No one I follow seems to have posted this yet, so I'm here to rob you of your entire Sunday: thomaswc.com/2025.html You're welcome!

Restarting this little project.

My brother’s gift to my sister was an Apples to Apples/CAH–style game where players match movies to Letterboxd reviews and I’m pretty sure he deserves the MacArthur

There's something wonderfully ironic about feeling like you're the only person in the world that wasn't compelled by Pluribus.

Turning off BBC Breaking News notifications. It’s got out of hand. I don’t need to know about: - every single celebrity death - every gory detail of every mass shooting ever including video of the event I suspect I won’t miss it and don’t really know why I had it on.

I've been given permission to get a BluRay player, even if I don't get one for Christmas. So it's time to build an HD movie collection. Charity Shops FTW! These were priced at £1.50 each, but when I went to pay they guy said “6 for £2”. Amazing.

This is so frickin cute. A browser extension that adds a little pettable bird to your web browsing. I love the whimsy. idreesinc.itch.io/pocket-bird

Also found: - an executable of my A Level computing project - the first PHP web app that I wrote in about 2008 with no framework and clear SQL injection vulnerabilities - a WordPress 2.9.2 install set to run on XAMPP

I found a really old disk with an “oldfiles” directory on it that contains the code for my first ever website (maybe my second? I don’t actually remember) Iframes. Tables. Animated gifs. The works! Such nostalgia!!

The 1 o’clock BBC News segment starting at around 1:18pm is really quite fun.

Imagine, realising for the first time that you can just buy a thing and use it forever, no monthly subscription, no vendor-bricking, who on earth in this day and age would want such a thing? 🤷‍♀️😱

#PHP 8.5 changes now added to caniphp.com I spent a few hours this evening working through all the new features and deprecations and closing a few old PRs. If you use the “API" then this is also updated at: caniphp.com/features.json

And it's up! All together now... 🎶 Somebody told me the user provider should use an adaptor to proxy the query factory builder... 🎶 www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03o...

Ah yes, it's unsubscribe from mailing lists week! 5 already today. One was just “There will be a Black Friday offer soon!” (Sadly, not in my inbox there won’t. Not if you clutter it up with stuff like that!)

I endorse this message. www.isthiswhatwewant.com Ironic that Apple Music lists it as “Lossless”

I recently got my pre-ordered Playtile (@playtiles.bsky.social) and it's such a cool little thing. But what I'm most impressed with is how that have used modern web browser features to make such a functional PWA (progressive web app). rosswintle.uk/2025/11/the-...

@nathanwrigley.com I can’t find Bob in here, but your show with him is still very good and I’m happy to be your fifth, and only non-family listener, if that’s what I am! 😂 The internet needs some fun and humour and the sound of people laughing.

This “fish commits ‘credit card fraud’” thing was in my feed yesterday and it’s very funny. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_n...

I think I’ve found an early ancestor of Marvin the Paranoid Android…

This video about jet turbine blades made me say “That’s CRAZY!!!!” out loud several times. The engineering here is incredible. youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM

Does anyone ever do a nuanced take on big internet outages that includes evaluation of the trade-offs. I see lots of complaining about how everything is dependent on the same three or four services. But little discussion of what we could do instead and why we choose not to. 🤷

One of those "I don't post about work much" things, but last week my ACF colleagues dropped ACF PRO 6.7 Beta 1 with... Inline Editing for ACF Blocks! Live, instant, intuitive editing using ACF in the background. Looks amazing! 🙌 www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-pro...

I care so frickin much about climate change. But I also feel so completely helpless about it. Until the People In Charge give a damn and are willing to act, what can we really do?

At some point I want to modernise my blog and make rosswintle.uk more of a “digital garden”. But honestly: I’ve not built a CMS-controlled website for about 2 years now. I get stuck every time I try WordPress editing these days and I can’t get my head around full site editing and block themes.

Right. I think everything is up-to-date now. Other than the things that need rebuilding. I’ll get to those. Next up on side-project to-do list is getting caniphp.com/ ready for v8.5! Not long to go now!!!

Are we still doing starter packs? Put this one together because I love seeing things that lovely folks write on the internet, and I'm sure there are more people to meet and add to this list. go.bsky.app/AnM2t7r

Oh fun. My anti virus/malware software says VS Code's GitHub Copilot Chat has a dodgy Base64-encoded script in it! You'd think GitHub, of all people, would know not to do that!

I'm not a video games connoisseur but one of my faves on the little PlayDate console, Hyper Meteor, is now on Steam! A tiny asteroids-like game, but so much fun, perfect difficulty level, excellent sound design. I'm gonna wreck a controller playing this. store.steampowered.com/app/1425590/...

This is incredible. And funny. If you understand why. “Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music” dustri.org/b/horrible-e...

After this week's firehose, I’m back on my wanting-to-improve-school-comms train again. I'm convinced that there's a relatively simple solution to 80% of most school comms issues. But I also know that schools are focussed on education and care, not comms, and would find process change hard.

A random thing I learned today. Occasionally this live version of the Gin Blossoms “Hey Jealousy” pops up in YouTube. I like the 90s nostalgia of it. youtu.be/wgEQ3FzaS1U They’re on the Jon Stewart Show, and at the end he thanks “Howard Stevenberg” and Howard Stern for being on the show. 1/2

Oh, yay! I didn’t think my LoopConf talk recording was going to be free to watch. But it’s out on YouTube. This was an epic labour of love. I’m so glad I can share it with you. My 25 Lessons from 25 years of software development in (a little over) 25 minutes. youtu.be/cyxQ82L298Y

A new series of my Household Problems drawings (as seen in my newsletter every week). This one: What your leaning fence says about you.

This is an excellent little pop-up calendar app for MacOS. Free. Love it. lowtechguys.com/grila/

Phew! Epic day with the kids: - Science Museum - Minecraft Experience - Getting lost in Westfield Shopping Centre - Finding a Nintendo pop-up store! - Driving to London and back Hooray!!

I'm taking my kids to a thing in London tomorrow and I can only take in a bag that's A4 size or smaller. WHAAAAT?!

I wrote down some thoughts about my hope for #PHP open source: stitcher.io/blog/sponsor...

We played a silly family car game just now. It has raised a very interesting question. What would happen if you exposed a marshmallow to the vacuum of space? We are now down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos titled “X in a vacuum chamber” Can flies fly in a vacuum chamber? Is this even ethical?

I stumbled upon github.com/observablehq... and damn, this is cool. I've been looking for a nicer way to render HTML in JavaScript for ages.

Hacktivate looks like a cool game for MacOS/iOS. Security/code-breaking challenges, teaching text encodings, image processing, and command-line. You probably need to be a beginner computer nerd to not be totally confused (there's a free tutorial). But this seems very clever. www.hacktivate.app

This looks like an amazing resource, and it’s free! (Just some P&P) storytellertactics.com/free-deck

found this weird cable buried in my back garden when I was planting potatoes. couldn't figure out what it was for so I just chopped it up with a shovel. didn't get electrocuted so I assume it was okay. posting here because I can't log into facebook right now

Still trying AI. Last week: Oh. Claude Code seems really clever. It’s guided me to best practice for a thing I don’t know much about. This week: Me consulting the docs and finding out this is not best practice at all, and Claude apologising and tearing its own recommendations to shreds… 1/2

Is “Rotated poop emoji” now a trend in logos? Or is it purely accidental? 🫣 This is the second I’ve seen in as many weeks!

So it turns out that if you barely ever see anyone because you remote work, and then you see many trains, planes, restaurants, bars and offices at a team on-site, you might pick up nasty bugs that you no immunity to. 🤧🤒😴 (Sorry, team. Hanging out with you was great though!!)

"How to build a dev team". Not gonna lie, I freakin' LOVE that Laracasts is doing this kind of content. I've started watching this and it's great. Also... Oi, @jeffreyway.bsky.social ! Get Laracasts on Bluesky or Mastodon will ya? There's plenty of us over here now! 😃

New post: You probably don't want to build "finished software". But what can we learn by thinking about it as a concept? rosswintle.uk/2025/10/soft...

I don’t remember how I found it but Rogue Words is that rare thing: A free iOS game. That’s it. It’s a free game! A roguelike word game with Scrabble influence. Really nicely done. rogue-words.web.app

It still amazes me what they teach 9 and 10 year olds. Homework this week: “Main Focus: How can I make the appropriate choice of pronoun or noun within and across sentences to aid cohesion and avoid repetition?” I’m sorry, do what now?

A little reflection on last week's @loopconf.com I'm so glad this happened. I was honoured to be a contributor. And it reminded me of how important in-person events are, and how hard they are to organise (Thank you, @rzen.net !!!) rosswintle.uk/2025/10/loop...