tomw

tomw, 5 hours ago to random

Hey

Imagine you want a symbol to mean "this is bad". But not an X, because it's about an election and an X is ambiguous (it could mean vote for this one).

What is that symbol?

tomw, 1 day ago to random

Once again I have put an apology between the <noscript> tags

Sorry friends, I would have made this work without Javascript, but I didn't have time and at this point, seriously, most websites don't work for you, do they?

(That isn't what I wrote, I just said sorry)

tomw, 1 day ago to random

#ukpol

People are all about fact-checking their information until they see a 'poll' that has their favoured party ahead from Johnny's Polling & Wings Shack. Instant share

tomw, 2 days ago to random

Long story short, don't trust AI with your dog.

tomw, 3 days ago to random

Annoying #opendata #ukpol problem - UK postcodes are included in Code Point Open but Northern Ireland postcodes are excluded for stupid licensing reasons.

Is there any source of NI postcodes mapping them to the new constituency boundaries?

tomw, 13 days ago to random

GPT-4o? What even is this numbering scheme?

I'll wait for GPT-4: Golden.

tomw, 15 days ago to random

When making a speech/Youtube video/whatever, you don't have to say "without further ado". Just leave out all the ado. I don't need any ado.

tomw, 16 days ago to random

Someone needs to invent something worse than screens so that all the people who rabbit on about "screens" being bad will embrace them as "the wholesome alternative to (new bad thing)".

This is basically what has happened with kids' comics at this point.

tomw, 19 days ago to random

I just used jQuery in a new project and you know what, I don't even feel bad. I just needed to hide all the elements with one class and show all the elements with a different class. A one-liner in jQuery and not in anything else!

tomw, 24 days ago to random

ncrs yr typng spd by lvng t ll th vwls

tomw, 24 days ago to random

Every security expert ever: "Do not use incrementing ID numbers"

Every Shopify-based shop: "Thanks for your order # 1201"

tomw, 26 days ago to random

If a few hundred simultaneous requests can bring down your website, don't moan about Mastodon instances for sending them. Fix your website.

This doesn't need to be a big job – for most servers it's a couple of config lines, plus for Wordpress or similar you'll likely need caching.

It will prepare you for the day when you publish something that gets a lot of (genuine) traffic.

This level of traffic is not a "distributed denial of service", it is a "small-to-medium-sized request for service".

tomw, 27 days ago to random

Stop releasing "new web browsers" that are just Chromium.

Stop releasing "new search engines" that are just Bing.

What a colossal waste of time.

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, 1 month ago to random

Does a word processor exist (regular app or web app I suppose) that displays a section outline with 'live' word counts next to each section? Like:

Introduction (434 words)
Chapter 1 (942 words)
etc

This seems so simple but searching turns up a) other people asking the same question and b) bodgy scripts/plugins.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Marketing website: "Wow, Bonkadonk makes collecting payments so easy, even my cat can do it! Now he runs his own fancy collars business. Thanks Bonkadonk."

Emails to customers: "We have just deprecated the C-7 GX Rootytooty trust chain as part of our move to GlobalSecure root chain v4. What does this mean for me? You will need to update..."

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Used to be that you'd ask "what are the kids into?" and the answer would be like, idk, pogs.

Now the answer is "liminal spaces".

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Just saw someone saying they use AI to write Tailwind.

At that point why not just stab yourself in the feet with a spoon instead.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Pop quiz: can you spot the problem in this PHP snippet? I just got tripped up by it and it was very Not Fun. (This is rewritten to be a minimal example.)

if ( $coolness > 10 ) {
define('COOL_MODE', true);
}

if ( COOL_MODE == true) {
echo 'You are cool.';
}

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Why has no one made "Slack but free and simple"? Have I missed it? Every proprietary alternative seems to be a featuritis nightmare (eg. Discord) while the open source ones are too busy fretting about perfect encryption and decentralisation to be simple/friendly.

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, 1 month ago to random

All my emails go something like:

"Yes that's all good. Happy with Wednesday or Thursday.

Tom"

People either appreciate this brevity or find it weird, there's not really an in-between

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Please read my paywalled article about why paywalls are bad for democracy

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Windows people, please understand this. Sometimes people need to run Linux.

They’re allowed to complain about printers not working, or sound issues, or any other hardware compatibility problems, without you saying “use Windows” every time.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Today I realised that I can put a CDN in front of other people's (read-only, public) APIs so that they don't rate limit my stuff.

Is this obvious? Commonly done? Kind of rude? No idea...