Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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That time I got locked-in at the V&A
I just realised that I never shared this anecdote online before -
One time, I got locked-in at the V&A Museum after closing-time. I'd been there for a museums & cultural institutions event and I'd probably had a few too many glasses of champagne before I excused myself to return to my hotel. Unfortunately in my … -
Fuck you Ted Lasso season 4 finale, I hadn't planned on crying today. 😭
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A Three Rings development sub-team seems to have developed a habit of making production server changes at in-person events, right before meals are served. On at least one previous occasion this has led to them missing out on dinner as they monitored and maintained at-risk servers when they ought to be eating.
Until the servers are stable, they don't get their food.
They call it the "crash diet".
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TIL that I dance Argentine Tango with Ruth better... when I close my eyes. It's a fundamentally intuitive and semi-improvised dance built on connection and communication and it turns out that, for me at least, the best way to stop trying to visually predict what a partner (I know well enough to "read" visually) is going to do and instead... just move together... is to stop looking at her! Weird, but effective!
(Yes, we're still learning to tango. Slowly.)
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My newly-revamped personal site has an almost full suite of slash pages; something I'd been meaning to do for a while:
Still no /now, but I'll get that sorted someday, perhaps!
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After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?
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Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
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Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).
This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -
[popover]:not(:popover-open) {
content-visibility: hidden;
}I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!
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Every time I see Sainsburys comparing the value-for-money of different brands of toilet roll, the abbreviation they use catches me out and I think they're telling me how much paper I should be "using".
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Online supermarket showing several brands of toilet paper with the price displayed alongside a breakdown showing the price (in pence) per hundred sheets (of toilet paper), but "sheet" is abbreviated to "sht" which looks like... a different word I associate with the product.
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F-Day plus 214
It's been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that... it's little wonder that people are getting confused.
Like:
Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving … -
Pixel Area (@pxlarea@mastodon.social) launched a couple of weeks ago, and DanQ.me was selected to be one of the initial "seed" blogs that were there at the outset (I'm at https://pxlarea.com/x38y34).
I'm... honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there's a list view available too). And 'pixel' seems to be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my 'pixel' comprises... 169 pixels). It's got a little bit of a "million dollar homepage" (remember that) feel to it... though at least it's not operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it's home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it's a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it's "space" and hop to neighbours?)
So... yeah; I'm undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
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Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.
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That moment when you realise that you forgot your sunglasses but figure you'll just squint.
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A fawn-coloured French Bulldog sits on the wooden decking outside a back door, squinting as she looks towards the sun (evident from the direction of the shadows).
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Needed to renew my driving license. My new one doesn't have an EU flag on it. The sad reminders of Brexit just keep coming. 🇪🇺💔
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I descaled the coffee machine yesterday. We live in an exceptionally hard-water area and this maintenance was long overdue.
This morning I turned the machine on and something felt unfamiliar and wrong. I couldn't put my finger on what, until I realised...
...I'd gotten so-used to seeing the "descaling needed" light illuminated that I'd subconsciously forgotten that it wasn't supposed to be always-lit! Turns out that a warning left long enough becomes not just invisible but normalised!
(Next, maybe I should do something about the 'check engine' light in the car. It's been on for a while too...)
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Close-up of the buttons on an automatic/beans-to-cup coffee machine.
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'Simplified'
Well 'thanks' for the 'simplified' statement, I guess?
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The clasp on my 'bi pride' watch strap is failing because, in an ironic twist, part of it needs to be made a little bit more straight.
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Close up of the buckle end of a worn, grimy watch strap in 'bi pride' colours.