Retro print patterns with CSS [link] 🔗
Ana Tudor, as always, shows excellent methods to create (what I'd call) retro print effects to images using CSS. This is something I've typically turn [...]
remy sharp's b:log
Posts
Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important [link] 🔗
Absolutely essential reading and viewing on how to produce captions with valuable real world examples of how to completely mess it up (and a lot of so [...]
CSS text fragment selector (please) [blog] 🔗
A little while ago (read: 14 years ago) I wished for a parent selector, and we finally have :has 🎉. Now, how about the ever useful jQuery selector :c [...]
groupBy and other ways that I'm an old dog [blog] 🔗
More of a TIL but my blog is rather bare lately, so this will do. I was browsing the excellent MDN to check something and came across both Map.groupBy [...]
Cricut Explore Air 2 [tif] 🔗
I've been eyeballing Cricut machines for a few years now, but it was mostly for stickers for my own use and the cost just couldn't be justified. Howev [...]
What About Men? [book] 🔗
For me: a must read. Reading Moran's book I could quickly see that I was the exact target audience for the content: white, cis, straight, leftie male. [...]
Apple going to kneecap the web: PWAs [blog] 🔗
Remember the days that Apple used to pitch itself as David in the David and Goliath stories? Well, the tables have turned. Apple, in a short number of [...]
Why my code isn't in TypeScript [blog] 🔗
I came across a reasonably interesting question on Reddit today, ask "If you don't use TypeScript, tell me why (5 year follow up)". Frustratingly it w [...]
New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality' [link] 🔗
I mean… the writing was on the wall, wasn't it? Didn't we, the tech nation desperate to actualise the ten-ecks developer, make our own bed? I know it' [...]
Yellowface [book] 🔗
Brilliantly written, almost car-crash like reading. The story is very much set in the publishing world, which isn't something I know very well or is d [...]
Removing episodes, audiobooks and more from Spotify [blog] 🔗
I've removed shows from Spotify in the past, but the change was to find the specific request and modify what was being sent. Eventually it would, and [...]
Anxious People [book] 🔗
A heartwarming story where not everything needs to be okay. I really enjoyed this book. It's more of a 4.5 for me, as I'm not sure I'd need to read it [...]
The Doggie Loggie [blog] 🔗
As we (try) to train Coco, one of the big tasks is being able to leave the dog alone for a decent amount of time (made trickier by the fact that both [...]
Christmas lights [tif] 🔗
Although I've been tinkering with bits, this was another home fix exploit. The lights didn't work at all (outdoor LEDs). At first I thought it was cor [...]
Born to be Mild: Adventures for the Anxious [book] 🔗
Some laughs but ultimately turned into a journal. The first series of chapters were really fun and throughout the book there's genuine chuckles from t [...]
My 2023 [blog] 🔗
That's another year done and time for another "my years" post, where I attempt to log what I got up to so that in 2033 I can look back and chuckle fro [...]
System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7) [book] 🔗
Great addition to the story of a struggling Murderbot. I continue to love Martha Wells' Murderbot diaries. As the years (and diaries) have gone on, Se [...]
Unrot (that) link [blog] 🔗
I present to you, a gift, a gift of a service that will "unrot" your links, cleverly named… unrot.link. The service promises to prevent and undo link [...]
Scraping Goodreads [blog] 🔗
I only use Goodreads because it's directly integrated into my Kindle (which I love) so I can easily track when I start and finish a book. However, Goo [...]
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot, #4) [book] 🔗
Surprisingly modern for a book written nearly 100 years ago. A solid murder mystery. Apparently one of Christie's most (or more?) controversial books [...]
My experience of ffconf 2023 [blog] 🔗
The event ran last Friday and (thankfully) as usual, going by all the people I spoke to, it was a huge success. In previous years I've been asked "wha [...]
Default layouts in 11ty [til/misc] 🔗
I found this really hard to determine in the 11ty documentation, so I've added it here for future reference. If you want a default layout for all page [...]
Blocking IPs in production [blog] 🔗
This is probably a hacky way to go about things, but if I don't write it down, I know I'll have forgotten it by the time maintenance comes around in 2 [...]
Shades of Grey (Shades of Grey, #1) [book] 🔗
Felt like a long read and felt a little like it was trying to be Red Dwarf a few times, but eventually settled into an interesting and fun story. I do [...]
Kid's Kindle Fire [tif] 🔗
My friend's son had a kid's kindle that wasn't charging any more. They were going to buy a replacement, but then asked me whether I thought it was fix [...]
Why I stopped loving slashes in self closing tags [blog] 🔗
Specifically the [space] [slash] combo before the closing bracket: /. I've had history with these particular two characters, but until recently that [...]
Keyboard Cleaner [link] 🔗
A wonderful does the job bit of software that supports Apple hardware going back over a decade. It intercepts all keyboard input allow you to safely c [...]
Coco [blog] 🔗
This is Coco. She came to live with us at 9 weeks old last Saturday. She's a bundle of love and has us all already on our toes! [...]
No more 404 [blog] 🔗
As with any ageing blog, some of my outbound links are hitting either 404s or domains that are no longer active. It's understandable given that my blo [...]
Randoma11y [link] 🔗
Accessible colour combinations - and upon hitting reload, there's actually some really stylish (to me) combinations whilst being either AA or AAA comp [...]
Brian LeRoux on enhance.dev [link] 🔗
All of Brian's approach to dependencies and concerns about long-term support, we're talking 10 years here, are absolutely excellent spot on and he goe [...]
Pokémon Sapphire [tif] 🔗
On the Console Repair Discord I'd offered to fix a Pokémon Sapphire cart that was initially not working, but then went to a repair shop and came back [...]
Why sponsor small events (like ffconf)? [blog] 🔗
Although ffconf has been running since 2009, sponsorship is always a process that you have to start from scratch. The event is organised by just Julie [...]
Preview Social Media Share and Generate Metatags [link] 🔗
Useful tool to check the meta tags used and preview how they'll appear in various social media sites, particular as Twitter declines, the need for Twi [...]
Getting daily notifications my parent is okay [blog] 🔗
About a year ago I came across the Kettle Companion which is a lovely idea: you share a device with a loved one, and when they boil their kettle, you [...]
The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club, #1) [book] 🔗
So good on all levels. Utterly polished and wonderfully likeable characters. Not much to add, except that the story was really well drawn out, and the [...]
Piranesi [book] 🔗
Kind of lovely. Kind of trippy. The book drops me right into an utterly bizarre world inside a building where waves crash and tides rise and fall. Pir [...]
Thirteen / what flowers mean to me [blog] 🔗
We bought the flowers today. Heart shaped. We started using a heart shape on the 10th year. We used to have numbers, the year-old she would have been, [...]
Murder in the Family [book] 🔗
I found the storytelling device clumsy and distracting, the first miss (for me) from Hunter. The story is told through a docu-drama series, half as if [...]
The Shining Girls [book] 🔗
Having seen the author present at a conference, I wanted to read this story: and I'm glad I did. The story is about a time-travelling serial killer wh [...]
Timezone offsets from an IP address [blog] 🔗
Following on from my hard and easy way of getting timezone from an IP address, having the timezone (as text) is one thing, now finding the actual offs [...]
Custom backlight for a Wonder Swan [blog] 🔗
I've been branching out from my usual Game Boy folly and have been tinkering with the Wonder Swan (an interesting little Japanese exclusive handheld). [...]
IP to timezone, the 30 second way [blog] 🔗
After my wrangle with getting a timezone from an IP address by reducing large databases down from several hundred megabytes down to only a few, then d [...]
A Slow Fire Burning [book] 🔗
Bit of a "beach read", but simple and enjoyable enough. Most of the characters are a bit tough to swallow, but it reads as intentional. Not entirely m [...]
IP to Timezone - the hard, but fast way [blog] 🔗
This week I decided it was time to try to revive some of the casualties from my recent Vercel incident, and though webmentions.app is the more useful, [...]
Stone Blind [book] 🔗
Brilliant different perspective on the Madusa myth. I really liked how the story was told. I was vaguely familiar with the myth, and did a little Wiki [...]
WonderSwan Color [tif] 🔗
Slightly branching out from the usual western handhelds, I've seen WonderSwans but never played around. Then managed to pick up a faulty "Color" model [...]
minimon.js - Pokémon Mini web emulator [link] 🔗
Not just the emulator but also debugger. Given that all the tooling for this (specifically around emulation) is on Windows, this is a great example of [...]
A Man Called Ove [book] 🔗
Always fun to have a grumpy, yet lovable character. In some ways predictable, but it didn't take away from enjoying the story and "watching" as Ove mo [...]
Just 6 joycons [tif] 🔗
I bought a joblot of Switch Joycons (because apparently I find it straightforward to fix…). £50 (plus £7 postage - which I think was overpriced) - but [...]