Now I’ve calmed down after my tootstorm, here’s what happened yesterday with Netcraft, Facebook, Digital Ocean, and this blog post.[1] At 4:06pm I received an email from DigitalOcean that said the following: We’ve received a report that there may be phishing material hosted on yo … | Continue reading
Since the last time I posted my homescreen in 2017 the main change is widgets. I still kind of dislike them and wish I could customise them more but it's better than not having them. Top left is Marvis Pro which aside from being a nice music player, also integrates with Last.fm; … | Continue reading
Yesterday Chris imported 470 old posts of his into his website and I was inspired to do the same. The earliest posts I could think of were when I was writing reviews of various iPhone apps for iPhoneWorld.ca in 2009. Sadly the site has been offline a long time so I fired up the i … | Continue reading
Since I last blogged about the App Defaults project the number of blog posts has more than doubled; there are 320 now! A few people have said something along the lines of "It would be cool to see what the most popular apps are" and I told them I'd been working on a way to do it. … | Continue reading
As part of a change to move my blog posts from /slug-of-post to /blog/slug-of-post I needed to set permanent redirects in my Nginx config so the old post links wouldn't 404. Forge has a UI for this but it only allows doing one redirect at a time and I had ~130 to do. So I grabbed … | Continue reading
I tried this recipe on boxing day this year and it was fantastic so we made some more tonight which were, unsurprisingly, also fantastic. You will need: Maris Piper potatoes. 2kg is a reasonable amount for 4-6 people but we ate all those between three of us so do as many as you w … | Continue reading
Just as I started the year writing back and forth with Jason Becker, this month I was part of Kev's PenPals project. This is the conversation we had covering all kinds of topics including Christmas food, weddings, and POSSE. You can see Kev's post about this conversation here. 1s … | Continue reading
Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. Read more about RSS club. I totally forgot about one more project I'd like to get done this year. I want to take my current Eleventy-based site I used for my podcasts and make it usable for anyone to quickly get a podcast up and runnin … | Continue reading
Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. Read more about RSS club. Congratulations on subscribing via RSS, you get these bonus posts. Lucky you. Welcome to the Knight Club[1]. What am I going to post here? Not a clue to be honest but there are things that I want to talk about … | Continue reading
Reading the title you might be thinking "Yeah no shit Robb of course the web[1] is fantastic it's literally the cornerstone of all commerce and communications in the modern world". Or maybe you're not thinking that. But I'm not talking about the web as a whole, I'm talking about … | Continue reading
I recently added automatically generated open graph images to my site using eleventy-plugin-og-image. Here is the open graph image for this post: I won't go over how to use the plugin; the docs on the repo and this blog post explain that very well. What I didn't like is that thes … | Continue reading
I got married and had a child. No time for anything else. Thank you for reading. Writing This year I wrote 60 blog posts including this one which is a big jump compared to last year's 19. My most popular posts[1] for the year are: Please, Expose your RSS - this one hit the front … | Continue reading
Here is the recipe for very easy to make sausage rolls. You'll need: ~450g of sausage meat. I prefer to buy sausages and remove the skin as there's a bigger variety of flavours available without having to add stuff to sausage meat myself A sheet of puff pastry. In the UK at least … | Continue reading
Last week I tooted about my Github-style post graph on my stats page and people seemed to like it. James added one to his blog pages. Pete swore at me. I knew I had to make it into an Eleventy plugin so other people could us it easily. If you just want to jump straight into using … | Continue reading
Threads started to test ActivityPub integration this week and the fediverse is losing it's collective mind going into overdrive to block them in any way possible so they can't grab all your data. Here's the fun part: they can already do that and they definitely don't need Activit … | Continue reading
Inspired by Marco and Kev, here is the current state of my subscriptions. Any prices that were in dollars I've converted to GBP. Anything I pay for yearly I've divided by 12 and marked them as such. Miscellanea I pay for Apple One Premier at £36.95 per month which includes Apple … | Continue reading
Part One Given this an input like this, find the next number in the sequence. See the advent of code instructions for more details, but we need to go from this: 0 3 6 9 12 15 To the following, to get the final value for that row of 18. To do this we take the first two numbers and … | Continue reading
Part One Given this an input like this, find the next number in the sequence. See the advent of code instructions for more details, but we need to go from this: 0 3 6 9 12 15 To the following, to get the final value for that row of 18. To do this we take the first two numbers and … | Continue reading
We've navigating a network today for...reasons. Part One The sample input looks like so: RLAAA = (BBB, CCC)BBB = (DDD, EEE)CCC = (ZZZ, GGG)DDD = (DDD, DDD)EEE = (EEE, EEE)GGG = (GGG, GGG)ZZZ = (ZZZ, ZZZ) The first line is a list of instructions (left or right) and the rest is the … | Continue reading
Time to play some matches of legally-distinct-from-poker-and-easy-to-play-on-a-camel[1] card game. Part One Each hand has five cards and a score: 32T3K 765T55J5 684KK677 28KTJJT 220QQQJA 483 Each hand outranks others based on how many cards of each type it has, starting at five o … | Continue reading
According to Overcast's stats I've saved 424 hours with smart speed. Smart speed, or "trim silence" as other apps call it, is a feature that will remove silences from podcasts and at launch was Overcast’s primary selling point. After the best part of a decade I was convinced by K … | Continue reading
It's boat racing time. For each millisecond you hold the boat down, it's speed will increase by one millimeter per second. Just like the bus in Speed, the boat never slows down. Part One The input format: Time: 7 15 30Distance: 9 40 200 Each column is a race which contains the … | Continue reading
The description for this puzzle was confusing. Like, really confusing. I had to read it at least five times before I even understood the question. Part One For this puzzle the sample input was as follows: seeds: 79 14 55 13seed-to-soil map:50 98 252 50 48soil-to-fertilizer map:0 … | Continue reading
As soon as I saw this one this morning I knew it was going to at least be a bit easier than yesterday. Part One The premise for today was scratchcards with two sets of numbers: winning numbers and numbers you have. The first half is winning numbers, the second is numbers you have … | Continue reading
More regex and string parsing today. Sounds like a party.[1] Part One Given an "engine schematic" like below, identify which numbers are part numbers. That is, they have a symbol (not a . though) either next to, above, or below them including diagonally. 467..114.....*........35. … | Continue reading
More regex and string parsing today. Sounds like a party.[1] Part One Given an "engine schematic" like below, identify which numbers are part numbers. That is, they have a symbol (not a . though) either next to, above, or below them including diagonally. 467..114.....*........35. … | Continue reading
After finally finding time to do today's challenge, I was able to knock it out in about 30 minutes for parts one and two. At the core of both of parts was parsing strings like this: $input = [ 'Game 1: 3 blue, 4 red; 1 red, 2 green, 6 blue; 2 green', 'Game 2: 1 blue, 2 green; 3 … | Continue reading
Until Zoe mentioned it this morning, I didn't know what Advent of Code was [1]. Advent of Code is an "advent calendar of small programming puzzles". So once I knew what it was, I figured I'd give it a go. I'm not sure if I'll make it all month but I'll certainly try. I'm doing it … | Continue reading
Sometimes one idea begets another. In the case of Crossover I had the idea while building DoubleShift but I was too far in to change it. DoubleShift also now has some fun additional features like leaderboards which only make sense for that site. Crossover, unlike DoubleShift, isn … | Continue reading
I have watched Scrubs more times than I can count and I am currently re-watching Grey's Anatomy for the third (maybe fourth?) time. I noticed there are a lot of actors who have appeared in both and it seemed like it was every other episode. After some data-wrangling I have an act … | Continue reading
Now my new site design is done, I've been able to take some time to add features I've wanted for a while. In this case, I want to show popular pages based on pageviews at the end of blog posts, on the search page, and on the 404 page. Fetching Pageviews I use Fathom for analytics … | Continue reading
Recently someone emailed me to ask how I was doing SVGs on my website because they'd looked in the source but it wasn't obvious how it actually rendered the SVG so I figured I would do a proper post about it. Here is their email: I'm looking to steal more ideas from you and foun … | Continue reading
Today, I attended a casual no-official-name hackathon. Just a bunch of people working on silly projects. It did have a theme though: silly interfaces. I spent the first hour before I arrived thinking of a few ideas until I thought of the perfect thing: a Mastodon client but it's … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago when Hemispheric Views 097 released and people started putting up their default app posts Jason said this in the HV Discord: take a hike /now. It's all about /default now I decided to quickly throw a site together to collect all these (at the time eight) blog posts … | Continue reading
In episode 028 of Hemispheric Views Andrew mentioned the Johnny Decimal (JD) system for organising files. I made a note of it as a thing to look into. Then, like a lot of things, I never went back to investigate. Then in episode 096 they had Mr Johnny Decimal himself on to talk a … | Continue reading
Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people's RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don't have a link anywhere to their feed. Even if people only ever … | Continue reading
Inspired by Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the Defaults! and this post by Gabz herein lies all the apps I use in the various categories as written by Andrew: Mail Client Mail.app Score: 1 Mail Server iCloud with custom domain Score: 1 Notes Notes.app, Obsidian Score: 2 ✅ T … | Continue reading
It's September 37th and the Relay for St Jude campaign has closed. They raised $774,262.53, putting Relay at $2.98m lifetime raised! Our St Jude sub-campaign raised $12,590.57 and sent out 106 sticker packs to 15 different countries. This is a far cry from my initial goal of $250 … | Continue reading
It's September 37th and the Relay for St Jude campaign has closed. They raised $774,262.53, putting Relay at $2.98m lifetime raised! Our St Jude sub-campaign raised $12,590.57 and sent out 106 sticker packs to 15 different countries. This is a far cry from my initial goal of $250 … | Continue reading
tl;dr: You can't set full screen artwork without being featured by Apple. In iOS17, the Apple Podcasts app has (for some shows) fancy new full screen artwork but I noticed that my shows don't. After some hunting around, some tooting, and messaging John, I came across this page th … | Continue reading
Late last year I moved Ruminate from Simplecast to it's own site built with Eleventy for a two reasons: I wanted full control over how the site looked Simplecast is $15 a month and that's a lot for a show that makes no money Since then, I've successfully used that same Eleventy s … | Continue reading