Archives: Notes

I needed to come up with some alt text for this photo from March 2019. It included the word thirst-trap.

I’m going through the notes section on my website to check for broken images and quickly check links.

Turns out I’ve been posting to my website first for twelve years now. First to syndicate to Twitter, when it was fun, and now to Mastodon.

At various times I thought about giving up and leaving my more ephemeral content for Twitter because I liked it. I’m glad I did not.

Host your own content, you never know when your favourite social media site will become your X-favourite site. The Nazi bar. Or both.

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I’ve found life without analytics really freeing. I used to worry about visiting my own site and messing up the stats. No stats, no worries.

It was also a stupid concern given that only referer spammers allow the scripts to run these days.

Not a good puzzle day… gave up on Wordle and had to send through my very impolite filler word and I broke the LinkedIn 6×6 Sudoku, although I’ll go back later. At least I got additional.today out nice and quickly.

Councils prioritizing private development over locals is one of those things that gives me the screaming shits and entirely reasonable amount.

In this case, the footpath that’s closed for so long that it needs a permanent sign leads up to pedestrian lights so, of course, people are crossing a reasonably busy road without the benefit of those traffic lights.

Friends doing nice things can be pretty great.

It has been 0️⃣ days since typing git checkout [repo] instead of git clone [repo].

It really seems that the Police Squad! TV series has been disappeared from the internet. I know a lot of it made it’s way in to the first Naked Gun movie but I’ve been wanting to re-watch it but it’s just vaporized.

Last night, the YouTube app on my TV was mostly showing music in my suggestions. Mostly related to what I’d listened to on YT Music during the week.

Stupidly, they were mostly audio only clips of tracks I’d listened to. Because obviously when I turn on the TV I want to listen to music.

I’m assuming they’ve turned up the Gemini in their YT algorithm.

Yay, I managed to update about 1500 notes on my site without accidentally sending a single one to Mastodon.

The code alongside the comment “don’t share old posts to Mastodon (magic number alert)” just paid for itself.

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Contrary to popular belief, I’m Going Home is the best number in Rocky Horror and I will not listen to anyone who suggests otherwise.

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Predictably, I am planning on watching Rocky Horror tonight. My copy is the 25th anniversary re-release.

The cat is distracting me by being adorable. ADORABLE.

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I’d like to use server side analytics but I suspect they’re even more susceptible to referrer spam. Apparently you can do it through CloudFront but they’re not very good; I have heard Cloudflare does a better job if you sign up for a pro account.

I’ve decided to remove analytics from my website. Referrer spam has beaten me and I figure most actual visitors, mostly nerds, to my site have blockers installed anyway. It’s also allowed me to remove Jetpack as that’s the only thing I was using it for.

Last night I watched a video of the Rocky Horror cast on the 50th anniversary.

I first watched it when I was about 10 and it’s a big part of why I love musicals and, I suspect, the reason why I go on a Broadway adventure every few years.

As a teen I saw it live with the extended family with some guy called Russell Crowe playing the role of Frank. Recent productions have been really bubble-gummy which takes away from the slide in to darkness after the Rocky’s awaking. I’m glad I got to see it in it’s original form.

Removing all trace of an infamous and highly embarrassing moment from the internet is child’s play compared to removing out of date info from an Apple contacts app.

I’ve never hosted a podcast nor been a guest on a podcast. I’m tempted to organise a monthly dinner club for the six people who can say the same.

I watched Spotswood on iView last night which somehow I’d never seen. It’s fun and largely stands the test of time.

What really trilled me was that a few scenes were filmed in the hood. In that movie way at the bottom of the hill they turned in to a completely different suburb but that doesn’t change the fact that a baby faced Ben Mendelsohn and Toni Collette rode a bike down a street near here.

We live near the freight bridge over the Maribyrnong River and you can always tell when an exciting train is coming through because there are bunch of youngs with high end cameras hanging around eagerly.

I don’t know what constitutes and exciting train, except maybe the steam engines that occasionally use the line, but the youngs have probably never got excited browser interoperability. Who am I to judge?

Now to the optometrist to find out how much worse my eyes have got in the last two years. I suspect a lot. Coincidentally, I think it was grand final day when I last had them checked.

I am still upset that the good cafe in a neighbouring suburb sold and became the bad cafe. The old barista spent months doing handover and they learnt nothing. NOTHING.

Not using the CSS cascade hastens the Antichrist.

— Peter Thiel, probably

I watched the Hamilton the Musical episode of Hard Quiz last night and all I can think is how much of a waste of a subject it was that the contestant didn’t make it to the final round.

I am tempted to write an NPM package that just bricks a machine whenever someone types a tilde, caret or the word latest.

Ha, the NYT endpoint for the Wordle solution is available prior to the start of the time period. No token/request hash needed.

Foolishly, I tested this in my browser for tomorrow (don’t worry, I would never…). Switching to curl HEAD requests, it looks like the solutions are available up until October 8.

ANZ’s history of fines: November 2017, February 2018, October 2020, October 2022, March 2023, September 2023, December 2023 and September 2025.

They’ve apologised and promised to improve their systems to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. I presume the system improvements are to better hide their actions from regulators.

People around my age used to have a lot more colour in their hair.

Me browsing the internet this week: oh, this is the bad place.

I was not expecting LinkedIn of all places to start doing good proper honest human constructed Sudokus. Not only that, they’re by Thomas Snyder a name anyone who has watched Cracking the Cryptic should recognise.

Hopefully it starts a trend and newspapers will stop publishing boring algorithmically generated grids.

Many years ago, I saw a job application form with the biggest tell that the company was run by toxic wankers.

“How many mouse clicks do you take to open your editor when you turn on your computer (we’re serious)?”

I still occasionally think about how much I’d hate to work for those people.

I released a new SEO WordPress Plugin last week: Simple Search Submission for IndexNow.

I thought the official plugin was over-engineered and had an unnecessary top level menu so wrote one that got out of the way and just got the job done.

It’s also available on GitHub (issues and pull requests welcome) and via composer: composer require peterwilsoncc/simple-search-submission

I guess we all should have seen believing medical science is woke (pejorative) as a natural extension of believing climate science is woke (pejorative).

I’m sure some people saw it coming but it didn’t occur to me.

Bookmarking: A random list of RecipeTin Eats cooks I’ve done. I’ve even started looking up things I know how to cook for ways to improve.

• Sausage Bake with Potatoes and Gravy
• Roast Chicken
• Pad Thai
• Slow Cooked Lamb Shanks in Red Wine Sauce
• Gravy Baked Chicken (thighs & drumsticks)
• Slow Roast Leg of Lamb
• Honey Mustard Baked Chicken Drumsticks
• Poached Chicken Breasts
• 5 Minute Fall-apart Massaman Lamb Shoulder

80s styled curried sausages is missing from the list because it wasn’t a success.

In our house, we like chicken and we like lamb.

There are admissions of guilt and then there’s node recommending that node should only be used with a package manager.

I needed to do a test the tests commit to verify failures.

I can confirm that the test suite fails for node version 42.

I finished writing my latest WordPress plugin over the weekend.

Its working subtitle is “Why write 1200 lines of code (including 700 lines of tests) with no build dependencies when you can write 3,200 lines of code (without any tests) with 73 build dependencies?”

It’s hardly catchy but I think my version of the plugin is better than the latter.

Usually the cat sits under my desk during the day.

Yesterday I took her to the vet to get a vaccination so today she is sulking at the other end of the house.

Indicator use in order of how much it annoys me.

3. No indicator.

2. Turning on the indicator as they start turning the corner.

1. The guy in the red Toyota who literally pointed to the street he planned to turn in to rather than use his indicator.

So many tables on caniemail.com could be replaced with LOL, NOPE.

On Survivor Australia last night, Parvati mentioned that she and David had played Deal or No Deal Island together. Fascinated by the concept, I looked it up and the details are just as terrible as the name suggests. Possibly even worse.

An unfortunate side effect of agreeing to talk at a conference is the need to write a talk and prepare a slide deck.

After seven and a half hours, the house has become the smell of lamb shank. I am getting very hungry but there is still a little while to wait.

I decided to go retro when I drew a Kilopixel. Sadly I am old enough to have played Pong when it was new.

I’m trying to figure out if it’s IndexNow or IndexNow®. I can’t find any registration details online but it’s not something I need to do regularly so may not be looking in the right place.

It’s always DNS. Except for when it’s a missing semi-colon.

The Hamilton movie screening in theatres ?

That it opens two months later in Australia than in the US ☹️

“Reduces the number of database queries … by 344 (347 queries down to 3)” is always nice to write in a commit message. Even if it is for a process that runs once during the lifetime of a site.

I just made the typo npm ruin and I think I’m in to the idea.

In the continuing saga of Peter Listens To The Hottest 100 Days Later Than Every Else.

The Whitlams have much better songs than No Aphrodisiac. Although, that may be the Chunky Chunky Air-Guitar bitterness speaking.

(I just heard Tim Freedman yelling “it was just one goat”.)