Kind: Notes
Short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title.
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Step/ski into my office! Today I'm working from a cafe overlooking an indoor ski slope where my kids are having lessons!
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Dan sits at his laptop in a cafe; ski lifts can be seen in the background.
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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.
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Dan sits on the grass in a garden, with his French Bulldog.
This has been a test post. Feel free to ignore it.
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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. ๐ฑ
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.
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First-person view down a hammock in a rural garden. The hammock's occupier (Dan) is holding a novel and a can of premixed Pimms & lemonade.
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Sleeping champagne-coloured French Bulldog, her tongue laying out on the cushion of her bed.
Derpy McBlepsleep, diligently guarding the front door just in case somebody comes by with treats.
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Remind me, do I live in "United Kingdom" or "United Kingdom (the)"? ๐
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Dropdown select box for Country with options including "United Kingdom" and "United Kingdom (the)".
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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
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Shonky MSPaint-grade graph showing ease of access increasing as ease of verification decreases, with a trend line going through Wikipedia (2001) through ChatGPT (2022) to an unknown future in 2043.
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
randomuser123is; 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.
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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.
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Dan sits at his laptop in a cafe; his phone is playing music to his earbuds.
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Awtomattig
If Automattic had been founded in Wales instead of the USA, it'd probably be called Awtomattig.
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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.
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Young French Bulldog, standing, looking happy, tongue hanging out.
She did such a good job of scaring him off that he left us some milk and orange juice by way of apology.
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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 unknownrel="..."at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!) -
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. ๐ณ๏ธ๐
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Screenshot from a Gender field on a form (with radiobutton options "Genderqueer/Non-Binary", "Man", "Woman", and "Fill in the Blank"). A wrapping/spacing issue has made a "clear" link appear very close to the field label "Gender", making it look like the word "Genderclear", which sounds a little like "Genderqueer".
Breakpoint issues always make me feel a bit "genderclear".
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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.
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1950s black and white photo showing a newly-opened "GVB" bus depot in West Amsterdam.
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...
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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!