Ugh, Apple is showing notification bubbles on both my phone and my laptop for the major OS updates with the UI that has been universally canned. Great work because now I can’t tell if there’s a security update to install.
Archives: Notes
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The time I tweeted “It’s on. Rolling coverage: https://bit.ly/abc_news #libspill” during the short period when both Rickrolling and Australian governments imploding during their first term were popular.
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Some references I’m seeing out of the corner of my eye that I haven’t thought of/seen for a while:
- selectivizr
- IE8
- Boxcutters
- Media Temple
- #qanda
- WordPress 3.3
- Australian Idol
- Bob Earth – I miss that guys social media presence
- The word Webmaster
- ABC 2
- CJ Craig
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In the process of deleting 21,693 tweets using Cyd, thanks to Ben Buchanan for the recommendation.
The vast majority are on my site in the notes section.
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I’ve been getting in to cooking YouTube recently in the hope of picking up technique rather than recipes.
A recent video (the first I’d watched on the channel) pointed out that soaking chopped onion is a great way to get rid of the excessive, their word, onion flavour.
I have never smashed the “never recommend this channel” button so quickly.
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I feel terrible for the staff at the Adelaide Festival, they’ve been working solidly on the event for twelve months (possibly longer for some shows) only for the board to ruin the reputation of the festival at the eleventh hour.
If you do go to an event at this year’s AF please remember that the people you see producing the shows are probably devastated.
None of the people you see front-of-house were involved… most of them are not even on payroll yet.
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The new Adelaide Festival Board has now made an unambiguous apology to Randa Abdel-Fattah: “We apologise to Dr Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her.”
They’ve removed the previous board’s statement from the site. I’d have been transparent and kept it with a notice directing readers to the newer statement but there’s no perfect decision here.
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The Maribyrnong River swans are back with a family. This year with four cygnets, up from three last year. We saw mum and dad taking the kids for a swim down the river in the final stages of dusk last night.
I tried to get a picture but was too far away so it looked like the photo of the Loch Ness Monster.
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More news outlets need to report that the abusive Grok images are by design. It was developed to counter other AI systems being “too woke” according to Musk. He has said as much many many times.
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On the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, the board says “We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented”.
Which is very different to the board apologising for the decision itself and completely fails to acknowledge the board’s fuck up.
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curl -I what terrible things have happened overnight do i even want to know dot comHTTP/2 301
Location: https://www.abc.net.au/news -
Sure, there’s about an acre of floor space, a cat bed and a cushioned chair to choose from but, sure, let’s risk getting crushed under a caster wheel of the very heavy desk chair.
Idiot creature.
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The brand new canvas awning we had installed upstairs has been great this week. Today it’s in the up position due to the wind. I can hear the wind alarms going off at the Docks so I think it’s a wise but unwelcome decision.
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Guess what?! It’s just a tunnel. The stations look nice enough but more could have been done to make it easier to differentiate them at a glance.
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On the way home I’ll make my first trip through the Metro tunnel, I predict it will be just like all the other tunnels I’ve traveled through.
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I’m heading in to town to donate plasma for the first time. When they changed the rules for homos I’d just had a vaccine so I needed to wait and then forgot about it. I’m a little excited.
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I know it’s either a lack of or inadequate training and not the fault of the casual worker working on Christmas Eve.
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”Barista” at cafe I’m only going to because the regular one is closed: Are you enjoying your coffee?
Brain: Honestly I think it would be nicer if you’d boiled the dirt from a plumber’s boots to a temperature that would melt steel.
Me: Yes thank you. Merry Christmas.
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Code comment, possibly exposing my naivety:
In theory I could have got away without sub-grid here but it was going to be a pain for responsiveness so I gave up and used the extra elements. I basically didn’t want to end up with a ridiculous number of nth-child selectors.
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I’ve decided to go with مذكرات طالب الجزء الاول (Diary Of A Wimpy Kid) and have ordered both the translation and an English edition. As far as I know, they have never been edited for being a little too racist or misogynistic.
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I’m trying to find a print edition of Roald Dahl’s العملاق الطيب or ذكاء ثعلب (The BFG or Fantastic Mr Fox, Arabic translations), probably the latter due to the babblement of made up words in the BFG. I’d settle for an e-book though.
It’s not easy to shop in a language you don’t understand in an alphabet you can’t recognise. I’ve tried Goodreads for some links and while some of them go to translations, it tends to be a random language rather than the one you are looking at.
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A bad take so bad the taker isn’t even game enough to include the conclusion they are trying to take you to. It’s the “if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you” of the Internet.
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We’ve been watching The League of Gentlemen recently but last night we didn’t feel like watching a horremdy (like a dramedy but for horror). We needed nice, simple and a lot of heart.
Scrubs was perfect: we watched the first three episodes of season one and it was so nice. We’ve got DVDs of the first three series so get the original music too.
I think Bill Lawrence has got a bright future.
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Do youngs still go through a The Doors phase or is it now a Nirvana phase?
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To misquote Douglas Adams:
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake connecting computers to the Internet in the first place. And some said that even the computers had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have invented the valve in the first place.
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SMS from “Coinbase” (yes, scare quotes) “Your login code is 123456. Wasn’t you? Reach us at 1800 SCAM.” I’ve never seen that approach before.
With all these scams, the money laundering and the well known price manipulation you’d almost think that operating in the crypto market was somehow a dodgy thing for dodgy people.
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It’s started: Bluesky have asked me to verify my age through Kids Web Services. They have a very smart looking web site.
Their privacy policy seems fine, I guess but includes that well worn line “we may modify this Privacy Policy at any time.” I understand that line is basically the privacy policy version of E&OE but what’s not clear is how they want me to verify my age.
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The David Byrne Tiny Desk is simply great. Do yourself a favour, etc
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More stories about the UK need to be illustrated with this image.
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A question about CSS sub-grid, is it possible to do without
div.can-i-do-without-thisin this example?Hashtag peter learns css again after somehow becoming a backend developer over the course of the last ten years
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Breaking news, 2025 edition: You can do some pretty neat things with CSS variables and SVG use.
Next to figure out subgrids.
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Wow, have I forgotten a lot of CSS over the last ten years.
I’m trying to remember to use logical properties, even though my site is only ever going to appear in English.
It seems odd that a shorthand equivalent of
margin,padding, etc doesn’t exist for setting all four directions logically. The originals only really work for one or two values logically. -
I know I am an old silly but were I running a bank and transitioning people to a new system, I’d:
- provide the exact name of the new app
- provide the new access details before rather than after the transition
- only do so after internet banking was available via the internet
I guess this is why I am not a product manager at a bank.
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The EBU allowing Israel to compete in next year’s Eurovision is so weak. I hope SBS joins the broadcasters pulling out in protest of the genocide.
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This is brutal, Nick Cave’s bad cover version of Disco 2000 has more listens than the single Bad Cover Version on the EP (although the remix of the single has heaps more than both).
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Curious about your (or another’s) contribution history for WordPress? My contribution history tool now includes WordPress 6.9 in the results.
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I think the quickest fix I saw pushed through was boring a hole in the paywall for Covid related articles, from memory that took less that 24 hours after the first case was discovered in Australia.
It had nothing to do with my team but I think at first it was a bit of a kludge:
if category == covid then leak. -
When I was at Farifax, I once whinged so much about ending up on smh.com.au via links on theage.com.au that we got a fix through the system in about a week just so I’d shut up about it.
People were actually very good about it. Once I pointed out that “I’ve subscribed to the Age, why would I try to log in to the SMH after hitting the paywall?” everyone was sold fairly quickly. It probably helped that it was peak 2020 at the time. News was pretty important to Victorians at the time.
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The ABC News website insists on showing me the Today in NSW section even though I’ve got all the things set to Melbourne. The sidebar shows local news correctly but not the main feed.
I hit the CDN endpoint ae9.equinix-mel.netarch.akamai.com so there are multiple ways for the national broadcaster to detect I am, maybe, possibly, not in NSW.
They can be such a Sydney media outlet sometimes, across the board.
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George Michael came up in my feed last night so I started reading his Wikipedia page as a result. Apparently Casey Kasem refused to say “I want your sex” on American Top 40. Because America, I guess.
I am, of course, listening to various albums today.
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Do professional chefs use “things have started exploding” as a measure when reheating food in the microwave too?
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The trains were crowded enough that I decided to catch the traditional Sunbury line home. I’ve never been on a roomier Sunbury train.
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Apparently I am enough of a train nerd to be curious about the metro tunnel. Please listen for announcements does not seem great though.
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I had such a great time speaking at Web Directions Enqueue, thanks for having me and I’m looking forward to the next one.
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I’m also very, very pleased that people guessing which milestone usually guess ten years too low (I’m ignoring the fact that a sensible person always guesses ages low for anyone they think is over twenty-one).
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Having a milestone birthday this week has got me thinking about the last ten years.
Buying a home has got to be a highlight, that it was the place we’d been renting for ten years beforehand is gravy. We knew its sins going in but also that we loved living here in good ol’ 3011.
A lot of professional achievements. From memory, I had the first functional commit on the CMS re-platforming for Fairfax but if not, it was one of the first five or six. I sometimes worry that that will be the biggest project I ever work on but I thought I’d worked on big projects ten years ago so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These days I make regular decisions that effect a “try not to think about it” number of websites. But I also get to help other developers contribute code to these same sites. Often is the people who have been showing up for years, but sometimes it’s a new contributor who then becomes a regular contributor and, finally, an old hand.
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Me: Oh good, I slept through another major internet outage.
…arriving at my desk…
Internet: fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
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Over a dozen birds are hanging around on the lawn out the front of our house and I can’t help but be a little creeped out.
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Elsewhere in the talk I use the phrase up cache creek without a paddle which I am reasonably proud of.
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That thing when you are writing a talk and find yourself asking “what’s the funniest transition to use for this joke?”