Bookmarks

Oh great, we’re inventing the “machine spirits” from Warhammer now…

I’ve been having on-off minor vision issues for the last year, with today being a “soft-focus day”. Even at tiny sizes these fonts are exactly as their name implies. I’m tempted to switch to using them.

In this guide, I will try to explain what the Fediverse is, why it’s cool for punks, give a practical how-to on getting started with Mastodon, and lay out some dreams for the future.

Politicians wanting to break encryption, despite the risks to everyone… a tale as old as time.

I want to try to recreate this. I know of several code bases which could benefit from using automated documentation generation just to have any documentation.

HTML is – dare I say it – fun to me. The reason is that I started a long time ago.

“You’d never see this with Google Sheets,” he said. “You’d never get this level of passion.”

A plain English guide to getting yourself unstuck when you screw up with Git.

Here are the mistakes I’ve seen which may make you fail at learning Rust. I hope this list will help you avoid them.

Transforming government services isn’t as easy as the tech bros and billionaires make it out to be.

I was considering Pika for creating a side blog, and now they’re offering 15% off 🥳

Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

Legislation to protect children in the digital realm is essential. But if it results in the loss of small cycling and cancer-care forums, something’s gone wrong

Press the button, get a “useless” website. Just like the old days.

Why do engineers get mad at each other so often?

We hope to see htmx, in its own small way, join the likes of giants like jQuery as a sturdy and reliable tool for building your 100 year web services.

Making code suggestions without deep context is like having a brilliant junior dev who just joined yesterday - they’ll write clean code that subtly breaks everything.

Bookmarking for later

Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta

I love this… a meticulous breakdown of different releases of previously-unseen footage from 90’s BBC comedy The Fast Show, along with a love letter to why this is important. More series are covered on the site, including faves like Red Dwarf.

Links are powerful — that’s why Instagram and Twitter and Threads punish and limit them, and why Substack tries to take credit for them.

Quit Substack while you can. Molly White has a great post about her experience doing so: https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/

HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on.

only few professional software engineers can “afford” to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions.

The elevator doors scud open and the bullpen is a hive of activity. A pause. This is, as they say, “where the magic happens”. I make finger-quotes as I say it, but I do it ironically so that everyone laughs at my supreme wit.

If hosting a PDS for a secondary/test account goes OK, I guess the next step would be to migrate my “main” Bluesky account to that PDS.

I think I’m going to try out setting up my own ATproto PDS, and hosting my own Bluesky data.

The “growth mindset” is Microsoft’s cult — a vaguely-defined, scientifically-questionable, abusively-wielded workplace culture monstrosity, peddled by a Chief Executive obsessed with framing himself as a messianic figure with divine knowledge of how businesses should work.

Lots of useful stuff here for implementing dark + light modes for websites.

In fact, one survey by the US Library of Congress suggested that less than 20% of all recorded music was available on the internet.

We watched the trailer for Y2K last night, and it looks ridiculously fun.

Society doesn’t fucking need more loud, pearl clutching, rabid moralists. We need individuals who embody values in their daily lives, who lead by example rather than by volume. We need real moral heroes who aren’t screaming on street corners or denouncing people on social media for not fitting into a rigid morality box.

Wowhead have compiled a playlist of the in-game soundtrack for World of Warcraft’s upcoming “The War Within” expansion.

First impressions: it’s a banger.

If it’s anything like the last 2 expansions, this is going to end up dominating my “Most Listened to” this year

David Soper continues to be a miniature painting legend.

Cheekily bookmarking my own /bookmarks page because I’ve turned it into more of a “link blog”, and changed how it’s shared out to social media.

It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, for a curated list of blogs and other “small web” sites, and powered by RSS feeds. I’ve spent a chunk of my morning reading posts I’d probably never have found otherwise and then hitting “next post” to get another.

It’s open-source too!

Part of me does wonder if these loopholes and techniques could be exploited for good somehow, rather than selfish gain - and what that might look like.

I absolutely do not have the time to recreate this, but I still kinda want to.

I’m going to have to investigate this more at a later time. It sounds like it could be great to power a “media” section of my site.

Honestly, I’ve been tempted of late. I’ve noticed my overall usage dropping pretty low, though I do have bursts of activity. I think I could, but I wouldn’t delete my accounts; I’d leave them up for syndication (POSSE) and discovery through tools like Murmel.

Maybe you’ll blog, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll have users, maybe you won’t.
Maybe you’ll give up that cool domain.
Maybe you’ll sell that little project and hate what the buyers do with it.

Truth be told, I’ve fallen waaaayy behind on my CSS knowledge.

I’m pretty sure ICQ was the first chat app I used regularly, back in 2000/2001. I was honestly surprised to find out it was still in operation.

I’m going to give this a try soon. Setting up a PHP environment natively on Windows has always been a pain, and this looks like it might solve it.

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Danie Ware’s Sister Superior Augusta stories are some of my favourites in all Warhammer fiction. Despite having (I think) all of the printed stories, I’d actually missed Mercy - an oversight I’ve just corrected and downloaded to my Kindle!

I keep meaning to do a small project based on Augusta and her squad; maybe this year is when I finally get around to it?

This is one of those things that I always thought was weirdly missing from Micro.blog, so I’m glad to see it’s here!

I loved Textpattern. There’s an alternative universe where I’m still using it, having not been seduced by the idea of needing more features. Once upon a time I wrote what I believed to be the first XML-RPC interface for Textpattern, before it became a core feature. To this day, I use some Textile syntax when writing Markdown because I still have the muscle memory.

“Bon Anniversaire”, Textpattern! 💛

We thought we knew how Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

I started a few years earlier than Mike, but a lot of this struck a chord with me