tomw

tomw, 7 months ago to random

I can't stand how so much of the energy that once went into blogging now goes into closed-platform email 'newsletters' (remarkably similar to blog posts) because they come with a lottery-ticket chance of making some money. Argh, it's so awful.

tomw, 4 months ago to random

Every so often I see programmers having the "Where do kids learn to code? What is the Basic of today?" discussion. There's never a good answer.

(No, Scratch is not a good answer.)

Anyway, I finally figured it out and the reality is pretty good but also kind of terrible. But on balance, I feel OK about it.

The answer is Roblox.

tomw, 9 months ago to random

I spent an hour trying to make my printer work and decided to humour them by doing some of the more ridiculous troubleshooting steps like "Turn your wifi router off and on again".

Anyway yeah that's what fixed it

tomw, 1 year ago to random

One bugbear of mine is when people insist that the English language has one "right answer" on questions of spelling, punctuation and grammar. It doesn't – this is why newspaper style guides exist, for example. Usage also shifts over time.

There are a thousand small debates where either way is perfectly valid and which to choose is a matter of preference. As a former(ish) sub-editor I have strong views on most of them. But I am not going to tell you that you're "wrong", because you're not.

tomw, 11 months ago to random

Do you ever have one of these kinds of days?

*/5 * * * * if curl https://www.example.com 2>&1 | grep -q "Error establishing a database connection" ; then ; reboot ; fi

tomw, 1 year ago to random

How would you respond if someone emailed you "please call me urgently", and then you called them, and it was very much not urgent?

tomw, 9 months ago to random

Pretty sure I have finally learned the word bergochdalbana, just waiting for a chance to use it. #swedish

tomw, 11 months ago to random

Which extinction threat worries you more?

• The real one that scientists have been warning about for decades
• The sci-fi one where some autocompletes somehow become sentinent and no one can find the Off button

tomw, 9 months ago to webdev

So there's no way to specify that <input type="time"> should use 12-hour format with am/pm?

(It always follows locale settings with no override.)

Sigh.

#html

tomw, 9 months ago to random

How to go viral on Mastodon – your options:

1. Say that Mastodon is good

2. Say something about old computers being better than new ones

3. Say an obvious (but contentious within the US) US politics opinion

4. Say that Google/Facebook/etc is up to something

5. Dunk on Twitter/Musk

6. Post a webcomic

7. Scary but difficult-to-read climate graph

8. Star Trek joke

9. Animal photo

10. Say that Gargron is up to something

Additional suggestions welcomed.

tomw, 9 months ago to random

"CW politics" has totally died as a norm here hasn't it? I see endless USpol stuff with no CW.

It's interesting how this was a point of friction back in late 2022 (I never liked it personally) and it's just gradually disappeared.

tomw, 1 year ago to random

All UK addresses can be expressed as:

Name
[Flat No.]
House No.
Postcode

Street and Town/City are not required but are recommended - they help resolve typos and such. But people insist on writing addresses out like this:

Name
[Flat No.] [Building Name]
123 Street Name [or House Name then Street!]
Small District
Larger District
Town/City
County
Postcode

If you don't give them enough fields to do this then they will take a terrible revenge on your data.

tomw, 9 months ago to random

What earthly reason is there for Chrome to break "iframes can access their own cookies" by default and silently, unless you do some stupid incantation?

(I just ran into this, and no I am not trying to do anything evil, it's an anti CSRF cookie.)

tomw, 3 months ago to CSS

Tailwind is terrible but so is BEM and people still take that seriously for some reason.

What they have in common is that they are elaborate ways of avoiding the "cascading" part of #CSS. Both encourage you to write CSS one div at a time.

tomw, 10 months ago to random

Changing Twitter's name and logo gives up, at a stroke, all the awareness from those share/follow buttons that litter the web, and even print media and TV. They will all need to be changed, but most likely half of them will just be dropped instead and the other half will linger with the bird logo like the Google+ icons you still see around occasionally

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Why are all these billionaires racing to space, yet there's zero interest in building a real-life Atlantis?

I mean, if you were that rich, how hard could it even be?

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Spare me from people who think the answer to "Google sucks now" is a paywalled search engine that gets most of its results from Google anyway

tomw, 11 months ago to random

No legs, then?

tomw, 1 month ago to random

You know how people do something slightly embarrassing in the coffee shop (or wherever) and then they say "now I can never go back there"?

I have worked in plenty of customer service jobs and let me reassure you that I never remembered anyone for any reason.

"My usual"? I have no idea who you are, sorry.

"I was just here an hour ago"? Nice for you, I did not retain that information.

"I've been waiting for my food for ages"? Hmm, it is possible that I was bad at this.

tomw, 11 months ago to random

People dunk on regexes but learning them even relatively lightly does sometimes let you solve "this would take all day" problems in a few minutes. On time spent learning vs time saved I feel like I'm solidly ahead at this point.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

I miss the days when the RIAA was public enemy number one and someone was inventing a new peer-to-peer protocol every week

tomw, 3 months ago to random

It bugs me that to get a hairline border in #CSS you have to specify it as 0.5px

(Maybe there's some other unit you can use? Not sure)

tomw, 3 months ago to random

Surprisingly few people remember that the word "podcast" was derived from "iPod"

tomw, 2 months ago to random

I feel like if anyone will know it'll be someone here:

What is this connector?

It's USB at one end and this thing at the other.

tomw, 2 months ago to CSS

OK, which #CSS wise guy made it so that background-size: cover is order-dependent, ie. can't be specified before the main background declaration?