Step/ski into my office! Today I’m working from a cafe overlooking an indoor ski slope where my kids are having lessons!
Kind: Notes
Note #24342
If the most useful thing I achieve this Bank Holiday Monday will have been to make it easier to post short geotagged notes from my mobile to my blog (and Mastodon), it will have been a success.
This has been a test post. Feel free to ignore it.
VaultPress to the Rescue
OMG VaultPress Jetpack Backup to the rescue.
One of the best Internet people drew me a picture and when I replied to it, it got scrambled. 😱
But even though I had to modify core WordPress columns to store drawings, the backup respected that and I was able to restore it.
I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it because it’s a lifesaver.
How To: Sunday
Derpy McBlepsleep
Derpy McBlepsleep, diligently guarding the front door just in case somebody comes by with treats.
United Kingdom (the)
Remind me, do I live in “United Kingdom” or “United Kingdom (the)”? 😂
Information Trajectory
Humans invented Wikipedia, which made accessing information highly-convenient, at the risk of questions about its authenticity1.
Then humans invented GPTs, which made accessing information even more-convenient2 at the expense of introducing hallucinations that can be even harder to verify and check.
Is humanity’s long-term plan to invent something that spews complete nonsense that’s simultaneously impossible to conclusively deny?3
Footnotes
1 I’m well aware that in many subject areas Wikipedia routinely outranks many other
sources for accuracy. But the point remains, because you’ve no idea what the bias of randomuser123 is; even if you check the sources they cite, you don’t know what
sources they omitted to include. I love Wikipedia, but I can’t deny its weaknesses.
2 Sure, ChatGPT and friends aren’t always more-convenient. But if you need to summarise information from several sources, you might find them a more-suitable tool than those which came before. Why do I feel the need to add so many footnotes to what should have been a throwaway comment?
3 Actually, now I think about it, I’m confident that I can name some politicians who are ahead of the machines, for now.
The Sprint Plan And The Noise
Power’s out yet again at my house (though not for the last reason nor because of our weird wiring: this time it’s for tree trimming), so here I am in my favourite coworking-friendly local cafe with The Signal And The Noise (which I’ve talked about before) in my ears and a whole lot of sprint planning at my fingertips.
Awtomattig
If Automattic had been founded in Wales instead of the USA:
Proud Pup
This young lady’s so proud of herself! This morning, she was up in time to catch in-the-act the burglar who visits us three times a week and steals the empty glass bottles we leave on our doorstep.
She did such a good job of scaring him off that he left us some milk and orange juice by way of apology.
link rel=”blogroll”
Dave Winer kindly let me know about a proposed standard for linking to OPML blogrolls. Given that I added a page containing my blogroll last year, it was easy enough for me to add a tiny bit of code to the header to add support for automatic detection of my blogroll.
<link rel="blogroll" type="text/xml" href="/blogroll.xml" title="Dan Q's blogroll">Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!
(You’ll note I’ve added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all
<link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)
Allowed to Vote
I’m still a little miffed that my local council took it on themselves to “correct” my name on the electoral roll to something it isn’t, thereby potentially disenfranchising me (I can’t produce photo ID in the fake name they came up with!).
But I’m pleased to report that, after prompting, they were able to correct their mistake before I got to the polling station this morning. 🗳️👍
Genderclear
Breakpoint issues always make me feel a bit “genderclear”.
Nerd Sniped Traveller
I think I might be more-prone to nerd sniping when I’m travelling.
Last week, a coworker pointed out an unusually-large chimney on the back of a bus depot and I lost sleep poring over 50s photos of Dutch building sites to try to work out if it was original.
When a boat tour guide told me that the Netherlands used to have a window tax, I fell down a rabbit hole of how it influenced local architecture and why the influence was different in the UK.
Why does travelling make me more-prone to nerd sniping? Maybe I should see if there’s any likely psychological effect that might cause that…
Do-It-Yourself Country & Western Song
I saw a variation of this email back in the day, which provides a Mad Libs style approach to formulating a country & western song. When I was reminded of it today, I adapted it for Perchance. Give it a go!