Archives: Notes

Googling Windows 95 images, I came across these instructions from Radford University, Virginia, for setting up a modem. I love that this page still exists.

Hi, my name is Peter.

Sometimes my job is typing git bisect good; npm install; npm run build or git bisect bad; npm install; npm run build for hours on end.

I don’t think anyone in the industry can defend this.

– Professor of animal behaviour and welfare science on 7.30

We can no longer track them… Where are the state government inspectors?

– Racing Industry

Often it’s an exaggerated situation…

– NSW Govt.

Very happy to have found a shoe shop that caters for duck feet.

I have got to get better at resisting the urge to make a pun.

When it comes to WordPress roles & caps, one of the things my current and former colleagues love hearing about is my insistence primitives be plural and meta be singular, even if it requires awkward phrasing. They never want to tell me to shut up.

K, I’m kinda bored of developers complaining “Why is (the possible) impossible in WordPress?!”

Want to only allow posts, no media, no plugins, no theme changes, no nothing, not even for admins? Put this in mu-plugins https://gist.github.com/peterwilsoncc/ce2c1f2376b9b158125d0a2e4ff57567

Now you’re just taking the piss.

> pwcc = [];
[]
> ( ( pwcc == false ) == ( ! pwcc ) )
false

Ugh, flight delayed by a late passenger. Of course it’s Warwick Capper and of course we passed him sitting in the wrong lounge.

My friends get me ?

After twelve days of this I am ready to black out all the windows at work. I just know this is going to stick around for the next four months.

Congratulations Geekbot on finding the subject line of an unsolicited feedback request with the least chance of success.

One of the reasons I like Survivor is because the host will weather it out with the contestants. You could see JLP thinking “this is shithouse” on last nights #SurvivorAU.

A couple nearby were arguing about Brexit and are now staring at each other in awkward silence. He’s pro, she’s against.

Watching Simon try to find an idol last night was like watching a cat trying to use a pen. #survivorau

Wearing the shark socks a local cafe was kind enough to give me for Fathers’ Day yesterday. This is despite me being about as fatherly as your average four year-old.

Ugh. Has Morrison vowed to fix all the people wearing purple at PM&C today too? Prat.

I’m pleased to see the Footscray park redevelopment on hold. It’s not an unused public space needing to be revitalised, it’s usually crowded on weekends with BBQs and cultural events https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-27/maribyrnong-council-weighs-melbourne-victory-footscray-park-plan/11454642

As a former visitor, I love this description of Rock City in American Gods. This perfectly accurate description.

This is access for all but no where near equal access for all.

In the best tradition of uncles with no kids, so no possibility of revenge, we took our niece and nephew to a junk food degustation on the weekend. Whoa, am I glad we did that at the end of the day rather than the start.

I’d really like to be able to copy Gerry Harvey’s personal email address, the one that doesn’t go to a PA, every time I ask a foreign company asking for a valid tax invoice for a purchase b/w $82.50 and $1000.

Exploring the HTTP Archive data on Big Query. It’s interesting but demo queries with `/* warning: this costs several hundred dollars to run. */` sure add a little unwanted excitement to the mix.

It kinda makes me proud to see this blown up and displayed at the new job’s offices. If memory serves, The Age was among a vast majority of news outlets to call it out at the time.

A macOS podcast called This Dongle Life hosted by Sarah Koenig during Serial’s off-season.

As my AWS free period comes to an end, I’m trying to work out if the billing console predicts based on previous use or previous costs. It looks like costs (which is useless) but that may be because my site is over-engineered for its up to dozen visitors per day.

One of the most interesting CMS projects in the country is for the Age, SMH & AFR’s Product/Tech team. It’s good to be back with the team, this time in-house after working with them as an HM client a few years ago. https://medium.com/metro-product-technology/welcome-to-the-metro-product-technology-blog-2a51ba8e749f

Great to see Google has expanded its guide to robots.txt https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_txt

Remember robots.txt will not prevent a site from being indexed, only a noindex meta tag/HTTP header will do that. https://yoast.com/prevent-site-being-indexed/

Tomorrow’s my last day at Human Made before starting a new gig later this-week. It was lovely to spend a week with around half the company at WCEU recently, they really are a delightful crew.

So many models of Enigma machines at the Spy Museum ?️‍♂️

About 10 percent of the audience of @thewebprincess’s WordCamp Europe talk work daily in a second language. It’s a challenge of remote.

I’m pleased about how much control I’ve taken over my news intake recently. Blocking sites in my user CSS has helped, of course, but I’m less focused on bad news. It’s become habit now so I’ll unblock them in a couple of weeks.

Online arts publications after a volunteer for Senior Correspondent for Getting Free Tickets to the Hamilton Opening in Sydney, I’m your best person. We can work on the title.

Instead of above and below the line voting in the senate, it would be nice to have a separate area for racists, gun nuts, anit-vaxxers, homophobes and miscellaneous loonies.

There’s now a Chassis extension for WordPress core development with an ever so helpful copy and paste config file. A few people contributed but @kadamwhite put in a tonne of effort. https://github.com/Chassis/core-dev

FAXES! METCARDS!

Styling fieldsets and legends is still the worst.

Reading @rachelandrew’s excellent article on box generation & I’m confused. Is the display:contents bug always a problem or fine to use on the semantically meaningless div & span elements? https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/05/display-box-generation/

If you really want your WordPress hook to run first, or just troll @rmccue, run it at priority PHP_INT_MIN * 200.

If that doesn’t run first, PHP_INT_MIN * PHP_INT_MAX.

And if that doesn’t run first…

Wow, no one was expecting the entire cast of GOT to be killed off in episode two and replaced with the Comedy Company’s original cast. That twist was beautiful.

I get irrationally annoyed when I see “waiting for xxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net” as I visit a site. C’mon, have some professional pride and set up an alias on Route 53. It’s 50 cents!

A great post from @Dries acknowledging open-source isn’t a meritocracy allowing anyone to open a pull-request but is instead for a privileged few groups.

The APAC team at Human Made are doing Wear it like it’s Wednesday today (reverse casual Friday). I don’t mind saying, I look amazing.

Recommended custom styles for news sites:

html::before {
  content: "It's all terrible and depressing." !important;
  display: block !important;
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 0 !important;
  left: 0 !important;
  right: 0 !important;
  bottom: 0 !important;
  height: auto !important;
  max-height: none !important;
  width: auto !important;
  max-width: none !important;
  z-index: 999999 !important;
  background: black !important;
  font-size: 50px !important;
  font-family: impact !important;
  color: white !important;
  text-align: center !important;
  padding-top: 50px !important;
}

Developer buddies: hands up if you hear a project is using Jira and say to yourself “oh goody”. Hello? Anyone? So just me then.

I still can’t figure out which markdown flavour to use on any one screen, though.

Listening to @sciencevs Alcohol. Don’t burst my bubble, Zukerman!

This happened to me at Royal Melbourne after a seizure, I agreed to go private in ER but reconsidered once admitted. They only let up the pressure when I said I was vulnerable, had suffered a neurological event & couldn’t make sound decisions while in ER.

I listened to the first episode of the Women in WordPress podcast on this morning’s commute. Damn, it’s excellent.

Taking a radical approach to taking back control of my news intake.

Last year I accidentally took up smoking again and now I’m quitting again. I’d forgotten how persuasive Addict Brain can be but I’m about to hit the point where the primary motivation becomes avoiding the hard part again more than anything else.