Finished Dune books 1 to 6 - all those by Frank Herbert. I'm a little annoyed that it ends on a cliffhanger 😅 I know his son carried on the saga but I don't want to keep going - his son's forewords before each book were annoying enough, sometimes even giving spoilers while fawning over his […]

Warum drücken Autofahrer bei Gelb am Ampel stärker aufs Gaspedal, anstatt den Fuß vom Gas zu nehmen? Mehrmals die letzten Paar Wochen bin ich mit ein Kind beim Fußgängerüberweg-Ampel und müssen warten, bis ein Auto oder LKW vorbei rast, auch wenn für uns die Ampel schon längst Grün für uns […]

I love seeing my monthly little donations ping out to my Mastodon instance admin @mia and the maker of my favourite client @cheeaun (who develops @phanpy)! Support your faves :)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tofugolem/116024031152340128 I read The God Delusion and marvelled at how many times one can rewrite the same point to ram it down your throat. I don't think I finished it - I got the point. When I was in teacher training, I accompanied a group of teenage girls to […]

A bit of love for ASCII art in the newest Good Internet magazine: https://goodinternetmagazine.com/ascii-art-is-an-art-born-from-limitations/ My own can be seen here if you click on the ASCII art tile with Muttley on it: https://sarajoy.dev/#stuff

My youngest's room monitor plays music. He's a bit old for a monitor but likes having it still. Anyway, it plays a strange mixture of melodies, one of which... Y: Is this one pickled cannonballs? Me: You what? Y: Pickle ball cannon? Me: Oh, Pachelbel's Canon!

A visual affordance to tell Sara how not to burn her fucking fingers again;

RE: https://climatejustice.global/@parents4future/115988654034953499 I hate conspiracy theories. I hate that what's really been happening appears to be very conspiracy-like, perpetrated by the very people who were making up the conspiracy theories that took the US in such a terrible direction […]

LOL love how a little 'ist' snuck in there. I used to have English, Swedish and German all live as spell check and autocomplete on my smartphone keyboard at once, but it got confused as heck. I now have both English and German on at once, and switch into Swedish only when needed.

Imma start a new swear, something too heavy on the JS ist beJSen, pronounced like beschissen, German for shitty

Someone, some time ago, made a web "app" to play music or maybe video, I think, with iframes, and web standards - no funky Frameworks or YouTube embeds. Does that sound familiar? I'm sure there was either a good string of posts or an article about it.

@sarajw siigh…there ya go: https://codepen.io/flq/pen/Wbxdbja It does need some fine-tuning but you get the idea 😅

RE: https://mastodon.social/@joshtumath/115966699411063323 I feel like I found "my people" the last time I was at CSS Day. Josh is definitely one of them (whether he likes it or not)!

I'm very very pleased (and fighting back the impostor syndrome) to announce that I get to join a list of absolute giants in the CSS world! i.e., those who have spoken at CSS Day: https://cssday.nl/speakers.html ​:awesome: :css: :happy_pepper:

Ugghhhh. My heart is racing. A scary letter came from my eldest's school, that implied they should sign up for support sessions, based on the city guidelines on giving extra support instead of getting kids to retake years (obviously a good idea). I was like WTF, and politely asked my teacher […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@CapnFelix/115956734691607105 Join ussssss

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Kilian/115938981193589341 All of the CSS footguns in one place plus explanations as to why, and how to do what you want:

of all the coding I do, I never want to [redacted self violence] more than when I'm doing CSS. does anyone know of any good guides/courses for debugging it/having better mental models for working with it? I need to read every layout all the way through, and I have wizard zines pocket guide.

Sometimes I just crave cheese. Cheesy music.

FINALLY I GOT TO SEE THE AURORA!!! It wasn't *quite* as bright as the phone camera suggests - but it was all visible to the naked eye. Hamburg, Germany.

Apple Annie's website is almost still standing, but it's not how she'd have liked it to look. I haven't taken her off the CSS Joy webring, instead I've moved her site into a wrapper page, so that we can see the site as it should be, via the wayback machine […]

I do not like this time input UI. I NEVER manage to hit an afternoon time on the first try.

Random tip for Brits and other English speakers in Germany - when you want generic aspirin, but don't want to pay through the nose for a brand name painkiller, you need to ask for ASS. (It stands for AcetylSalicylSäure) Yeah. You're welcome! Enjoy taking ASS, it helps with headaches!

A contact of mine's wife has benefitted from my complaint about how (peri)menopause can make histamines in the body go nuts, likely being the problem I currently have, being allergic to who-knows-what all year round. She has come off HRT and started taking antihistamines and is feeling much better.

RE: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/115906504382302368 Really interesting thread! I had a revelation one time, when watching a 3D movie in the cinema (probably the first Avatar), and slowly developing a headache: I think we're so used to 2D movies and photos, where a director chooses what […]

Quick question... I've been trying to fix a knackered old Dell laptop for my neighbour's 13 year old daughter. It was obviously important that it looks good. But I've just spoken to a friend who gave me a Mac laptop for work (that's finished) which will obviously be way cooler (and I don't use […]

Lol. I feel old. A couple of somewhat younger colleagues didn't recognise the "all your base, your base, base, base, all your base, are belong to us" reference.

[US, ICE, etc.] Just want all my American friends (and people I don't know over there too) to know I'm thinking of them. With them. In solidarity. I know that doesn't help you out much. It's almost just thoughts and prayers. But if a little moral support helps, then, why not say so. I wish […]

I need to go through my C&H collection books again. Or maybe actually buy the ones I don't yet have. I was introduced to "Kalle och Hobbe" as a child in Sweden, when they were heavily featured in Serieparaden - a magazine that issued collections of popular comic strips, translated into Swedish.

Ich bekomme gerade ganz viele Picnic (Lebensmittellieferung) Freundschaftsrabatten. Möchtet jemand eins davon haben?

Has anyone put out a guide for effectively *attending* an online conference? I have seen a lot of guides for giving an online conference, and a lot of complaints about attending an online conference, and it strikes me that a guide for attending might be useful. I'd ideally like to see things […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/115881777967642893 Who needs 7, 8, 9 and 0 anyway

Huh. Probably wasn't written about a world torn asunder by inequality, political polarisation, protests and geopolitics - oh as well as starting to be suspicious of your own possessions spying on you - these lyrics suddenly felt so relevant: https://youtu.be/J9gKyRmic20 I'll take the message […]

Open question: how do tech folks keep track of interesting events and conferences you might want to attend. Back in Web 2.0, Upcoming was great for this. I know @andybaio resurrected it several years ago, but not sure if it’s currently maintained (it seems to only have a Twitter login option […]

I'm looking at the weather app like I have been for a good week already because of all this snow. There's no more snow due and the melt will probably begin on Monday. It's just occurred to me why I'm sad there might be no more snow. I wanted us to be snowed in, a huge drift against our front […]

Well, slap my 12 faces and call me a dodecahedron, it's the first Reading List of the year: Reading List 352! https://brucelawson.co.uk/2026/reading-list-352/

[US, ICE, etc.] Just want all my American friends (and people I don't know over there too) to know I'm thinking of them. With them. In solidarity. I know that doesn't help you out much. It's almost just thoughts and prayers. But if a little moral support helps, then, why not say so. I wish […]

If any of you don't yet know about the Scottish gritters - zoom in and enjoy: https://www.traffic.gov.scot/gritter-tracker My favourites both sound like Carry On film names or characters: - Spready Mercury - On Her Majesty's Slippery Surface More names can be found here […]

Highly recommend the WarnWetter app for anyone in Germany: https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/warnwetterapp/warnwetterapp.html

So much snooooooowwwwww

Is the best MS Office alternative still Libre Office? If I'm not wanting to use Google docs?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eunews/115842737580067593 This is all very concerning I know - I just need some levity and this flashback brought me a smile I thought I would share: To me that phrase said by Tusk belongs not to Dumas' Three Musketeers books, but to the anthropomorphic dog version […]

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/115842506731662927 What an article. This stood out: > Strikingly, the majority of young people do not identify as either right- or left-wing. Instead, young women see their politics as flowing from their deeply held progressive personal values, which they […]

Dune reading progress - book 5 - actively enjoying this one, actually! It's a different angle on the universe, and I'm pretty gripped. Let's see what I think by the end... I plan to read up to and including book 6, then stop.

Substituting some greek yogurt in for eggs, in a cake recipe. Pacing to and fro in front of the oven chanting "please rise, please rise, please rise"

@sarajw We saw these cheery snow people and snow dogs on our walk

My kids in Hamburg are like this, this morning:

Boom! Bang! Rattatat-tat! 🎆 Happy New Year to everyone in the CET timezone :) Especially those surrounded by neighbours all letting off many thousands of euros of fireworks at once! May your neighbourhood only squeal with tiny rockets and not ambulance sirens 💜 (I like fireworks but I prefer […]

The New Year Lemon Piggies are ready! 🍋🐽 Happy New Year, Gott Nytt, Guten Rutsch and the same in other languages to everyone, whether the new year is already upon you or coming later 🎆 (pinging @dcbaok who I first saw posting these a couple of years ago)

You get some funny effects when the weather is bouncing around the 0°C mark.