Steve Abraham

Another year, another blog

A long time ago I came to an understanding with JavaScript; I didn’t like it and it didn’t like me.

When I adopted Eleventy for the previous version of this site around a year ago, I hadn’t appreciated how much JavaScript I’d have to write. I initially thought I’d get away with it, but as I tried to add new sections to the site along with extra bits of functionality, I quickly realised how wrong I was.

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Reclaiming old content

I’ve spent a little time over the last few weeks gradually reclaiming old blog content from various sources. Some has been pulled from the Wayback Machine, some from old Pinboard archives, some from site backups. Going back over two decades, almost none of it has any value, it’s certainly well beyond being useful, so it’s perhaps entertaining at best.

It’s facinating how much near 25 year old linked content is still available.

I changed my mind, my CMS adventure

Oops…! I did it again. The latest post in this saga is here.

When I launched this site a few days ago I posted that I’d settled on Kirby as my CMS1 of choice. This wasn’t exactly a spur of the moment thing, it’s a system I’ve been dabbling with for quite a while. In fact, my introduction to Kirby came from the talented Simon Collison when he designed and built my company site some time back.

I’ve since changed my mind.

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New year, new blog

For the last few weeks Matthias Ott has been running a newsletter about designing and publishing on the web, with a heavy emphasis on owning and running a personal website. There’s an archive available of past issues, well worth a peruse.

Every time a new issue drops, I remember that it’s something I want to (re)launch. I open Sublime Text, try and remember what CMS I was playing with, get lost looking at colours and fonts, and then… oh, shiny thing!

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Prevent iPhone auto adjusting web font sizes

This post was imported as part of the reclamation project. Links may be broken, content will be very old and likely no longer relevant.

When viewing websites on the iPhone it will auto adjust font sizes at will to improve readability - this can be especially useful when switching from landscape to portrait, for example.

However, on certain web layouts this can cause problems and may result in an undesired layout.

To prevent this, simply add the following to any element in your CSS:

-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;

Safari will now no longer auto adjust the font size.

Apple TV + UK Netflix + Router + US VPN = US Netflix

This post was imported as part of the reclamation project. Links may be broken, content will be very old and likely no longer relevant.

This was one of the few things I’ve ever posted that went semi-viral. It was linked from a couple of very popular answers on Stack Exchange sites and gained some traffic at the time. Largely useless now (though the principle is still good), and the links are mostly broken, just retained for posterity.

So for the last few days I’ve been fiddling with my Apple TV, routers and VPN accounts to see if I could get access to US Netflix programmes on my TV. A few folk have asked, so I thought I’d share my setup.

This is not a detailed configuration step-by-step, it’s a general overview of the solution I ended up with. Detailed support for each part of this process is available from your VPN and/or firmware supplier.

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What if your hard drive died?

This post was imported as part of the reclamation project. Links may be broken, content will be very old and likely no longer relevant.

A couple of weeks ago Chris Coyier tweeted the following: “You could wake up tomorrow and your main hard drive could be dead. Are you ready?”. This got me thinking; if I woke up tomorrow and my main hard drive was dead, what would I lose?

As it happens, after giving it some thought, I think I’m pretty much as safe as I can be, and I don’t even take any backups. Unintentionally, I’ve got myself into the situation where I’m working almost exclusively from “the cloud” with almost zero reliance on local data… and I figured I’d share my set up.

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Microsoft to introduce auto-updates for IE

This post was imported as part of the reclamation project. Links may be broken, content will be very old and likely no longer relevant.

So Microsoft has announced that it’s going to start auto-updating Internet Explorer on PCs to the latest version supported by the Operating System. On the face of it this seems like great news, and it would be, if they had the balls to do it right.

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