Lego website not letting you click through pictures, read reviews, big white gaps and spinners? Oh, because their main JavaScript file is returning a 404, right. But it works if you come from a list page rather than direct, but of course

I do not recommend using Google Maps for walking round Matlock

Implies it will not open this year, as previously said at archive.is/jWzBw “Construction work is scheduled to finish at the end of 2025 [...] after which West Midlands Trains can start training” Found this picture at www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/mose... Been waiting 20 years, can wait a bit more!

If I have to watch the Strictly pairing episode (I’m happy to watch the dancing, I don’t really need to see the intros), it appears that I will be the person who updates Wikipedia in real time

Not sure I’d ever seen this one, and it has a train! (Guess I could look into if there’s a higher quality picture nowadays…)

I was pleased when I saved 11K on fixmystreet.com loading by doing this technique on two small images in the footer 🤣 (www.webpagetest.org/video/compar... lists 316KB of JS; 170KB of that is lowest priority prefetch (odd it seems to fetch them first, hmm?), and 127KB is Google Analytics.)

Interesting to see it over the years: dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... dracos.co.uk/made/bbc-new... …

Does anyone have or can get hold of a copy of this 2002 episode of Life Laundry? genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/b2f16d7af8ef... Alma was one of my stalwart seconds in orchestra; she started learning the violin in her 60s, was in her 80s and I just found out she died suddenly this week

I am glad they are not more sophisticated, so don’t get me wrong, but how am I getting DDOSed by something that pretends to be IE6, or Opera 9 on Windows 98? What is this actually trying to do? Scrape content? Look for emails? Just be annoying?

There's a great job going with my lovely colleagues at @societyworks.org (the commercial arm of the @mysociety.org charity). Please share! apply.workable.com/mysociety/j/...

After quite a busy day yesterday, today we are visiting day two of the Birmingham Honey Show, with free entry to Winterbourne House and Garden. Stalls by the local bonsai group, the Lettering Arts Trust, the Lapworth museum of geology, so much craft and skill on display

For anyone else who might have the rest of the series in this format (goldsborobooks.com/collections/...) and wondered if the last would be available with the pretty edges, they don’t appear to have told anyone or I missed it but I stumbled on it to pre-order at goldsborobooks.com/products/sec...

Not the *only* one, but certainly one where I thought it might happen more often :) Hopefully it sometimes looks more like this, where it’s remembered the journey you’d previously looked up and you can still see the platform to change to as you pull into New Street

Mad props to @dracos.co.uk for making the one website on the planet that actually deals gracefully with the network dropping as you go underground

Yeah, eg we forked an 8KB version of a nearly 20KB library due to polyfills/dependency bloat, see: github.com/alphagov/acc... Can’t imagine that scaled up across the JS-first ecosystem

From on the hour to ten past the hour, the Ordnance Survey API status page says everything is fine. Then it checks at ten past and remembers that it’s currently on fire (good luck to those dealing with it). Wasn’t expecting to test my fallback rollovers today, but then, when are you

Wrote this up at dracos.co.uk/wrote/2026-b... ; not sure anyone else will discover it beyond the school WhatsApp group ;-)

Niche, but if you have (or know) a kid in year 6 in Birmingham, instead of the 415-page secondary admission arrangements PDF they give you at www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20119/s... you may find my HTML version at dracos.co.uk/made/2026-bi... slightly easier to read!

This really was a great event - do watch it back if you couldn't make it!

I may not have the Met Office’s supercomputers, apparently doing really complex calculations, yet even I can tell that the observed rain of 15:10 will not have cleared the entire city of Birmingham by the forecasted 15:15 (or indeed now, 15:25).

Just made a donation through JustGiving. They default to a *17%* tip to themselves, which the slider lets you reduce to a minimum of 12.5%. Clicking “Enter custom amount” changes it to £1.50, with weaselly words about how it saves charities money. JG made more than £31m before tax on £59m of income.

The little photo on my home screen generally throws up nothing much, but today it reminded me that six months ago today I saw Mercury. Joy in the movement of rocks

“I am 10 years old”. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/emer... has the full thread written out. My own 10yo’s response was only that Sparkle Sooknanan is a great name, and I’m glad that is all it engenders :-/ People need to plan what to do when norms are disregarded, at all levels.

It seems odd to me that @octopus.energy can’t have better interfaces for balances and usage. For example, the five timeframes on this core graph of electricity usage are: 1 month, 2 months, 1.5 months, 1.5 months, and 1.5 months. This would be a “what is wrong with this graph” question for my kid

Only just seen this, really good and interesting 😍 Lots similar to what I did/do at traintimes.org.uk/notes/perfor... (eg no fonts, tiny own-library JS), and fixmystreet.com (especially the front page, though can now see some tweaks...), which I gave a talk once on at dracos.co.uk/said/three-r...

Wrote about playing a ’90s text adventure in the resolution I remembered playing it in: dracos.co.uk/wrote/wonder...

On the bus down the Northfield high street, thinking of section 132(1) of the Highways Act 1980 adlegem.dracos.co.uk/ukpga/1980/6...

Gift Aid reclaim spreadsheet for 2024/25 filled in. Feel I should be able to automate this somewhat, but xkcd.com/1205/ and the amount of faff it would take always puts me on the not bother side

Ian Skelly far too profesh to hint as to what was being shouted

1. Invitation from Cloudflare to join an account 2. Click Join 3. Get told to sign out first 4. Click Sign in with Google, and sign in 5. “This account requires 2FA, please set it up” 6. ”To confirm your 2FA, please enter your password” But, Cloudflare, I... don’t have a password?

I donate to @hearmeoutmusic.bsky.social, who run music workshops in immigration detention centres. hearmeoutmusic.org.uk/why-detainee... Stephen Kinnock gets free VIP tickets to the In It Together Festival. Seema Malhotra gets to go to a Polish festival: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxGZ...

If you go to royalmail.com and click “Contact us” in the footer, can you actually find a way to contact them? The hold music is a two minute repeated loop of the start of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe in B-flat major interspersed with a “don’t abuse our staff” message.

Going through Weoley Castle at the weekend did feel like being in Northern Ireland. Easy to be a cover, but easy to defend/support, so hard to counter, even if obviously run by people like this... www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/the-flags-di...

Some great names in here: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/3... Good that they didn’t remove jurisdiction to hear and determine legal proceedings from the Estray Court for the Lordship of Denbigh and the court leet for the Manor of Laxton.

Apropos of nothing, the loading time for an Airbnb results page on a 4G mobile is c. 30 seconds. Admire the waterfall at www.webpagetest.org/result/25082... Deliberate as they want you to get the app? Doesn’t have to be this way...

Searching for Weoley Castle on Google Maps takes you to the south end, but no reference or indication of the actual Castle, unlike clear OpenStreetMap. Bus through the suburb feels like going through a Unionist village in Northern Ireland

FixMyStreet seems to bring out the best in some people - but rarely have we seen such boundless enthusiasm for making one's neighbourhood a better place. Many thanks to Michael for sharing his very positive world view: www.mysociety.org/2025/08/21/w...

A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One, there is no such function, and two, there is no such function. Now I realise that technically speaking that’s only one flaw, but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice. (with apologies to Kryten)

My favourite discovery today is the “Microsoft 365 admin center” “Copilot Control System” page which I think sums it up nicely

all of this is basically a trojan horse for my sinking feeling right now that generative AI will be 'good enough' and that's...potentially a very bad outcome!

I once crafted a short text adventure (dracos.co.uk/made/rocking...) from one of Ryan’s Dinosaur Comics (qwantz.com/index.php?co...) back in 2012 (which he then linked to at qwantz.com/index.php?co...) so I can feel I played the minusculist of parts in this 🤣 Congratulations!

There is a £1,000 item in the Uno mobile store :-/

I wrote a silly little OTT harmony for the theme from In the Night Garden: dracos.co.uk/wrote/epic-i...

Unenjoying GitHub’s move to React more and more; now loading an issues page no longer loads any of the comments as part of the initial page load, and on a slow connection it just gives up and assumes there was a “system error”.

I do like regular expressions. I don’t much like “AI” (by many definitions/uses). Do I like using AI to generate regular expressions to then be fast, not be reliant on that AI, and not be a black box? Maybe. www.mysociety.org/2025/08/12/u...

So I blocked bots on Saturday. What traffic have I had since? Since Sunday morning: * 15,619 hits that I blocked (99.7%) * 52 hits that I didn’t block * 28 of them for robots.txt (from only 6 bots) * 1 trying to hack the site * 16 for static files * 2 me using my site * 5 other people

@sophiecoulombeau.bsky.social Saw this and thought of you :)

Forgot to include a robots.txt, didn’t I. Guess it’s interesting to see how the bots pick up a new site then what they do, so I had a quick look at my logs and it was all a bit strange: dracos.co.uk/wrote/adlege...

>>> 'blueberry'.count('b') 2 >>> datetime.fromtimestamp(1754353022).isoformat() '2025-08-05T01:17:02' Just because there exists a Birmingham screwdriver doesn’t mean you have to use it, even if they’re trying their best to make you.

Launched in 2016: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxv... (“forward and back in your browser window won’t work”). It cost (costs?) a lot of money: www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/how_... Unavailable since 23rd July; would be interested in more details of what broke.