new favourite New York Times term for a British thing just dropped

A neat little quiz game: Is a headline homophobia from the 80s-90s or transphobia from the 2010s-2020s? Because it's all the same bullshit, repackaged for the hate du jour haveigotphobiaforyou.com

I legitimately didn't know they were competing with Steam and it's crazy to me that they burnt so much money on what sounds like something with very little (or wildly misguided) market research.

Me, waking up a muddy slope: “You’ll catch me if I fall, right?” Literally five seconds later I’m down on hands and knees in the mud and stinging nettles. Small consolation: my walking partner also went down so wasn’t able to record any of it.

Made a Slack-o-lantern that hits you with the Slack notification sound and logo when you walk by. 👻 now baAAck toOOO WooOOrk 👻

it's kinda weird that all the software i am expected to use for work are all written by distributed teams, go, python, postgres, linux, chrome, k8s etc and despite being told "the best teams work in an office together" i don't know of any software i use that's actually written that way

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

Made a little app that transforms all the album art for my music so it looks like it's in a CD jewel case. It makes me irrationally happy.

Last week I decided I couldn't really tell the difference between a high-quality flac and an 128kbps MP3, so I transcoded all my music to save a load of disk space. Mistake. It's painfully obvious whenever there's any treble. Now I'm slowly re-importing everything in higher quality.

Average doctors appointment if you’re not skinny 🙃

The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a boss😏" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.

I’d drifted away from board games a bit. That turned around in August!

"It's no different than checking IDs at the airport". Except in your home. On a device that you own. Android used to be open...

Company: "We’ve revised the UI to make it more balanced, more focused, and pull in more color from your theme" Me: *sighs, starts writing some UserCSS*

UK users when the website asks them where they're posting from today.

Wrote a bit about getting rid of Spotify and, uh... parsing nested plist files instead. chameth.com/escaping-spo...

Tailscale app connectors are also very handy if you have a server in a sensible jurisdiction, and want all traffic to a certain destination to originate from there.

I used www.calligraphr.com to create a font of my handwriting. They support non-renewing subscriptions, and my month just ran out. Pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail with a data export attached. No hard sell, no dark patterns, just did the job well without trying to extort me. Refreshing.

New blog post: Get the location of the ISS using DNS https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/get-the-location-of-the-iss-using-dns/ I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like …

Me: *about to do something productive* Board game arena: "The round-robin tournament you joined and forgot about has started! You're now in 11 different games!"

Picked up a new board game: Cosmoctopus, by Henry Audubon. Just had a very enjoyable first play. It has Splendor vibes, but with more depth and a fun theme. I'd collected 7 tentacles and was poised to win on my next turn when my opponent got their 8th and successfully summoned Cosmoctopus.

There should be a tenth circle of hell, reserved for people who build devices with USB-C ports for charging that don't work with USB-C power supplies. All you had to do was put a little bitty resistor in. It'd save so much annoyance.

Scenes of the UK and Ireland

british fan chat

I gave all the floating figures on my site a little sticky tape effect, and I love it. #indieweb #smallweb

ever since this thread from @pfrazee.com I've wanted to make this and it's finally ready: repoview.edavis.dev if you're a nerd of a certain age, I think you'll especially get a kick out of it enjoy!

Another week, another blog post: chameth.com/an-app-can-b... In which I stretch an analogy too far while talking about writing software for yourself, and a little about using LLMs to do it.

Yesterday I added a little wave pattern to the edges of some boxes on my website. Last night I woke up questioning why the waves didn't actually wave. Now they do! I remember first learning CSS 20+ years ago using examples that came on a CDROM attached to a magazine. It's come a long way!

New intro time, I think! Depending on where I am in my hobby-hopping cycle, I'll be posting about: • Programming • Video games • Board games • Baking • DIY • 3D Printing • Electronics • Films • Books Assorted favs/genres/etc: Go, FFXIV, Warframe, Cakes, Obsession, Sci-fi, Horror, LitRPG #promosky

@xkcd.com 1168: nightmare mode. (Why yes, I have spent the evening trying and failing to make GitHub actions work, why do you ask?)

CUT MY LIST IN TWO PIECES THAT’S HOW YOU START QUICKSORT

I'm trying to blog more frequently (instead of, you know, forgetting about it for half a year at a time). My latest post is about my thoughts on LLMs (and claude code in particular): chameth.com/coming-aroun...

Exciting and practical house designs coming out of Scandinavia

Pop stars doing their bit.

Well that was a fortuitous time to check how much I’d used @kagi.com. This is more-or-less 10 months of searches, so <$0.01 per query. (And I just did my 10,001st query this billing period to make sure it wasn’t just rounding!)

Made a chocolate cheesecake yesterday. Today it's almost entirely gone. It is so amazingly good. I'm just not going to think about the sugar content... Recipe over here: www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/malt...

I hate it when recipes bury half of their steps as modifiers in the ingredients list. Are they just trying to game the cooking time numbers? Like is a recipe that says it takes 10 mins but has “pasta, boiled and drained” as an ingredient somehow better than one that takes 25 and has an extra step?

Hey, 90s kids! Your bedroom is now in a museum! (Prague's National Museum, if you want to make a complaint.)

I wrote a thing about how writing about things is hard because brains suck: chameth.com/curse-of-kno...

Came across this nice Go library for interfacing with Bambu Lab printers: github.com/torbenconto/... I already had a Go service doing home automation stuff, now it has printer support. It turns the light off automatically, reports metrics, and even notifies me of state changes via @pushover.net.

Simpsons Bortposting being my chosen source of breaking news as never #NewbiePopey

applying for jobs again

Today I baked a parsnip and maple cake. It tastes a lot nicer than it sounds! Grating parsnip is a pain in the ass, it turns out.

Is there a rule that if a product comes with a tool, it is invariably the worst possible version of that tool? Case in point: this horrible little spanner that comes with rotary tools. Pictured next to its slightly better replacement…

Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.