I made my AI slop public for everyone to ridicule. It’s been quite a car-focussed week with a windscreen replacement on Monday and mechanical work being carried out on Friday. The windscreen was seemingly successful (although it hasn’t rained yet – always the optimist!) but the other work less so. I paid several hundred pounds, and came out with the same issue, cool. The Nixpkgs…
Two news macOS dictation apps to consider this week: Handy and TongueType . Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman There’s only so many times you can read ‘Then I severed a +3 damage with poison debuff while he raised a +1 shield and used his armour of holding to neutralise the attack’ This is exactly why I stopped reading! I think it would make an excellent TV series though, and…
I’m sorry, not sorry, about the rising amount of AI/LLM related posts. You’ll just have to skip them like you do when you see Neovim mentioned 😁 THIRD MAN PRESSING IS NOW OPEN (via Studio Notes #94 ) Jack White built a vinyl pressing plant in his home town. He also seems to have continued the colour scheme he first used for his upholstery business . I think the days of not adding…
Your documentation is still in your Mum’s filing cabinet This is so right on. I always start out with a carefully created hierarchy of folders and yet I still can’t find where to retrieve a document or where to file a new one. I’ve considered installing something like paperless-ngx for this reason. One of the recurring themes in accessibility is that information should never…
Good Tools Are Invisible Once your identity is invested in a tool, admitting its flaws starts to feel like admitting something about yourself. So people don’t just tolerate the flaws—they defend them, and eventually flaunt them. You cannot have an honest conversation about a tool with someone who’s decided the tool is part of their personality. This is why you need to be careful…
“Every network. Fused.” Your phone connects to EE, Three, Vodafone, and O₂ through a single eSIM. It automatically picks the strongest signal wherever you are — so you never lose connection again. If this works, it’s a very good idea, and not stupidly expensive either. If you’re a WhatsApp user you can now reserve your username in the app. Yes, I know Signal exists. You…
Hot, hot, hot, man. Too hot. Uncomfortably hot. Dynamic Ecto Queries and PostgreSQL Query Plans – this is an interesting demonstration of how small code changes can ruin query performance. Well, doesn’t time go fast? Already that time of year where I make my yearly journey to Brighton, complain about the trains, and then reiterate that I don’t really go for the talks. The trains…
LNER eventually agreed, after I sent an email every week since April, to give me my money back . They are also apparently crediting my account as “a gesture of goodwill”. I have yet to receive any credit. I’ve got nothing but time, access to an email account, and a growing sense of exasperation. Mailway — Route mailto links to any email app or webmail – This was almost an…
I might upgrade macOS now they know how to do corners again 😎 I started off the week with food poisoning on Sunday/Monday. Good times. As a result I moped around the house on Monday feeling weak and sorry for myself. This week I fixed a weird text sizing bug with this website using AI. It took a few minutes. This would’ve taken me hours to figure out manually. See this screenshot taken on…
STOP MAKING *ARRS – I could not agree more. This is like active_bobbins in the Ruby on Rails world all over again. EV Stupidity Checklist …when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what they once knew, creating new versions of features that are objectively, obviously worse than the time-tested designs they replace. I was playing…
I had a small Elixir Phoenix app that I wanted to deploy somewhere for testing. I reached for Fly.io because I’ve played around with the service before and found it interesting. Unfortunately Fly don’t offer the cheap good-enough-for-testing self-managed Postgres they used to. They only offer Managed Postgres at Managed Postgres prices now. I decided to give PlanetScale a go. The next…
THE PRESSURE I am jealous of those projects that shipped a horrible bug at some point in the past that made the world burn for a while. They got attention and some of them then got funding and financial muscles to get them staff and hire multiple full time engineers. I sometimes think we would be better off if we also had one of those. I was discussing something similar to this recently. Doing the…
Hot innit. Investigating unauthorized access to GitHub-owned repositories Procrastination in it’s purest form raised it’s head this week as I decided to fix a Game Boy project that’s been sitting on the side, in plain view, for months. It is still not finished. GDS weighs in on the NHS’s decision to retreat from Open Source I made Focaccia, which was going swimmingly until…
I had to see the scale for myself to understand – This video from Alex at KTZ Systems is really thought-provoking. We went to see John Robins talk about his new book, Thirst: Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life , on Sunday evening. You might have guessed it’s about his alcoholism. It was raw and revealing. I drew many parallels between his problems with drinking, and mine, with eating.…
The Idiot from Serial Productions was really enjoyable. Fastmail , my email provider, sent an email saying they are increasing prices. Fair dos, nothing stays the same forever. I’ve paid $50 USD a year for a long time. Now it’s going to increase to 54. Not too bad. We have listened to user requests and will now bill you in GBP rather than US dollars — no more currency conversion fees,…
Saw my first obviously written by AI job posting this week. Also saw a recruiter complaining about AI-written CVs being submitted. Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic’s Claude goes rogue This is easy to be judgemental about, but I can see how this might happen. Don’t try and pretend…
Busy week for me. I started it off with some actual real work. It felt good to be engaging the brain in a slightly more intense way than usual. Turns out I can still do this, sort of. Setting up a Rails app in 2026 can still be somewhat tedious, somehow. But that might just be computers. Haggis Ruby went off without a hitch – credit to the organisers. I think two days was a bit much for me ,…
The daffodils are looking sad and are nearly over, but fear not, the cherry blossom is out 🌸 and we’re blessed to have many cherry trees throughout the city. The wasps …are back. I went up into the loft to start prepping to install a new loft hatch and found that a solitary wasp had started work re-building a nest. I’ve returned the Wasp Nest Extractor 3000 ™ and I’m…
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY. Somehow. iMessage randomly signed me out so I was silently not receiving text messages. No warning, nothing. Cool. The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation Of Entrepreneurs What actually makes money hasn’t changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it’s tedious and…
April? Unacceptable. Such lateness? We went away to Norfolk for a little break over the bank holiday. The location was my idea because I’ve never been over to that side of the country before. It reminded me of Somerset in a lot of ways. We stayed in an Airbnb with a very poor shower, and non-functional radiators. I used a log burner for the first time to varying degrees of success. We…
Broke another tooth eating sweets I don’t even like. Cool. I discovered why I struggle so much to connect to WiFi in my local coffee shop – NextDNS. Shot myself in the foot , it seems. Captive portal’s are essentially man-in-the-middle attacks, so they fail to appear when using NextDNS as it is encrypting DNS requests. Stupid security. This is the problem with fancy networking.…
As you might remember I’ve been having several ZigBee related woes for a while, and this week was no different. This time the investigation was prompted by Zigbee2MQTT spontaneously restarting, or trying to. The container seemed to die and then try and restart by couldn’t, and that would continue for a bit. I suspect this has been happening for a while, but I never noticed because I…
A is back! I drove down to Heathrow on Saturday to collect her and her friend. Thank god that is over. Travelling via Bangladesh ( Dhaka ) and then China ( Kunming and Chengdu ) is not the traditional way to get back to the UK from Sri Lanka, but getting home safely whilst avoiding the Middle East, and seeing some Pandas as part of the process made the journey worthwhile I’m told.…
You’ll be glad to know I’ve had neither the time nor headspace to worry about AI this week. This week has been another shit one. After all hell broke lose in the Middle East last Saturday, A, who was meant to get home from her holiday on Wednesday, became stranded instead. This was very stressful as flights became few and expensive due to the closed air space in the region. The worst…
I discovered that not only is Oban Web now free but it also works with the fairly recent SQLite support. This is cool because for small side projects I’ve been increasingly interested in using SQLite. And having a web interface to jobs is a massive help. Speaking of SQLite. I am increasingly of the opinion that almost all “self-hosted” software should start with SQLite and offer…
You may or may not have noticed that I shipped a pretty big re-organisation of my “web presence” this week. The separate weeknotes website where you would’ve been reading this before is no more. That is now a section on here at elver.me/weeknotes/ . The blog from jordanelver.co.uk has also been consolidated here. Leaving that website as more of a work/calling card kind of thing.…
This week is very AI/LLM heavy for which I apologise. It feels as if it is dominating my life. That’s not even hyperbole. Every conversation I have seems to end up talking about it some how, even with “normal” people who don’t have skin in the game. It’s amazing. It’s awful. It’s happening regardless. This week’s project was to setup SSO (Single…
My DNS problem took a step forward when I realised that I might be able to solve it, again perhaps temporarily, without having to actually setup a proper DNS server – which I seem to be constantly putting off. That fix is NextDNS . NextDNS protects you from all kinds of security threats, blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids — on…
The Mecha Comet looks like a cool little handheld computer which I would never use. Make Ghostty look as much like iTerm as possible Thanks to help from my mate Claude, I now have Ghostty configured to match iTerm with only a tiny difference (that I’ve noticed so far) so I’m moving over to give it a proper try. typr Most Beautiful Typing practice plugin for Neovim with dashboard This…
Remember I was going to try a try a lo-fi approach to using a proper domain on my home network? Well I have now got that working, and with a little sprinkle of DNS-01 ACME challenge I’ve also got legit Let’s Encrypt certificates for all my services, which will just work everywhere (but, at the moment, you know, just on this computer). I chose the simplest option for moving forward with…
Although I now have a slight reluctance to print for fear of something going wrong I decided to go ahead and print a AMS Lite top mount . This is so that you can mount the AMS above the printer, to save space. This is a long print with multiple plates, so I got to test out the automatic filament switching capabilities of the AMS Lite and A1 for the first time as the spool I was using did not have…
Monday came, back to work for many. I too, was glad to be back into my normal routine, for as long as that can last. Hive by Basic Apple Guy – new year, new wallpaper. Not only does it make your computer look nice but it also saves money as setting a new wallpaper feels like getting a new computer. Elon’s Spies by Tortoise Investigates – You know, I think this Elon guy might not…
A thousand apologies to those whose Monday back at work was unbearable without these weeknotes. I am but human. The converter for my Kaweco Brass Sport arrived as did a broader nib and I’m now much happier writing with this pen. Starlink to Shift LEO Ultrafast Broadband Satellites into a Lower Orbit By the end of July 2025 Starlink’s global network had 6 million customers and 110,000…
Christmas again. It was fine. Glad it’s over. So is my credit card. ISS IN REAL TIME A real-time journey onboard the International Space Station This is crazily detailed. Very cool. CAD is not something I’ve ever done with the possible exception of 1 module at College when I was 18 or 19 (although the memory is so vague that I question if it actually happened or not!). However, it has…
Another brief sojourn to Sheffield this week. Good times ✅ When setting up Home Assistant there are two integration choices when it comes to Zigbee connectivity: Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA), which is the “official” integration from the Home Assistant people, or Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) (with the MQTT integration ), which is a third party integration but has supposedly better device support,…
Brick Borrow – This seems like a really good idea? I’ve often thought that I’d like to build some Lego sets, but I don’t know what I’d do with them afterwards. I don’t particularly want a house full of Lego. Because I’m such selfless nice guy I volunteered to take a look at someone’s “slow” laptop running Windows 10. It became clear…
If your blog doesn’t have a feed it is dead to me. That’s a shame because I would like to read your blog. We picked our Christmas tree on Wednesday afternoon and it was delivered Friday evening ready to be decorated, which I cannot be arsed to do. Ho, ho, ho. I added a handy dandy Raycast script command to start 3D cameras . Once I plucked up the courage (pathetic!) to figure out how…
The replacement screen for which I raised a PayPal dispute was received and works, that’s the end of that particular saga. Now that the coin batteries in my home automation devices are starting to run out, and after reading about that impressive project to build a sensor from scratch (which uses a AAA battery) I’m starting to realise that rechargeable AAA batteries may be the way…
My advice, never get sick . Another example of a broken web. Why do you go to IKEA’s website? Is it to read the latest news on the world famous IKEA meatball (that is a real example!)? No, it’s to browse and purchase the products IKEA sell. Which part of the home page loads last on ikea.com? You guessed it, the link to their online store. Absolute madness. Once again, you are welcome . I…
No Game Boy news this week. Waiting on parts. You’re welcome. Would you like to own a muppet? (via Simple Bits ). We had cause to use the NHS this week. The first doctor we saw was fantastic. She was empathetic, and seemed to really care. The system seems wildly inefficient though. The doctor navigated the bureaucracy in order to arrange an ultrasound, which necessitated moving departments,…
My latest trip down South was successful and restorative – LCD Soundsystem were right . My usual anxiety about the journey to and fro once again proved to be incorrect – it was fine, with the exception of the upper back soreness I got from all the driving. I’m looking forward to visiting for the final time this year around Christmas time. Springs and Bounces in Native CSS The…
Google pulls the plug on first and second gen Nest Thermostats Affected devices have been unpaired and removed from the Nest app I have a 3rd Generation model so I guess I’m next. From Helen Lewis: I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia Burr’s words reflect the bland incuriosity that accrues with wealth. As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the…
We went to see The Divine Comedy as planned. They were fantastic and played most of the hits I wanted to hear 👏 Our friends visited as planned and we took the opportunity to take them to Whitby for the day. We hadn’t been there before either. It was very windy and very cold, which did somewhat dampen our experience. Still, it was nice enough and we had fish and chips which is the law when…
The car seems to have developed “a noise” since going to garage. Good times. Never try. My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Writing a terminal emulator from scratch has got to be up there in terms of both large and complex. Impressive. Such is the progress of the LLM landscape, that as soon as I’d finished reading How I’m using coding agents in…
This is probably one for my therapist, but I genuinely screamed at my printer this week. A proper, guttural, scream. You’ve guessed it, it would not print. It wouldn’t print because it was not connected to the network. I couldn’t work out why until the next day when I noticed that my Kindle was also offline. The printer and Kindle would not connect to the network but all the…
I had to reboot my Apple TV remote again , same issue as last time, the volume buttons stopped working. It had a good 832 days to be fair. DataGrip Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use – I remember liking DataGrip when I used a trial a few years ago. Might be worth a look. Coverband A gem to measure production code usage, showing a counter for the number of times each line of code is executed.…
“Where Does Book Data Come from?” – I expected that this question would be fairly involved, and it is. My Virgin Media broadband contract came up for renewal 🙀 I’ve been anticipating this moment since we signed our first contract. Unfortunately, we had little choice. They are the only viable choice choice on our street. Openreach and City Fibre are constantly…
The DHH Problem — Remains as relevant today as when it was first given. More so in fact. I don’t think I was ready to hear this back in 2014. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I didn’t fully grasp the situation. I have a firm grip now. Rust is making baby steps into the git codebase My broken tooth was finally fixed yesterday. I’m £240 down, but happy that it seems to…
Workflow, workflow, workflow – I’ve now moved over to Snacks.picker from Telescope and I’m already 110% more productive, and ready for AI to take my job. My flat went up for sale and not a single viewing so far. I wasn’t expecting it to exactly fly off the shelf, but I was expecting at least one viewing by now. I guess it’s always a waiting game with selling houses…
The Nemotode army and sticky traps are having some effect. Things were said: After my initial excitement over Alien: Earth I think I reluctantly need to admit to myself that it isn’t holding together as I had hoped. I was wrong. Very wrong. Episode 5 is excellent . I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to all involved. Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails When I exit a tmux…