The Daily Mail are inadvertently making Andy Burnham sound even better as they've run a front page headline about how he "plans to roll back Thatcherism"...

All I'm going to say is that bad news often comes in threes. And the death of Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell are both very bad news for MAGA...

Today has been a very long month...

I'm getting dangerously close to just giving up and writing my own CIAM service. Which is a very bad idea. I know full well that it's a bad idea. And yet, every single existing service (seemingly) without fail is awful. Most of them are just broken, missing important features, or too expensive.

Maybe it's just me, but DS9 Episode 1 looks a lot more dated than most of TNG did, even though it's actually newer than most of it...

Since actual air conditioners seem to be rarer than unicorn poop, does anyone have any recommendations for air coolers that will actually work in the UK #heatwaves? I know they work by evaporation so the more humid it is the less efficient they are, so not sure if any are any good...

So, apparently both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are already criticising Andy Burnham, which - in my mind - means he's doing something right...

I'm very nearly at the end of my #ßtarTrek #TNG watch-through (I'm on S7 E23 right now). Do I go straight on to #DS9? Or watch something else first? Not sure which way to go...

What's the temperature again? #Heatwave (This was outside in the sun for about an hour)

There's a clip on YouTube of Farage asking "What do you want?". Someone really needs to edit that into Babylon 5 in place of Morden asking the exact same question when trying to recruit followers of the Shadows...

Okay, UKsters, the media is useless re: extreme heat, so let’s do this. I’m from Southern California, spent the last ten years living outside Seattle, which has a similar climate to Scotland, where I am now. Here’s what I know. 1. Heat exhaustion and sickness are no fucking joke. Do not tempt them.

Is anyone else having problems with exceptionally large moths this year? Or is it just us?*shudders*

It's 2026. I got a brand new 11"tablet recently. Last year I got myself a Bluetooth controller that works with Android. I've just spent the last hour or so getting Quake 3 Arena running on it. Turns out I'm not as good as I was 25 years ago!

I know you lot aren’t the ones who need to hear this, but: all a ban does is make the banned thing less safe, ever. Kids are gonna keep going online and now they are going to meet a predator who’s going to be able to threaten them with “you’ll get in trouble if you tell anyone”

Let me guess. This proposed ban on under 16s using social media is going to mean the social networks need to prove your age in order to let you use them. Which will mean they need to do that whole thing of sending your ID to the lowest bidder to prove who you are... This country sucks sometimes... ☹️

The Authors Guild are in partnership with an AI Licensing company. They're trying to funnel members to this company in the guise of 'earning more' from their books. But even if an author is paid for a 3 year licence, their books are in the meat grinder for good. There's no way to extract titles.

Anyone who openly proclaims that Russia is not an enemy of Britain is, quite clearly, an enemy of Britain themselves. And almost certainly a Russian asset as well.

Looks like our local far right council are starting down the book banning line. I'm surprised it took them this long, but they did have a lot of important work to do making sure that only the right flags were on display... 😡😡 leamington.nub.news/news/local-n...

So, according to the daily mail, the BBC is accused of bias because Desert Island Discs won't have Farage on because "his presence makes staff feel unsafe". But no accusations of bias when they disproportionately give Reform more airtime than they fairly deserve given the number of MPs they have...

My starting routine on #StardewValley is pretty much always the same. I spend my starting money on parsnips and plant 40 of them. Then use the money from that to buy other crops. I often lose 1 to crows, but it's not unusual to not lose any. This game I lost 3! ☹️

💥 70,000 signatures! 💥 ...and the petition closes on June 8th. Imagine if we can get it over 100,000 before then - and open a Parliamentary debate in time for the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote on June 23rd 2026. That'd be powerful. All hands to the pump! Sign and share, share, share! 👇

Well, here come the Christian nationalists... 😡☹️ www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I feel like I'm missing something. Capitalism 101 is "spend less, earn more". It's simple. And yet so many businesses are currently spending billions on AI features that nobody wants, alienating their customers. I've seen people seriously looking at alternatives to Google because of this!

I very often wake up with a song stuck in my head and no idea how it got there. Yesterday it was Drunk Cigs by MacKenzie Carpenter. A few days ago it was Hotel California by The Eagles. Today? YMCA by The Village People. Please make it stop!

Oh FFS. I've moaned before about the lack of decent IAM services. I've just been looking at one that seemed to tick my (very low bar) boxes - WorkOS. And it's actually pretty decent. But MFA is broken - they don't support recovery codes! So if you lose your authenticator you're locked out...

I'm irked. I'm attending @mlcon.bsky.social this week. I've gone over the schedule and there's only one case where I want to see both talks in the same time slot - which is amazing. That's at the end of Wed. Where Wed ends an hour earlier than Tue... If they ended the same time I could see both! 🙂

Anyone nostalgic for the early/mid 2000s HP scene (or that era in general), it turns out that the awesome @textfiles.com has archives of BinRev Radio, Default Radio, RFA, Phreak Phactor, and loads of other ones too listen back to.

So, the good news is that Lib Dems won in our by-election. The bad news is that if you add Reform and Tory together then you get more than 50% of the vote. So people around here do still want those parties, but the fact that they're split is the only thing stopping it from happening...

Between lack of time and lack of energy, I'm such a slow reader these days that Kindle Unlimited just isn't worth it. I've just finished After The Crown. I bought the Kindle version for £4 because the paperback was quite unwieldy. Took me 6 weeks to read it. That'd be £15 with kindle unlimited...!

I kinda wish they'd planned the Ashildr story a long time ahead, and then just randomly had Maisie Williams playing an extra in the background of some scenes. For no reason - just a very very long Easter egg...

Recommend me an #Android #Tablet. I'm looking for 8" give or take. I use it for reading, and for playing #StardewValley and things like Baldurs Gate 1 / Icewind Dale/ etc. What would you recommend?

Maybe I should build my own IdP... Every single one I've looked at - about 30 by now - is at least one of: too expensive, missing bare minimum features, or broken. It almost feels like if I could build one with a decent minimum set of features for cheap enough, I'll be rich...

All through dinner, our dog was barking when I was sitting down. As soon as I stood up, he stopped. As soon as I sat down, he started again. He was in a different room. With the door closed. Yet somehow he knew...

I don't want to build my own IdP. Building my own IdP is a very bad idea. So why are all the existing options so very bad? Or very expensive? Or both!

Gordon Ramsey, technical writing, and the importance of people who care rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/202...

@kbwagers.com out of interest, are you planning any books about Hail the gunrunner as opposed to Hail the empress? Ie ones set before "Behind The Throne" covering her adventures in that life? If not, could you please do so? 😉

Feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when I used to listen to BinRev Radio, Default Radio, RFA, and so on. (Which was 20 years ago!) Just looking to see what like that is still a thing. For the most part, it seems that there isn't too much, but impressed that Off The Hook/Wall are still going..!

I occasionally like to play just a random artist on Alexa, then go "Play music like this" and see what the resulting playlist is like. Today we started with Evanescence. And then went: Paramore, Alanis Morissette, Avril Lavigne, Meatloaf... I'm not really sure how Meatloaf fits in there, but ok...

There are loads of fantastic TTRPG actual play series on YouTube. And that's great. But where are all the tabletop wargaming actual plays? Warhammer, WH40K, Warmachine, Flames of War, anything like that? Or even things like Necromunda or Bloodbowl? Any recommendations?

So, I found a bad thing... Bad for productivity that is... dos.zone/nethack-1992/

With Trump openly talking about committing war crimes on the Internet, at what point does the international community get involved with stopping him?

Its been a decent week weather wise. It's been dry and fairly warm all week. I've got Friday (today) off work but Julia has stuff to do. So I figure I'll finally be able to get the lawn mowed. (Cheap electric mower - can't handle long wet grass) Get up this morning. And... It's raining... ☹️

Assuming all goes well, Artemis II is set to launch in just over 15 hours! So a bit after 11pm UK time. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqrq...

Which #StarTrek holodeck episodes do you think are better? The TNG ones with Moriarty, or the DS9 ones with Vic Fontaine?

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately* Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code. GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH github.com/settings/cop...

I keep running out of memory and can't quite work out why... (Note that this laptop has 16GB of memory)

I'm building MFA into my project. So I've been researching how it works in other services. I'm ignoring services that require super high security - IdPs, banks, etc - and just looking at normal services. And the answer is really quite depressing.

Ok internet, you need to stop me here. I want to play Dungeon Keeper, because it was a great game. Except there are apparently no decent modern versions of it. Which makes me want to build a decent modern version of it. Which is a stupid idea, right? Tell me it's a stupid idea...

Our dog normally goes mad whenever anyone puts anything through the front door. Today, for maybe the first time ever, he didn't. Which is huge progress. But this was a Reform flyer! I'm almost disappointed... 😉

My current book is apparently a Print On Demand copy and is quite large and heavy. So I've been reading the Kindle trial copy to see how I feel about reading ebooks these days. And - I can fully understand the appeal but I definitely prefer reading paper books...