I quite lke this piece The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Goodier about the weight of expectation your own posessions now put on you. I don't wear a watch. I found this via Matthew Bogart's review of the small e-ink reader the Xteink X4 Pocket eReader which has also had decent reviews in places like Lifehacker although I'll also note that part of the review from the New York Times…
Zola Blog Editor is a desktop and mobile application for posting to your Zola blog when the content is stored in GitHub. On my Android e-ink tablet it looks like this: It uses Tauri to wrap a web applicaton which connects to the GitHub API to retrieve, edit and add content. This means it requires a network connection to work since it is a remote-first tool. It was fully written by Claude Code…
It has taken me many years to recognise that one of the main differences between me and many others in the software development world, and part of what makes me good at software engineering management, is that I don't just look at the piece of work in front of me, but also the one behind that (and beyond that, too). I have previously heard several people in software engineering (and adjacent)…
The traditional Japanese Calendar has 72 seasons in a year, each made up of a handful of days . I have always found these to be a very calming way of reminding myself to look around and observe the changes in nature as the year progresses. I've written a plug-in for the TRMNL device that shows you which of these seasons it currently is. It looks like this: TRMNL plugins can connect to a…
I have a Mecool KM2 Plus Android TV which I have in my garage so I can watch Netflix or whatever whilst riding my bike online . Generally speaking I really like this box. I also have some Samsung Galaxy Buds FE earbuds but if you try and pair them to the Mecool box (via the "Accessories" menu) it doesn't work. This is because of the xcpe settings. If you disable this then the pairing will…
For my sins, I follow lots of people on Medium. For their sins, I never check Medium to see what they're writing. The link below is a bookmarklet which will export the list of people you are following on Medium as an OPML file so that you can import it into your feed reader. Export Medium Following . Just click and drag it to your browser bookmark toolbar, visit your "Following" page from…
Summary: I extracted a load of old blog content from the feeds archived on the Wayback Machine and converted it into markdown files suitable for posting on my blog, and got AI to write all the code for me. The generated code is all here in github . What I wanted to do Years ago I used to work for the University of Bath in the UK. We used to blog in the open about the work we were doing and…
I use a browser extension which always redirect wikipedia articles to their mobile equivalent ( chrome , firefox ). I find this much less cluttered and much more legible but it hides the settings screen behind a burger menu, so I hadn't thought to look for a dark mode until I finally cracked late at night after being blinded one too many times. It turns out that there has in fact been a dark…
I said to someone at work today that there's been an entire generation who has only known media consumption and creation through digital means. This isn't a new observation and also it's not quite true. Colouring books, sellotape, straws. Cutting shapes out of paper. Everyone born in the UK will have done these things as a kid. But in 2025, creating and using music, photography and…
Yikes it's March and I'm only posting January's books now! Gotta go fast! A Fire Upon The Deep - This was great! A 600 page space opera spanning billions of years and thousands of light years which had been on my wishlist for a few years but which got bought for me at Christmas by complete chance. This book contains about 5 ideas each of which could have spawned its own book but…