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As part of my current hydroculture experiments, I am using a lot of PVC piping. And while it can be cut with regular woodworking tooling, it can be a bit brittle and crack or even explodes while cutting small pieces. Using the right blade on any saw makes all the differences.In addition, I need to make a series of stop cuts along a 4 inches pipe. Yes, could be done …

When this blog reached its five-year anniversary in 2018, I wrote a summary of the conclusions it had reached so far, and I vaguely thought at the time that, should it run for another five years, that might be a good time for a pause. Now we’ve reached that point – Ten Minutes Past Deadline is 10 years old this week! – and it does seem to be the moment …

In recent months, there have been increasing attempts to spread malware via some seemingly ‘harmless’ programs, luring the user through rewards such as sending money with cryptocurrency or NFT-themed gifts. The unsuspecting user by running an ‘innocent’ executable to access prizes becomes part of a botnet. In this post, I would like to analyse in some detail the ‘Redline-EDIRA’ malware campaign that has been going on since around the beginning …

Focus outlines (and their styling) have frequently been a point of contention between aesthetics and usability. On the one hand, focus outlines are incredibly important for navigation, particularly by users navigating via keyboard or other non-pointer devices. On the other hand, for certain mouse or touchscreen users they can be unnecessary and detract from the design. Before the :focus-visible CSS pseudo-class was introduced, there was no middle ground to this …

In which I embark on a quixotic quest to make a physical book using web rendering technology.

It's hard to believe that it's been 20 years since I left Australia. It feels like a lifetime ago, yet the memories of that time are still vivid in my mind. When I decided to leave, I was filled with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I had spent my entire life in Australia, and while I loved my home country, I also felt a strong pull to explore the …

LOCATION: Bristol, England WORDS & PICTURES: Andy Thatcher Eastern Bristol is speckled with commons. Go way, way back and this whole area was part of the Kingswood Forest, a royal Anglo Saxon hunting forest. This means that all the little verges, scrappy bits of wasteland and neat greens that I am about to find around the Bristol Ring Road are relics of hard-won ancient rights and custom. The day is …

Sebring-Vanguard was a U.S. company based in Sebring, Florida.

I was not going to write this 4 years of FIRE post but I’ve had a number of requests for it which made me do a little thinking. In the end I thought it might add a little value as it’s no secret that my FIRE journey has been a roller coaster of ups and downs around the personable side of FIRE with the financial side in hindsight actually being …

This post is probably too long, but I need someplace that I can refer to. As is often the case, I am writing this to sort my thoughts, primarily. But I am hoping to give voice to what I am observing in other people in our field but is rarely spoken about. I am not attempting to postulate a solution to a complex problem; instead, I am trying to provide …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, 49 messages, 13 participants (4 whom you've never met?) later, you have not a boolean but instead something rather undefined: "What makes a feature a feature?" "Isn't everything in React a component?" "Where do I …

Orange you glad, Zagato Zele 1000

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I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by expanding Wikipedia, I am in some small way helping the advance of AI and speeding along the arrival of the singularity. After all, Wikipedia has historically been an important training corpus for AI models. But …

As we await the next generation of engineered writing, of tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs), it is worth pondering whether they will ever create truly great and unique prose, rather than the plausible-sounding mimicry they are currently known for. By preprocessing countless words and the statistical relationships between them from million of texts, an LLM creates a multidimensional topology, a complex array of hills …