for the purpose of talking about AI-generated content, and it’ll always be clearly labelled), and I can’t see that changing any time soon. But I’ll admit that there might be some value in AI-assisted curation and administration, so long as there’s an informed human in the loop at all times.

Footnotes

1 Based on my tagging, I’ve apparently only written about escalators once, while playing Pub Jenga at Robin‘s 21st birthday party. I can’t imagine why I thought it deserved a tag.

2 There are, of course, various other people trying similar approaches to this and similar problems. I might have tried one of them, were it not for the fact that I’m not quite as interested in solving the problem as I am in understanding how one might use an AI to solve the problem. It’s similar to how I don’t enjoy doing puzzles like e.g. sudoku as much as I enjoy writing software that optimises for solving such puzzles. See also, for example, how I beat my children at Mastermind or what the hardest word in Hangman is or my various attempts to avoid doing online jigsaws.

3 Let’s ignore for a moment the farce that was Apple’s attempt to summarise news headlines, shall we?

4 Essentially the same SQL, plus WordClouds.com, was used to produce the word cloud grapic!

5 Two separate concerts, but can you imagine‽ 🤣

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Sabbatical Lesson #1: Boundaries

Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.

A French Bulldog wearing a teal jumper pulls away at her red lead as she walks down a dirt path between gardens. Freezing fog hangs in the air up ahead.
This is about the point on the way back from the school run at which I pull out my phone and see what’s happening in the world or at work. But not today.

My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.

Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?

Dan, wearing a purple t-shirt, looks at the camera while pointing at the centre of three computer screens which share a cluttered desk, each of which shows a stylised image version of the Automattic Creed.
Here. Here is where work happens (or, y’know, anywhere I take my work laptop to… but the crucial thing is that work has a time and a place, and it doesn’t include “while walking the dog home after dropping the kids at school”).

But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!

My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase here:

It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.

Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.

He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to my work Slack account.

Footnotes

1 My employers’ sabbatical benefit is truly an epic perk.

2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.

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We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida

Book cover of We'll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida, translated by E. Madison Shimoda. At the top is written 'The Japanese Bestseller'. The hospital-green cover shows an open pill bottle (with label written in Japanese) pouring out five cats of different breeds who tumble down to land on their feet atop the translator's name.Another book I received at Christmas Eve’s book exchange was We’ll Prescribe You A Cat by Syou Ishida, translated from the original Japanese by Emmie Madison Shimoda. It’s apparently won all kinds of acclaim and awards and what-have-you, so I was hoping for something pretty spectacular.

It’s… pretty good, I guess? Less a novel, it’s more like a collection of short stories with an overarching theme, within which a deeper plot which spans them all begins to emerge… but is never entirely resolved.

That repeating theme might be summed up as this: a person goes to visit a clinic – often under the illusion that it’s a psychiatric specialist – where, after briefly discussing their problems with the doctor, they’re prescribed a dose of “cat” for some number of days. There’s a surprising and fun humour in the prescription, each time: the matter-of-fact way that the doctor dispenses felines as if they were medications and resulting reactions of his nonplussed patients. Fundamentally, a prescription of cat works, and by the time the cat is returned to the clinic, its caretaker is cured, albeit not necessarily in the way in which they would have originally expected.

Standing alone, each chapter short story is excellent. The writing is compelling and rich and the characters well-developed, particularly in the short timeframes in which we get to know each of them. There’s a lot of interesting bits of Japanese culture represented, too, which – as an outsider – piqued my curiosity: whether by the careful work of the author or her translator it never left me feeling lost, although I suspect there might be a few subtler points I missed as a result of my geographic bias1.

The characters (whether human, feline, or… otherwise…?) and their situations are quirky and amusing, and there are a handful of heart-warming… and heart-wrenching… moments that I thoroughly enjoyed. But by the time I was half-way through the book, I was becoming invested in a payoff that would never come to be delivered. The nature of the doctor, his receptionist, and their somewhat-magical clinic is never really resolved, and the interconnections between the patients is close to non-existent, leaving the book feeling like a collection of tales that are related to… but not connected to… one another. As much as I’d enjoyed every story – and I did! – I nonetheless felt robbed of the opportunity to wrap up the theme that they belong to.

Instead, we’re given just more unanswered questions: hints at the nature of the clinic and its occupants, ideas that skirt around ideas of magic and ghosts, and no real explanation. Maybe the author’s planning to address it in the upcoming sequel, but unless I’m confident that’s the case, I’ll probably skip it.

In summary: some beautifully-written short stories with a common theme and a fun lens on Japanese culture, particularly likely to appeal to a cat lover, but with no payoff for getting invested in the overarching plot.

Footnotes

1 Ishida spends a significant amount of intention describing the regional accents of various secondary characters, and comparing those to the Kyoto dialect, for example. I’m pretty sure there’s more I could take from this if I had the cultural foothold to better understand the relevance! But most of the cultural differences are less-mysterious.

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Small-World Serendipity

As part of our trip to the two-island republic of Trinidad & Tobago, Ruth and I decided we’d love to take a trip out to Buccoo Reef, off the coast of the smaller island. The place we’ve been staying during the Tobago leg of our visit made a couple of phone calls for us and suggested that we head on down to the boardwalk at nearby Buccoo the next morning where we’d apparently be able to meet somebody from Pops Tours who’d be able to take us out1.

Silhouette of a bird flying through lightly-cloudy skies, over a colourful sign which begins "I heart-sign BUC" before disppearing out of frame. The heart is coloured in the red-with-a-black-and-white-diagonal-stripe of the Trinidad & Tobago flag.
I could have shown you a picture of the fun ‘I ♥️ Buccoo’ sign from the boardwalk, but I got distracted by a Magnificent Frigatebird circling overhead2.

At the allotted time, we found somebody from Pops Tours, who said that he was still waiting for their captain to get there3 and asked us to go sit under the almond tree down the other end of the boardwalk and he’d meet us there.

A black chicken and her four young chicks stand on a boardwalk and peck at the tail end of a coconut.
It was only after we left to follow the instructions that I remembered that I don’t know how to identify an almond tree. So we opted to sit under a tree near a chicken teaching her chicks how to eat a coconut4. I still don’t know if that was right, but the boaters found us in the end so it can’t have been too far off.

We’d previously clocked that one of the many small boats moored in the bay was Cariad, and found ourselves intensely curious. All of the other boats we’d seen had English-language names of the kinds you’d expect: a well-equipped pleasure craft optimistically named Fish Finder, a small dual-motorcraft with the moniker Bounty, a brightly-coloured party boat named Cool Runnings, and so on. To travel a third of the way around the world to find a boat named in a familiar Welsh word felt strange.

Small six-seater day boat named 'Cariad', afloat. The letter I is dotted with a heart symbol.
Either you’re an extremely long way from home, boat, or else somebody around here has a surprising interest in the Welsh language.

So imagine our delight when the fella we’d been chatting to came over, explained that their regular tour boat (presumably the one pictured on their website) was in the shop, and said that his cousin would be taking us out in his boat instead… and that cousin came over piloting… the Cariad!

As we climbed aboard, we spotted that he was wearing a t-shirt with a Welsh dragon on it, and a sticker on the side of the helm carried a Welsh flag. What strange coincidence is this, that Ruth and I – who met while living in Wales and come for a romantic getaway to the Caribbean – should happen to find ourselves aboard a literal “love” boat named in Welsh.

View from the prow of the Cariad, a light blue boat, as she heads towards a distant shore.
Long shallow sandbars and reefs almost surround the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, leaving enormous areas accessible only to low-draft boats (and helping to protect the islands from some of the worst of the weather that the Caribbean can muster).

There probably aren’t many boats on Earth that fly both the colours of Trinidad & Tobago and of Wales, so we naturally had to ask: did you name this boat?, and why? It turns out that yes, our guide for the day has a love of and fascination with Wales that we never quite got to the bottom of. He’d taken a holiday to Swansea just last year, and would be returning to Wales again later this year.

It’s strange to think that anybody might deliberately take a holiday from a tropical island paradise to come to drizzly cold Wales, but there you have it. It sounds like he was into his football and that might have had an impact on his choice of destination, but choose to believe that maybe there’s a certain affinity between parts of the world that have experienced historical oppression at the hands of a colonial English mindset? Like: perhaps Nigerians would enjoy India as a getaway destination, or Guyanans would dig Mauritius as a holiday spot, too?5

Dan stands waist-deep in seawater; land is visible in the far distance.
I wrote previously about visiting the Nylon Pool, an waist-deep bit of ocean on a sandbar a full half a mile offshore.

We took a dip at the Nylon Pool, snorkelled around parts of Buccoo Reef (replete with tropical fish of infinite variety and colour), spotted sea turtles zipping around the boat, and took a walk along No Man’s Land (a curious peninsula, long and thin and cut-off from the mainland by mangrove swamps, so-named because Trinidadian law prohibits claiming ownership of any land within a certain distance of the high tide mark… and this particular beach spot consists entirely of such land, coast-to-coast, on account of its extreme narrowness. All in all, it was a delightful boating adventure.

(And for the benefit of the prospective tourist who stumbles upon this blog post in years to come, having somehow hit the right combination of keywords: we paid $400 TTD6 for the pair of us: that’s about £48 GBP at today’s exchange rate, which felt like exceptional value for an amazing experience given that we got the expedition entirely to ourselves.)

A man sits on the prow of the Cariad, over a sandbar, pulling in her anchor.
Any worries I might have had about the seaworthiness of our vessel as its owner repeatedly bailed out the back of the boat with a small bucket were quickly assuaged when I realised that I could probably walk most of the way back to shore, should I need to! (sadly not visible: the Welsh dragon on front of his t-shirt)

But aside from the fantastic voyage we got to go on, this expedition was noteworthy in particular for Cariad and her cymruphile captain. It feels like a special kind of small-world serendipity to discover such immediate and significant common ground with a stranger on the other side of an ocean… to coincide upon a shared interest in a culture and place less-foreign to you than to your host.

An enormous diolch yn fawr7 is due to Pops Tours for this remarkable experience.

Footnotes

1 Can I take a moment to observe how much easier it was to charter a boat in Tobago than it was in Ireland, where I left several answerphone messages but never even got a response? Although in the Irish boat owners’ defence, I was being creepy and mysterious by asking them to take me to random coordinates off the coast.

2 It’s possible that I’ve become slightly obsessed with frigatebirds since arriving here. I first spotted them from our ferry ride from Trinidad to Tobago, noticing their unusually widely-forked tails, striking white (in the case of the females) chests, and relatively-effortless (for a seabird) thermal-chasing flight. But they’re really cool! They’re a seabird… that isn’t waterproof and can’t swim… if they land in the water, they’re at serious risk of drowning! (Their lack of water-resistant feathers helps with their agility, most-likely.) Anyway – while they can snatch shallow-swimming prey out of the water, they seem to prefer to (and get at least 40% of their food from) stealing it from other birds, harassing them in-flight and snatching it from their bills, or else attacking them until they throw up and grabbing their victim’s vomit as it falls. Nature is weird and amazing.

3 Time works differently here. If you schedule something, it’s more a guideline than it is a timetable. When Ruth and I would try paddleboarding a few days later we turned up at the rental shack at their published opening time and hung out on the beach for most of an hour before messaging the owners via the number on their sign. After 15 minutes we got a response that said they’d be there in 10 minutes. They got there 20 minutes later and opened their shop. I’m not complaining – the beach was lovely and just lounging around in the warm sea air with a cold drink from a nearby bar was great – but I learned from the experience that if you’re planning to meet somebody at a particular time here, you might consider bringing a book. (Last-minute postscript: while trying to arrange our next accommodation, alongside writing this post, I was told that I’d receive a phone call “in half an hour” to arrange payment: that was over an hour ago…)

4 Come for the story of small-world serendipity; stay for the copious candid bird photos, I guess?

5 I’ll tell you one thing about coming out to Trinidad & Tobago, it makes you feel occasionally (and justifiably) awkward for the colonial era of the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth II gave royal assent to the bill that granted the islands independence only in 1962, well within living memory, and we’ve met folks who’ve spoken to us about living here when it was still under British rule.

6 Exceptionally-geeky footnote time. The correct currency symbol for the Trinidad & Tobago Dollar is an S-shape with two vertical bars through it, which is not quite the same as the conventional S-shape with a single vertical bar that you’re probably used to seeing when referring to e.g. American, Canadian, or Australian dollars. Because I’m a sucker for typographical correctness, I decided that I’d try to type it “the right way” here in my blog post, and figured that Unicode had solved this problem for me: the single-bar dollar sign that’s easy to type on your keyboard inherits its codepoint from ASCII, I guessed, so the double-bar dollar sign would be elsewhere in Unicode-space, right? Like how Unicode defines single-bar (pound) and double-bar (lira) variants of the “pound sign”. But it turns out this isn’t the case: the double-bar dollar sign, sometimes called cifrão (from Portugese), and the single-bar dollar sign are treated as allographs: they share the same codepoint and only the choice of type face differentiates between them. I can’t type a double-bar dollar sign for you without forcing an additional font upon you, and even if I did it wouldn’t render “correctly” for everybody. Unicode is great, but it’s not perfect.

7 “Thank you very much”, in Welsh, but you probably knew that already.

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James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes

Book cover of James Acaster's Classic Scrapes.On the flight over to Trinidad I finished reading James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster, which I received as part of our family’s traditional Christmas Eve book exchange. I’m a big fan of his stand-up work (and I maintain that his 2018 serialised show Repertoire is among of the most artfully-crafted pieces of live comedy ever written) and clearly JTA recalled this fact when giving me this book.

Many of the stories in Classic Scrapes have featured in his work before, in various forms, and I found myself occasionally recognising one and wondering if I’d accidentally skipped back a chapter. It helps a lot to read them in Acaster’s “voice” – imagining his delivery – because they’re clearly written to be enjoyed in that way. In the first few chapters the book struggled to “grab” me, and it wasn’t until I started hearing it as if I were listening in to James’s internal monologue that it gave me my first laugh-out-loud moment.

After that, though, it got easier to enjoy each and every tall tale told. Acaster’s masterful callback humour ties together anecdotes about giant letter Ws, repeated car crashes, and the failures of his band (and, I suppose, almost everything else in his life, at some point or another), across different chapters, which is fun and refreshing and adds a new dimension to each that wouldn’t be experienced in isolation.

A further ongoing concept seems to be a certain idolisation of Dave Gorman, whose Are You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack storytelling style was clearly an inspiration. In these, of course, a series of (mis)adventures with a common theme or mission becomes a vehicle for a personal arc within which the absurdity of the situations described is made accessible and believable. But with James Acaster’s self-deprecating style, this is delivered as a negative self-portrayal: somebody who doesn’t live up to their idea of their own hero, and becomes a parody of themselves for trying. It’s fun, but perhaps not for everybody (I tried to explain to Ruth why I’d laughed out loud at something but then needed to explain to her who Dave Gorman is and why that matters.)

A fun read if you enjoy Acaster’s comedic style.

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Entitled by Kate Manne

Book cover: Entitled by Kate Manne. Subtitle: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Shows a picture of two playing cards; the King of Diamonds sits atop, mostly-covering the Queen of Hearts beneath.I just finished reading Kate Manne‘s Entitled. I can’t remember where I first heard about it or why I opted to buy a copy, but it had been sitting in my to-read pile for a while and so I picked it up last month to read over the festive period.

The book takes a pop-sci dive into research around male entitlement and the near-universal influence of patriarchal ideology. It’s an often bleak and sometimes uncomfortable read: Kate Manne draws a line connecting the most egregious and widely-reported abuses of power by men to much-more-commonplace “everyday” offences, many of which are routinely overlooked or dismissed. The examples she provides are a sad reminder of quite how deeply-embedded into our collective subconscious (regardless of our genders) are our ideas of gender roles and expectations.

It’s feels somewhat chastening to see oneself in some of those examples, whether by my own assumed entitlement or merely by complicity with problematic social norms. We’ve doubtless all done it, at some point or another, though, and we don’t make progress towards a better world by feeling sorry for ourselves. By half way through the book I was looking for action points that never came; instead, the author (eventually) lays out what she’s doing and leaves the reader to make their own decisions.

The vast majority of the book is pretty bleak, and it takes until the final chapter before it reaches anything approximating hope (although the author refrains from classifying it as such), using Manne’s then-imminent parenthood as a vehicle. She finishes by talking about the lessons she hopes to impart to her daughter about how to thrive in this world, which seems less-optimistic than discussing, perhaps, how to improve the world for everybody, but is still the closest thing it delivers to answering “what can we do about this?”.

But I suppose that’s the message in this book: male entitlement is a product of our endemic patriarchy and, try as we might, it’s not going away any time soon. Instead, we should be picking our battles: producing a generation of women and girls who are better-equipped to understand and demand their moral rights and of men and boys who try to work against, rather than exploit, the unfair advantages they’re afforded at the expense of other genders.

That I’d hoped to come to the end of the book with a more feel-good outlook betrays the fact that I’d like there to be some kind of magical quick fix to a problem that I’ve certainly helped perpetuate. There isn’t, and that’s a let down after the book’s uncomfortable ride (not a let down on the part of the book, of course: a let down on the part of the world). The sadness that comes from reading it is magnified by the fact that since its publication in 2020, many parts of the Western world and especially Manne’s own USA have gotten worse, not better, at tackling the issue of male entitlement.

But wishful thinking doesn’t dismantle the patriarchy, and I was pleased to get to the back cover with a slightly sharper focus on the small areas in which I might be able to help fight for a better future. A good read, so long as you can tolerate the discomfort that may come from casting a critical lens over a society that you’ve been part of (arguably it could be even-more-important if you can’t tolerate such a discomfort, but that’s another story).

(In 2025 I’m going to try blogging about the books I read, in addition to whatever else I write about. Expect an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, probably with a few lapses where I forget to write about something until well after I’m deep into what follows it and then forget to say anything about it ever.)

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Endless SSH Tarpit on Debian

Tarpitting SSH with Endlessh

I had a smug moment when I saw security researcher Rob Ricci and friends’ paper empirically analysing brute-force attacks against SSH “in the wild”.1 It turns out that putting all your SSH servers on “weird” port numbers – which I’ve routinely done for over a decade – remains a pretty-effective way to stop all that unwanted traffic2, whether or not you decide to enhance that with some fail2ban magic.

But then I saw a comment about Endlessh. Endlessh3 acts like an SSH server but then basically reverse-Slow-Loris’s the connecting client, very gradually feeding it an infinitely-long SSH banner and hanging it for… well, maybe 15 seconds or so but possibly up to a week.

Installing an Endlessh tarpit on Debian 12

I was just setting up a new Debian 12 server when I learned about this. I’d already moved the SSH server port away from the default 224, so I figured I’d launch Endlessh on port 22 to slow down and annoy scanners.

Installation wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped considering there’s a package. Here’s what I needed to do:

  1. Move any existing SSH server to a different port, if you haven’t already, e.g. as shown in the footnotes.
  2. Install the package, e.g.: sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y endlessh
  3. Permit Endlessh to run on port 22: sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/bin/endlessh
  4. Modify /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/endlessh.service in the following ways:
    1. uncomment AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
    2. comment PrivateUsers=true
    3. change InaccessiblePaths=/run /var into InaccessiblePaths=/var
  5. Reload the modified service: sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  6. Configure Endlessh to run on port 22 rather than its default of 2222: echo "Port 22" | sudo tee /etc/endlessh/config
  7. Start Endlessh: sudo service endlessh start

To test if it’s working, connect to your SSH server on port 22 with your client in verbose mode, e.g. ssh -vp22 example.com and look for banner lines full of random garbage appearing at 10 second intervals.

Screenshot showing SSH connection being established to an Endlessh server, which is returning line after line of randomly-generated text as a banner.

It doesn’t provide a significant security, but you get to enjoy the self-satisfied feeling that you’re trolling dozens of opportunistic script kiddies a day.

Footnotes

1 It’s a good paper in general, if that’s your jam.

2 Obviously you gain very little security by moving to an unusual port number, given that you’re already running your servers in “keys-only” (PasswordAuthentication no) configuration mode already, right? Right!? But it’s nice to avoid all the unnecessary logging that wave after wave of brute-force attempts produce.

3 Which I can only assume is pronounced endle-S-S-H, but regardless of how it’s said out loud I appreciate the wordplay of its name.

4 To move your SSH port, you might run something like echo "Port 12345" | sudo tee /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/unusual-port.conf and restart the service, of course.

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My Ball

Our beloved-but-slightly-thick dog will sometimes consent to playing fetch, but one of her favourite games to play is My Ball. Which is a bit like fetch, except that she won’t let go of the ball.

It’s not quite the same as tug-of-war, though. She doesn’t want you to pull the toy in a back-and-forth before, most-likely, giving up and letting her win1. Nor is My Ball a solo game: she’s not interested in sitting and simply chewing the ball, like some dogs do.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog on a black-and-white rug, indoors, stands while chewing a lime green tennis ball.
I’d like to imagine the grunts and snorts she makes at about this moment actually translate to “My ball. Myyyy… ballll. Myyyyy ball! MY BALL! My… BALL!”

No, this is absolutely a participatory game. She’ll sit and whine for your attention to get you to come to another room. Or she’ll bring the toy in question (it doesn’t have to be a ball) and place it gently on your foot to get your attention.

Your role in this game is to want the ball. So long as you’re showing that you want the ball – occasionally reaching down to take it only for her to snatch it away at the last second, verbally asking if you can have it, or just looking enviously in its general direction – you’re playing your part in the game. Your presence and participation is essential, even as your role is entirely ceremonial.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog in a doorway, on a tiled floor, holds a braided rope; a human hand barely holds the other end.
This might look like a game of tug-of-war, but you’ll note that my grip is just barely two-fingered. She’s not pulling, because she doesn’t need to unless I try to take the toy. This is My Rope, she knows.

Playing it, I find myself reminded of playing with the kids when they were toddlers. The eldest in particular enjoyed spending countless hours playing make-believe games in which the roles were tightly-scripted2. She’d tell me that, say, I was a talking badger or a grumpy dragon or an injured patient but immediately shoot down any effort to role-play my assigned character, telling me that I was “doing it wrong” if I didn’t act in exactly the unspoken way that she imagined my character ought to behave.

But the important thing to her was that I embodied the motivation that she assigned me. That I wanted the rabbits to stop digging too near to my burrow3 or the princess to stay in her cage4 or to lie down in my hospital bed and await the doctor’s eventual arrival5. Sometimes I didn’t need to do much, so long as I showed how I felt in the role I’d been assigned.

A toddler with long blonde hair, wearing a pink cardigan, sits on a tall stool in front of a kitchen sink, holding a long-handled scrubbing brush.
In this game, the chef was “making soup” (in the sink, apparently) and my job was to “want the soup”.

Somebody with much more acting experience and/or a deeper academic comprehension of the performing arts is going to appear in the comments and tell me why this is, probably.

But I guess what I mean to say is that playing with my dog sometimes reminds me of playing with a toddler. Which, just sometimes, I miss.

Footnotes

1 Alternatively, tug-of-war can see the human “win” and then throw the toy, leading to a game of fetch after all.

2 These games were, admittedly, much more-fun than the time she had me re-enact my father’s death with her.

3 “Grr, those pesky rabbits are stopping me sleeping.”

4 “I’ll just contentedly sit on my pile of treasure, I guess?”

5 Playing at being an injured patient was perhaps one of my favourite roles, especially after a night in which the little tyke had woken me a dozen times and yet still had some kind of tiny-human morning-zoomies. On at least one such occasion I’m pretty sure I actually fell asleep while the “doctor” finished her rounds of all the soft toys whose triage apparently put them ahead of me in the pecking order. Similarly, I always loved it when the kids’ games included a “naptime” component.

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Moving Three Rings’ Servers

Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when I kicked off my sabbatical twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements along the way).

Network diagram but with entities having faces and named Chungus, Atul, Summer, Gwen, Alice, Astrid, and Demmy.
If you ignore the smiley faces and names my 10-year-old annotated it with, this diagram’s a reasonably-accurate representation of what each of our three production server clusters look like.

I did some work on this project during my Three Rings-focussed International Volunteer Day last week, but it feels like I’ve been working on it for much longer than that. And it feels like it… because I have been.

Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits, making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks beforehand, I was running a “dry run” every four or five days, streamlining the process of moving the ~450GB1 of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway: reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users knew about our downtime window, and generally fitting in a little time to panic.

Terminal screenshot showing a directory listing of a logs directory with several gzipped logfiles with different date-stamped suffixes, and the contents of the logrotate configuration file that produced them.
I made reference on International Volunteer Day to how we needed to configure logrotate. When you’re building architecture for a system as gnarly as Three Rings, there’s about a billion tools that need such careful tweaking2.
The whole operation was amazingly successful. We’d announced an at-risk period of up to six hours and I was anticipating it taking three… but the whole thing was completed within a downtime window of just two and a half hours. And I fully credit all of the preparation time. It turns out that “measure twice, cut once” is a sensible strategy3.

It’s challenging to pull off a “big”, intensive operation like this in an entirely voluntary operation. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it were I not on sabbatical, but it’d certainly have been harder and riskier.

But then, I also couldn’t have done it without the kickass team of volunteers I’ve surrounded myself with. I guess the real success story here is in the power of a well-aligned team and in volunteer effort.

Footnotes

1 Three Rings‘ user data is represented by a little under 70GB of MariaDB databases plus about 380GB of organisational storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search engines, and larger eCommerce platforms… but large enough that moving it takes a little planning!

2 Okay, a billion tools to configure? That’s an exaggeration. Especially now: since the architectural changes I’ve put in place this week, for example, production app server builds of Three Rings no require a custom-compiled build of Nginx (yes, this really was something we used to need).

3 Which you’d think I’d have realised with my more-successful recent second attempt at secret-cabinet-making.

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