Renaissance Design

Vendor lock-in is hostile to the Fediverse

Chris — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:25:10 +0000

I’ve just had to part ways with my previous Mastodon server for ethical reasons, so I thought I’d take the chance to write up why and also how. One of the defining features of legacy social media platforms is the reliance on inertia to keep users trapped. All your friends are on Facebook, so you don’t want to leave because you’ll lose touch with them. You’re used to the way the Instagram app…

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YouTube is crap, so I fixed it.

Chris — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:59:31 +0000

Regular readers will know that I’ve been recording Let’s Plays on YouTube for a while. I have a regular series that runs on Fridays, plus on Tuesdays I try out different games to see what people might want to see more of. YouTube has some very basic tools to schedule videos. Videos have a status of Private (only you can see it) Unlisted (only people with the direct link can see it) or Public.

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Fixing SMTP timeout issues

Chris — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:02:57 +0100

I’ve recently been having a problem with my mailserver. I could receive mail fine, but trying to send would frequently time out, whether it was me sending email manually from my mail client or services on the same box as . The fact that the problem was limited to SMTP led me to suspect that might be the culprit. A quick squint at man saslauthd later and I spotted an interesting flag: I…

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DeGoogling adventures: PeerTube

Chris — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 22:18:23 +0100

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I’m quite keen on the idea of getting Big Tech out of my life as much as possible. If you haven’t, well done – we’re only in the first paragraph and you’ve already caught up. I’ll be honest: when I say I want to deGoogle, YouTube wasn’t high on my list of priorities. I only upload gaming videos over there, and that’s not really…

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On digital hygiene

Chris — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:35:31 +0100

This is largely inspired by a post from Neil Brown on why “NSFW” is an outdated term and should be retired. I came to a slightly different conclusion, which I’d like to lay out here. While it’s true that the definition of “work” is different for everyone and what’s safe for one workplace isn’t necessarily safe for another I think there’s a way the term could be rehabilitated into something…

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Let’s talk about backups.

Chris — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 19:11:18 +0100

There are two kinds of people: those who have lost data, and those who will. I’m one of those who have lost data, so I’m going to take a moment to tell you how I go about avoiding that. What’s brought this on, you might ask? Blame Mike. We were just talking about data loss and backups, so I thought I’d turn my pain into a teachable moment. I’m nice like that. Once upon a time I rented a…

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Altnets: the solution to slow broadband?

Chris — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:28:28 +0100

It’s taken a long time for the 21st Century to arrive in Bridgend. You might think that since I work as a web developer and maintain a homelab and a gaming channel on YouTube as a hobby that I’d have a fast Internet connection. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Up until the last week, I was struggling along with a VDSL connection that was, to put it bluntly, pedestrian by mid-2020s…

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Today the Online Safety Act went into full force in the UK

Chris — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 12:30:50 +0100

Websites are being forced to gate content behind age verification to pander to the "won't somebody think of the children" lobby. The legislation makes no distinction between social media giants like Facebook and Instagram and small not-for-profit sites. If a bad actor in your tiny hobby site uses it to direct message porn to a minor, you could face a fine of £18 million for something you could not predict or prevent. Continue reading...

Joe Crawford is not my real dad

Chris — Fri, 23 May 2025 18:54:56 +0100

That’s an inside joke, my parentage isn’t seriously in question. He is however a fella who delights in knocking together fascinating little CSS experiments, like this replication of tractor feed printer paper. He’s also on the fediverse, as all the best people are. If you too delight in doing fun things with CSS, you should probably follow him.

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Poking at my <kbd>

Chris — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:45:47 +0100

I’ve had a really productive day working on the typography for a client’s site, and along the way I found myself giving the much-overlooked element a bit of a spruce-up. Not that the client will likely be using the element much, but the thought struck me I hadn’t really done anything much to style it on this site and I use it a lot. It denotes input into a computer, and I use it every time I’…

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