I'm speaking at #eurobsdcon on Saturday. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/schedule/ If you're about, please come and say hello 🙂

I'm still missing some #Hacktoberfest logos for my archive. shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07... If you can help - please let me know :-)

8 weeks later and BlueSky's legal department still haven't answered my GDPR request.

I'm speaking at #eurobsdcon on Saturday. https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/schedule/ If you're about, please come and say hello 🙂

Just for fun, I built a favicon proxy - it enables me to show website images on my blog without exposing visitors to 3rd party tracking. I re-encode to WebP. So far 280 images taking up about 3.6MB. Which seems a bit high for tiny little favicons. One of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/113804079415782325 Free to a good home! If you'd like a magic mirror, with built-in infrared heater - it is yours for the taking. Lovely bit of kit, but doesn't fit our decor. Pick up in London only (on the Elizabeth Line).

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/111108587823540039 Blimey! I think Google have actually fixed this bug!

Noice. Thanks Lidl. Thlidl. Drinking: Radler Naturtrüb By: Lidl Deutschland / Germany 🍺🍺🍺 https://untappd.com/user/edent/checkin/1515464324 #untappd

Help me out, Fedifriends. In the last week I've had three different dipships complain that the posts by @blog are too long for the fediverse. How can I make it more obvious that it is an automated blog syndication account? Its account is literally `@ blog`. Its name is "Terence Eden's blog" […]

🆕 blog! “LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks” I asked three different commercially available LLMs the same question: Which TLDs have the same name as valid HTML5 elements? This is a pretty simple question to answer. Take two lists and compare them. I know this question is […]

Why didn't rental Segways become as ubiquitous as rental eBikes in cities?

If you have strong feelings about HTML comments in #wordpress comments - please let me know at: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/64016

A question because I am ignorant about low-level software. Are there any self-decoding complex file formats? I remember when you had to download hundreds of different codec packs in order to watch movies. Given the size of a movie or audio file, would it be possible to bundle it with a […]

Here's a minimum viable WebP. Useful if you need to hardcode a blank image. header( "Content-type: image/webp" ); echo base64_decode( "UklGRhYAAABXRUJQVlA4TAoAAAAvAAAAAEX/I/of" );

At some point, I need to re-do this experiment. Which modern email services let you sent to an internationalised email address? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/09/why-cant-you-send-email-to-a-chinese-address/

Hey, #wordpress friends. What's the purpose of <!-- .children --> and <!-- #comment-## --> being injected after every ul/ol comment? Are they necessary? Can they be removed? As seen in […]

At a fancy London office yesterday. The caddy which usually has toiletries and sanitary items instead had some rapid Covid tests.

Congratulations to @Mastodon for launching its new service offerings. It’s win-win: we all need a strong Mastodon organization, and organizations looking to onboard need expert help from people who know. This only benefits the ecosystem and I’m excited to see it.

🆕 blog! “Class Warfare! Can I eliminate CSS classes from my HTML?” I recently read a brilliantly provocative blog post called "This website has no class". In it, Adam Stoddard makes the case that you might not need CSS classes on a modern website: I think constraints lead to interesting […]

NGL, I've found some pretty cool #conkers.

Please quote this toot with your favourite Prime Number.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/111745210637996231 And now it is properly exposed! Hurrah!

Rather than having a class which adds a hover effect on headings with internal links, I can use this CSS: `:is(h2, h3, h4, h5, h6) > a[href^="#"]:hover::after{}` I don't know if that's more readable, quicker to render, or brittle. But it certainly means I don't need to add `class="hover-heading"`

I'm pleased so many of these fuckwits have unique names. Makes maintaining a muted-words list much easier.

Nice to see the Lemmyverse (or whatever we're calling it) start to send traffic to my blog. As every with federated social media, the individual number of referers is quite low. But together, when added up, give it a bit more heft.

What have you failed at this week? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/all-the-jobs-i-didnt-get/ Someone once told me that they thought I succeeded at everything I tried. That's probably the impression you get from social media. But the reality is much different. I need to be more honest about […]

Having a rummage in the CSS spec to see if I can make something cursed. This is a valid length, apparently. 3.2e1q Wild!

After reading this, I went through my blog and managed to remove a few *hundred* useless `class` attributes. I also got rid of several redundant `id` attributes as well. The majority of my CSS now uses semantic targetting rather than scattershot #id and .class Is that *sensible*? Well that's […]

A little accessibility question, if you have the time, inclination, and experience to answer. Informative images should have alt text. Decorative images should have null alt text. Null text is usually written as: alt="" But attributes don't *need* values. So, do screen readers treat these […]

🆕 blog! “Theatre Review: Interview (Understudy Performance)” ★★★☆☆ One of the best things about London theatre is that once in a while a show will give its understudies a chance to break out of the dressing room and soar on the stage. It's a chance to see talented performers at a discount price […]

After reading this, I went through my blog and managed to remove a few *hundred* useless `class` attributes. I also got rid of several redundant `id` attributes as well. The majority of my CSS now uses semantic targetting rather than scattershot #id and .class Is that *sensible*? Well that's […]

🆕 blog! “Theatre Review: Interview (Understudy Performance)” ★★★☆☆ One of the best things about London theatre is that once in a while a show will give its understudies a chance to break out of the dressing room and soar on the stage. It's a chance to see talented performers at a discount price […]

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING CAT

What is it with these people and "the foreigners are eating our sacred animals" trope? From 20 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/dec/10/sun.pressandpublishing

My work on exposing #blockchain nonsense is cited in - "Exporting and Importing Digital Cultural Goods: EU Law and the Digital Revolution" https://doi.org/10.46284/mkd.2025.13.3.2

🆕 blog! “How big a solar battery do I need to store *all* my home's electricity?” I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London. On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use […]

"He argues that he was misled by the search engine and is thus also a victim." https://tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/utiac/2025-ukut-00305

Web design is my passion! Ok, first make it work *then* make it look good 😁

Nominate your favourite UK-based #OpenSource heroes at https://openuk.uk/awards/ This isn't pay-to-win. We don't charge for nominations and the award ceremony is also free (and very swanky!). Please - show your support for your favourite people, projects […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Today I am mostly disabling some of the forced WordPress cruft which bloats my blog. I have a big list of default behaviours which I turn off. You can view them at: https://gitlab.com/edent/blog-theme/-/blob/master/includes/remove.php What are your "favourite" things to remove from WordPress? […]

## Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/09/book-review-all-that-we-see-or-seem-by-ken-liu/ This book is _ridiculously_ zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble […] [Original post on shkspr.mobi]

no joke I think the single most effective effort-to-result change that The Tech Internet could make for usability is to move the github readme above the github file list

🆕 blog! “Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu” ★★★★★ This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble. She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts […]

I think this is the first entry on @openbenches in Morse Code! https://openbenches.org/bench/39537

As we stumble into the next #emfcamp cycle, I've written something that might be of interest to EMFers who plan to make something microcontroller-based for next summer: https://sam.pikesley.org/blog/2025/09/05/driving-a-microcontroller-with-your-phone/

Nominate your favourite UK-based #OpenSource heroes at https://openuk.uk/awards/ This isn't pay-to-win. We don't charge for nominations and the award ceremony is also free (and very swanky!). Please - show your support for your favourite people, projects […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

🆕 blog! “Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu” ★★★★★ This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble. She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts […]

## Book Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol. 1: Second Contact by Ryan North https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/09/book-review-star-trek-lower-decks-vol-1-second-contact-by-ryan-north/ I can confidentially declare that Lower Decks is the second best Star Trek series […] [Original post on shkspr.mobi]

Ugh! Thank fuck for backups! Just discovered a large amount of missing data (or, rather, the absence of it). Luckily my host keeps DB backups for a few weeks, so I think I can recover most of it. Have you tested your backups recently?