Inscribed

Putting the AI into Malaise

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Conversations are converging.

This week, repeated discussions – always interesting ones – circling around AI use across different sectors, but with many overlapping themes. Happy to admit I’m more intrigued by it all from this viewpoint, rather than simply a technical one. Helicopter views. The effect of innovation on psyche, team morale, social cohesion, democracy,.

And on economics, of course. This morning, another chat on the train raising the difficulties of finding part-time work, or your first job. A less often surfaced topic, one you have to listen out carefully for instead of the brash ubiquity of AI.

The two strands are obviously related, but I’m not convinced it’s as simple as saying “AI is replacing jobs”. This may be true to an extent, in certain clusters, but there is a wider shift here, about People and Power, about the need for humans as capital and as resource. About our entire narrative of skills, careers, working identity, and literally How We Find Value For Ourselves.

I’ve learnt one thing about humans, it’s that they’re quite happy to let things go to shit. If there is a form of distributed depression floating around – what may be described as a malaise (or, in my mind, a lack of joie de vivre) – then this needs to be called out, identified keenly, and rallied against. We need to talk about it more, set it as the context for other discussions, just as we should with climate change and war and politics.

Now does not feel like the time to gloss over things.

fragments 2026-03-05

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Retrogames collecting. Is it less about preserving civilisation’s past, and more about just being sure that your own history did actually exist and wasn’t just some fevered dream?

Like “yes, that crazy bit of my childhood did really happen, I have proof of my memories.”

Listen to the sound of the quietest breath. Beneath the noise of everyday life, hidden under the hummings and the chaos and the distraction.

Everything is contained within the universe, within the tao. You cannot escape it. You can only perceived it, understanding that perception is enough. And in doing so, return to it.

Realising I need to relabel myself this week, professionally-speaking. 2026 has started with me taking on more responsibilities than just, effectively, web dev and sysadmin – titles such as “project manager”, “senior tech” and even “product manager” have all been floating around in my head.

Not as official titles, of course – one of the joys of being self-employed is that the bureaucracy of these things remains largely absent. But as a means of thinking about what I’m being asked to do, where I fit in, and what skills and experience I need to bring, titles are a useful tool.

I know nothing about being a stonemason, but I keep imagining the delicateness of the job at the moment. Feels like I’m chipping away at a lot of things – big things, some would say epic things. Things like Wind Waker on the GameCube, Tom’s Crossing at bedtime, and codebase refactors across several fronts.

I’m not used to these longer stretches. I’ve always enjoyed small, fast things I can feel good about. But among the chips, I’m finding a solace in the notion of progress, and a casual form of it at that. From the open sea, to the (clop-clop-)clip-clop of horses, there can be a gentle joy in the journey that’s missing from many other places.

Don’t know how that comes across in RSS feeds. There should be an audio around here somewhere.

pilgrimage

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

eye tests

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

nostalgia

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Things I’m Playing: Cryptmaster

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Cryptmaster by Paul Hart and Lee Williams

Year: 2024
Platforms: Lots! Played via Steam (on Steamdeck – don’t forget a keyboard though)
Usual price: £20.99 (Steam) but possibly on offer at Epic and GOG
Saves: Manually, and at altars. Death resets to last save.

Skulls. You can’t but help be fascinated by them. Such natural objects, and the item se have that remains attached to our own sense of perception. And yet so taboo, so invisible – to see one is to be reminded that we will all eventually be nothing but bones.

So when fresh life gets breathed into old skeletons, we tend to be innately intrigued. The black/white simplicity of life and death is thrown into confusion. Should we be fearful, or hopeful?

Cryptmaster toys with our basic human dichotomies like this in a delightful way. Apart from the old tale of death itself rising up against life, this is a game that keeps you off balance by uniting silliness with solemnity, and 2D art with a 3D world. Starting from the lowest layers of the dungeony depths, you rise up gradually (in terms of height, as well as stature), only to simultaneously gain greater understanding of the game itself.

What is this game then? Starting out, it might be described as a typing-based, dungeon exploring, word-led RPG. Something in between Typing of the Dead, Eye of the Beholder, and a text adventure. Taking on the roles of a band of four undead warriors, the core loop involves investigating each level, fighting enemies using actual typed words to attack and defend, and carrying out small tasks to progress. Kind of straightforward.

The game’s love of language quickly shows through, though. Most actions require (whats) to use, which can be gained by defeating enemies, finding bugs and fish, and various other jollies. Actions and memories for each character are unlocked by gaining letters and guessing words. Potions require letters as ingredients, while bonus riddles and puzzles lurk around every corner.

So it was always going to appeal to me, as a lover of dictionaries, crosswords and word games generally. But from there, three things set Cryptmaster apart for me.

One is the art style, of course. Both crisp and sketchy at the same time, it’s always a joy to wander round the dark nether regions to encounter the strangely wonderful inhabitants that reign over each stage. An attention to sound design dovetails perfectly, to give everything a modern, old school feel.

Second is the writing and the characterisation, which is kind of the glue for the whole game. A range of amusing accents spill out their lines in a way that I couldn’t skip and had to listen to. Half of the world-building is just in this plethora of delivery, and the cheekiness of it all invites you to be cheeky in return, when the right prompts appear.

Third is the subgame, Whatever. I mean, it’s called “Whatever”. Apparently thrown in as a semi-after-thought by the developers, this was expanded out in later releases (but before I arrived). The basic rules are simple: select two from your Scrabble-like row of random letters, do damage according to how many times they appear on the character cards in front of you, and trigger side effects if you fill in all the letters on a card. There’s enough synchronicity to make deckbuilding interesting enough, but you’re still largely dependent on luck in the heat of the moment. But it’s fast, and always compelling to try one more go if your luck is bad. I probably spent at least a third of my playtime trying to beat the Whatever challenges if I’m honest.

I spent a lot of time with Cryptmaster (for me, at least) and enjoyed it all. There are some pretty obscure puzzles in there for the dedicated that I’m aiming to go back too as well. I just need to make sure I don’t get distracted by those damn Whatever cards on the way.

stoicism in th’ face of th’onslaughts

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

fragments 2026-01-26

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Remnants of Yule sit around like dead birds – Christmas specials on catch-up telly, bags filled with discarded wrapping paper, forgotten tinsel strands, unglamorous presents waiting for their charity shop destinies. A collective subconscious pretends none of it happened – or that all of it was true, but belongs to another culture.

Good grief, the modern Outlook UI is just … I don’t have words. I can’t find the words. The words are all lost and scattered among the myriad interface elements. The words have been incapacitated by millennia of corrupted design decisions and the cluttering of a hundred thousand brains all crying out at once.

Even writing is a dark art these days.

One of the things I’ve found hardest – that’s snuck up on me – about working across four timezones, from UTC+8 to UTC-5, is switching off. Not helped, probably, by not having set working hours in general in my life. Haven’t got the structure set or visible, and it’s not helped by being unable to set timezones properly in MS Office.

So I’m a bit more burnt out than I think I am, because this is new to me. Sure, I’ve had meetings with Australia in the morning and the US evening the same day before, but not with work ongoing around it all, not as one connected strand.

Which is funny. Back after Christmas I was thinking I should set more structure around my day planning. Maybe this is the universe forcing it on me.

If at least 5 fragments in folder
Get 5 oldest fragments sorted by time
Remove start/end blank lines
Concatenate into one file, divided by rules
Email content to me
Move fragments into “processed” folder with date

Xiu Xiu are releasing a covers album and holy shit Dancing On My Own because-Robyn-has-become-a-ghost shiversssss.

fragments 2026-01-20

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Thinking I should catch up with Biffy Clyro albums after catching up with Biffy on the latest Jools series. Starting back at the start and Joy.Discovery.Invention is such a killer start.

The new laptop is working out well – I had some troubles trying to restore a “full” backup from my old machine, and then realised there were some root-owned files that hadn’t been backed up anyway, so ended up buying a new SSD drive and using rsync to transfer everything. Rsync is my tool of 2025, and probably 2026.

Issues with transferring to a new device have been pretty minimal:

An issue with the keyboard not kicking back in properly after wake-up was fixed with a quick email to Juno support, and an apt upgrade.
An issue with the Windows key not working was fixed with an email to support, and me pressing Fn-F2 to unlock it. No idea what that function key is supposed to be for.
Flywheel Local sites seem slightly borked, but this might be the version of Local I’m running. Some internet searching helped anyway.

Other than that, I’m slowly reinstalling software needed, making sure to use the same source where possible (apt / flatpak / snap) to make sure the same config files get re-used. Smooth.

New shoes, bright and rigid. As the wind bellows down, their fresh, dark treads bite against the spotty pavement and I feel strong in my core. Remembering my tai chi; direction comes from above the head, hanging like a jellyfish. Action is propelled from beneath the earth, a volcano erupting into the body.

One day I will write about Autumn, but January is a busy month. I find myself project managing across timezones, and while I’ve worked with Australian and American clients in one day before, I’ve not had to coordinate across 4 timezones concurrently, on a deadline of just a few weeks.

I’m focusing a lot, sprawled out among a chaos of documents, systems, and unknowns. It’s going ok. I think. We’ll find out in a few days, but for now, it’s strangely exhilarating to be using less technical skills that I haven’t employed in a few years.

I’m nearing the final volume of Jason Aaron’s Scalped series of graphic novels. The writing is so good – I read the first two years ago and so very nearly gave them away, but instead opted to ship the whole series in from the US. Everything is dangerous, gritty, yet also sympathetic. There are devils everywhere, but the true devil – colonialism and exploitation – lurks outside of the books’ covers, bleeding into the same themes driving the news still.

Migration also seems to be a theme across other media recently. I watched Godland on iPlayer in December, a sallow-paced landscape of a film about a Danish missionary priest finding himself in the wilds.of Iceland. It is at a reserved film, yet the drawn-out, underspoken scenes let their patience do the storytelling.

In that sense, it is similar to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, another film that deals with man being in places uninvited. Having watched it last year, I went back to the source and read Roadside Picnic. I was glad it was quite, quite different to the film – like two parallel tales running alongside each other. Like a lot of good sci-fi (The Left Hand of Darkness, Do.Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and so on) it can be hard to summarise into whether the story was “good” or “bad”. Their effects sink into your mind during the reading, and you’re never quite sure what future event will provoke a reaction from it that was unrealised at the time.

And to round the circle off, I am enjoying playing ARC raiders a fair bit recently. For a game all about the adrenaline of playing hide-and-seek against giant robots, it can be a strangely relaxing experience where the moments of hectic running and firing and bathed in an ambience of lonely exploration. Breath of the Wild meets Minecraft in an Electric State world, perhaps.

inwards, upwards

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Things I’m Playing: Mundaun

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Mundaun by Hidden Fields

Year: 2021
Platforms: Lots! Played on Steam
Usual price: £15.99 (Steam) but often on offer for less than £5
Saves: Manually at savepoints, and automatically at key points

A couple of hours in, my ears latch on to the correct way to pronounce what I’m playing: mun-day-yun, three sounds rolling downhill, rather than a long dr_au_n out single second half. It strikes me as a twisted-up mountain, with all the right parts there, albeit with a mind of their own.

Indeed, the game says that its characters all “have their own obscure spoken language” – I’d initially assumed it was a swiss-german style thing, but it would seem apt for the words you hear to be unique to this game, fenced off physically and culturally as they are by wooden gates, icy lakes, impassable rivers, and the looming, dark peaks of mount Mundaun itself. (Edit: An old Edge review claims it to be Romansh.)

A single road leads to the start of the adventure. You don’t know what lies around the corner, let alone the maps of the region at this point, yet you instinctively know this is the only way in, the only way out. As you wander around the valley and find relaxing benches to sit on, your journal fills with hand drawn sketches of the topography, just sufficient to get your bearings but never modern or accurate enough to stop thinking.

But by this point it’s clear that it’s not just the maps which are drawn by hand. Either your notebook has bled out into the world, or the world has infested the papers in front of you – everything here comes from the end of a pencil, daubed as it is in corrosive charcoal lines. Once it is everywhere you no longer see it unless you look closely, but the monochrome textures inscribe the Mundaun landscape with more soul than any I’ve seen in a long time – HD, genAI, or IRL. It is clear you are wandering through someone’s fevered dream here, but the dream is everything, all encompassing.

As with all good dreams, it’s hard to relax properly. The horror-noir B-movie bones crunch beneath your feet as you walk, even as the distant horizon sinks below the mists to make you hold your breath. The benches are merely a way to plot out the waiting ghouls. Radio stations let you choose your ambience for a moment, only for the perfectly-crafted soundtrack to put you back on high alert seconds later.

Mundaun is a classic folk-horror adventure – Year Walk meets The Shining (which partially inspired the game, according to Wikipedia – that does a lot of things right – with a gorgeous amount of perception and craft about it. There are changes in momentum that threw me at first – hitting the first stealth section brought a sense of shock that I could have worked through, but instead I scurried over to the discussion forums for a certain amount of courage to persevere.

And here is the sign of a good folk-horror experience, I think – the unnerving sense that gnaws at the edge of the screen should also be an oddly cosy feeling. A glamour of strange wonder that you want to bob around in. Mundaun, with its textural intrigue, did this so well, and perhaps I wasn’t prepared for anything more proactive.

But I persisted and snuck and dashed and drove and tobogganed and forked and drank coffee. And, I can say, it was well worth it.

The past is behind you now

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Ride home til midnight

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Current technical upgrades

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

1. Laptop

Everything seems in flux here at the moment, with tasks spinning up out of the flurry of the leaves dropping down outside.

Among the chaos, I’m learning a lot on client work and pressing on with some upgrades at home.

The biggest change is a new laptop – the current one is from Entroware in 2017, and while it’s been upgraded a few times and is still very usable, it has a few issues which I can’t solve without serious risk and/or downtime. (The screen cable cuts out regularly, and needs a keyboard shortcut to reset, while I have this frustrating beep alarm that goes off around 9am most mornings? I mean, what the hell did I do 5 years ago?)

I’d honestly go back to Entroware, but I feel like their products aren’t coming back into stock any time soon, and their support didn’t respond to a message about it – maybe they’re now a shadow company, which would be a shame. (Thinking about it, maybe I should try to pump them for spare parts while I still can.)

Looking around, I know everyone says this is year of the Linux desktop and all that blah, but I’ve been so happy / comfortable / spoiled by this Entroware laptop (it has always, amazingly, pretty much just worked), and just can’t justify the risk of having to deal with niggling things breaking on a new machine. I looked into the Dell XPS 13, but it seems to rely on Dell repos and still have risks. Framework and Starlabs were also on my list, and while I love a modular design, I couldn’t justify the cost for it, especially when “normal” laptops are so modular and upgradeable already.

So I’m trying out Juno Computers‘ Aurora V2 model, which seems to be a fairy generic laptop with UK support. A Halloween deal helped incentivise me, and offset the upgrade to 32GB and a 2TB drive.

It arrived about a week later via UPS and I now have the fun task of setting it up and migrating everything over (or the other way round). From a quick play, there are a couple of initial minor things, mainly around strange keyboard input, but these should be a good chance to test out their support.

I’ll try to document things as I go – one thing that amazed me in my research was how little information there was about Linux on specific laptops on the web, largely limited to some quick questions about people’s experiences on Reddit, from 5+ years ago. So I’m hoping to be a bit more transparent about my process and experience.

2. Pi PHP

I’ve finally, and quickly, updated PHP on my self-hosting Raspberry Pi, from 7.4 to 8.3. That should give a decent performance boost to sites including this one. I’d done a similar upgrade on a client’s server earlier this week, using Ubuntu instead of Debian. This page was spot on though, and the upgrade took 15 minutes by copying and pasting the handful of Debian commands.

I’m running nginx so had to make sure PHP-FPM was hooked up, but the install took care of everything for me, upgrading the php socket automatically so that all my sites benefitted instantly. I had to install the various extra php modules, so after setting up odrej’s php PPA as per the instructions, my final install was:
/

sudo apt-get install php8.3 \
php8.3-cli \
php8.3-cgi \
php8.3-fpm \
php8.3-curl \
php8.3-gd \
php8.3-dev \
php8.3-mcrypt \
php8.3-mysql \
php8.3-readline \
php8.3-xmlrpc \
php8.3-dom \
php8.3-imagick \
php8.3-mbstring \
php8.3-zip \
php8.3-intl \
php8.3-mysql

That seems to cover all the WordPress warnings.

3. Blog image resizing via syncthing and mogrify

A bottleneck in posting posts at the moment is the size of images. I like to keep images uploaded to the blogs fairly small as it’s only a Pi, and the max upload size is 2MB. My phone camera happily takes 7-8MB photos these days of course, and I’ve either been manually resizing images as needed, or going through a lengthy process to import and export them via Lightroom (for photo essays, for instance).

My new trial process is:

Set up a new syncthing folder called “blog_images”
Copy images from phone to this folder, so they get synced to the laptop
Run a mogrify script to downsize these and store them in a subdirectory:

mogrify -path ~/syncthing/blog_images/converted -resize "1280x1280>" -quality 85 ~/syncthing/blog_images/*.jpg

(It’s a one-liner, but I keep it in my “scripts” directory with all the other little tools, of course.)

Then I can just bulk upload the ones I need and delete them. Simples. Hopefully.

We’ll see how it goes, anyway.

One moment I’m busy

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Trying to walk somewhere but

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

No angles

2026-03-05T11:20:25Z

Small fixes: Steam Deck case kickstand

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Returning to my intent to make daily repairs more visible, here’s a quick fix I’ve been meaning to make for ages.

Ages ago, I broke the kickstand on the protector for my Steam Deck – precarious cables and whisky may have been involved – and I’ve unconvincingly been trying to hold it together with tape since, to little success. The case has a couple of plastic slabs that fit together and slide out to form a set angle, but the tiny pegs holding them together are pretty weak.

The tape was chucked, and I found some black thread lying around instead. After a few tries to get the loops and knots in the right place, the kickstand has now been “sewn” back to the case. I went for a second loop round the case’s body to get the knot in the middle, and help move the thread up and down when closing the kickstand.

Basically working, so far…

Nice simple fix. No real tools, other than scissors, and a helpful extra pair of hands to hold the stand in the desired position while I tied the knot (double reef FTW here).

Intergenerational splits and a sliver of hope

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

FT: UK consumer confidence slumps among over-65s but surges in young (unpaywalled version without the chart below).

This chart sums up so much that could be unpicked in the name of understanding change. Does it reflect a perception of finances shifting towards working classes (where we can now loosely define “working” class as those younger and with less skills and investments, and “owner” class as those with large amounts of finances – pension pots and investments – duly tied to share prices)?

Or does it represent a shift towards a new paradigm of technology, a new wave of incoming skills around innovation, and a fresh appetite for scraping away the old ways and for new lands of labour to be uncovered? (I’m not convinced from anecdotal tales in my own circle, but wage rises in the face of AI can’t be ignored, for those in the right space and sector.) Perhaps lower interest rates are the headline stat feeding into sentiment.

Or does it more ominously represent a perception of the state of the country based on what media you’re likely to consume and inhabit? The article is well worth a read for the analysis of the interplay between political views and levels of pessimism:

“In August, nearly all Reform voters expected the economy to get worse over the year ahead. The proportion declined to 80 per cent for Conservative voters, 58 per cent of liberal Democrats and 37 per cent of Labour voters.“

Each demographic and political bloc is clearly trying to find its own narrative for the state of the UK. The rallying cry of “this country is a joke” threatens to become the national anthem if you follow certain newspaper comment sections, and it’s pretty clear that algorithms create larger and larger echo bubble ecosystems, leading to confirmation bias as a service. All sides love to complain, and misery loves company. We – all of us – seek out the bad to justify our own viewpoint.

To see the confidence diverge in this way is… oddly hopeful. It’s a reminder that there can be some optimism and hope in what lies ahead. I feel firmly in the middle block – a cautious, curious figure trying to make some kind of sense of it all, but reluctant to be too committal one way or the other right now.

(Actually that’s a total lie. I’m fairly pessimistic about the next 5 years.)

But perhaps, sometimes, what we just need is something to change. Change is good, as good as a rest. With change comes opportunity. And if we spend all our time doomscrolling and whinging then, well, those opportunities will fly right past us, to be lost forever.

August monthnotes

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Wow, August was busy – I’m struggling to remember how to relax after a few weeks of holiday, juggling work, various family members visiting, and all the events going on. It’s been a good month, but it’d be nice to find some semi-semblance of routine among the daylight hours again.

The first half of the month was holiday. Fantastic to finally show our boys the heights of the Alps (“wow”) and the sights of Paris. Highlights were:

Getting a cable car up from Les Houches to the ankle-hills by Mont Blanc
Zooming down a small-but-fun luge coaster at Chamonix
Surviving a 15 minute drive round the edge of Paris, including 5 minutes of wrong direction and getting honked at
Going up the Arc de Triomphe and looking down on all the traffic (although oddly not too much – Paris is feeling fresh when it comes to cars)
Seeing and going up the amazing dome of the Galeries Lafayette. Last time I was there it was December and grey and empty, and I accepted a new job from the rooftop. None of that this time.
Pastries, pastries, beer and pastries

The week after that I caught up with some work while the family went to the Eastbourne air show. My folks were over for a few days, and we tried out the new Hail Mary games diner cafe which has a blend of games, arcade machine, and bigger table-top wargaming / roleplaying.

Got a new kitten. This is keeping us a little busier but definitely way easier than a dog. After a few days of everyone veto-ing each other’s name suggestions, we finally carried on a family tradition of basing it on our dinner. So “Scampi” it is. Say hi, Scampi.

Had a few days with son 1, and went to an evening concert with a string quartet and pianist covering Studio Ghibli tunes, set in the wonderful St George’s Church. I didn’t have the set list and couldn’t see the musicians playing, but did enjoy just closing my eyes and listening, and trying to place the films. An interesting exercise in how musical styles really reflect the setting and tone of each film.

Work has been the usual August juggle, but with some good progress. I finished hooking 75 WordPress sites up to Wordfence central and MainWP for a client, meaning we now have a couple of security templates we can apply in seconds, and all the maintenance and update control you’d expect. MainWP doesn’t have quite the control I’d like (such as applying automatic updates to sites with a particular tag), but does do a lot, is self-hosted, and has the option of a lifetime license.

I can continue to tighten up security overall across the sites, want to make processes clearer, and put secondary systems in place that alert us to where systems aren’t hooked up yet (and automate the config as much as possible). It took a few months of grind to get everything in place initially, so it’s nice to get into some of the peripheral and planning work. But yeah, sometimes you just got to do the grunt work, right?

I’ve also been finishing up converting an old Firebase install to the latest version, including switching it over to using Node modules. This has been a great learning project, as my web devops tool chain knowledge took a bit of a back seat when I was focusing on team and company leadership. It’s been slightly odd asking people about things like Browserify, and feeling “old”, but other devs – and a general sense for long term / permacomputing thinking – have kept me sane. I see lots of people go mad and burnout trying to keep up with life, and web tech seems to have been at the forefront. Definite sense of satisfaction catching up on the last 10 years in a couple of days.

A rainbow happened.

✍️ Updates:

Finally wrote up my self-hosting infrastructure
Updated my “now” page

Hacking together a Grid-Aware Backup in an hour

2026-02-03T19:50:03Z

Intro

This is a write-up of an idea that’s been noodling around my head for a few weeks, coming out of a new year’s resolution to get my personal backups sorted out.

If you’re a self-professed techie like me, chances are you have a lot of data “lying around”, including photos, videos, music, and various VMs, docker installs and git histories. You’ve probably looked into various cloud storage schemes over the years, and have various forgotten hard drives lying around in desks.

Mini-weeknotes 2025×12

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Struggling to write weeknotes recently so let’s try a more immediate form without too much reflection. This week:

30k-step walk in Brontë country
17 hour trip back. Travelodge reception, back seat of a truck, new words with an old friend
Delivered summary of carbon footprint work, nice
Various small and emergency tasks
Thermal pasted laptop
Watched The Electric State. Meh.
Playing Hotel Dusk: Room 215 on the DS
Trying out downloading videos up watch offline instead of streaming
Decent badminton

Freelance life is doing well at the moment. I’m pretty busy with a few clients, and a nice mix of tasks small and large, urgent and long-term.

The carbon footprint audit was the first time I’ve managed to sink my teeth into a more organisation-wide map, and I learnt a lot from applying the background knowledge I’ve picked up the last few years.

Really feeling like I’ve found a good space with code refactoring, systems health and sustainability. I’m going to be actively writing up more thoughts on this soon, as well as being open to more projects, but do get in touch in the meantime if you need a hand with refreshing or understanding a codebase, or if energy impacts of technology are on your radar.

Weeknotes 2025×04

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Running around, lacking the time to write something more structured this week. Here are some back-of the-mental-envelope notes from loose memory to keep the streak.

This week I’ve largely been digging into optimising a slowish site and, reader, I have been LOVING it. Index this, rewrite that, chop this, cache that. Summarise logs, chase down charts, Make Things Go Zoom. In theory, at least. Still need to test a few changes in the real world, but there’s an indescribable rush in looking over a software system and knowing it can be Better, and that people will like it when it’s Better.

Which has meant a proper, actual LAMPy “full stack” set of skills, from bash scripting to server management to SQL EXPLAINs to profiling code in WordPress. Hopefully a lot of it will get overhauled in the next few months anyway, and this is valuable familiarisation work too.

Been balancing that with looking after the CIC org reigns and making sure everyone on the team and various partners have what they need, get responses, and feel reassured. An increase in emails to keep on top of, basically.

Another week where I sillily (is that a word?) still didn’t release a funding page for my sketchbook challenge

Weeknotes 2025×03

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

This week has been a real mixed one, it must be said. Various bits of bad news, culminating in the news of David Lynch leaving us overshadowing the Switch 2 launch, if I’m honest. There was worse news from a close friend, and taxes featured heavily. But, determined to stay positive, it’s also been a busy and productive week. What happened?

Last Friday evening saw the news about the WordPress sustainability being disbanded/discarded and Hannah posted a great follow-up along with Chris Adam’s thoughts. I have mixed feelings on the question of whether and how WordPress should organise around sustainability, but right now I’m just a bit sick of the trend towards one bloke making sudden, sweeping decisions in the world that impact a whole bunch of people just trying to do good work.
Another Monday morning strategy and planning check-in with myself – in a field up the road this time, instead of a cosy cafe. More refinement of last week’s thoughts – I converted the rough list into three threads: Creative control, Clarity & Confidence, and Scaling up.I don’t know whether these are “pillars”, “OKRs” or a more general approach to navigation, but they’re useful – and as a single, self-employed person, it’s nice not to have to justify the approach taken. Maybe all these management approaches get that fundamentally wrong – are things like OKRs and North Stars and etc etc just tools for the leader/manager to help them organise their own thoughts? Is the proof in then being able to communicate ideas to others in a human way, not in a way that requires a bunch of background reading and swallowing a pill?

Monday’s office view

I continued taking small, incremental steps along my marketing route by thinking about testimonials a little more. Caroline very kindly shared her feedback form with me and while I could just copy and paste the questions there, I’m thinking about what kind of feedback is right for me, at the moment, and I decided to keep the whole thing small by just focusing on testimonials rather than, you know, actual honest-to-god feedback for now.

Last year’s work with Helpful Digital wrapped up with a last few tweaks to my work on their Social Simulator product. It’s been really good helping the team to modernise aspects of the code and make things (hopefully) more flexible and easier to work with – well worth a look if you’re after social scenarios and comms-team testing and training.

I’m starting some new client work on a WordPress plugin following an audit of the codebase over the last month, which I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into. This week I ended up doing my tax return and some invoicing, which took a bit longer than expected. Combined with some urgent tech support meant that the originally planned work will need to start in earnest next week, but it does feel really good to get the taxes submitted. I might even promise myself to sort this year’s out by May…?

Had a lovely chat with a second-year undergrad looking for advice and a chat about careers in data and tech. Felt like I was being interviewed at times, which was weird and fun, and a chance to reminisce a bit. It’s funny, but also nice that a lot of questions people have at the start of their career still feel like they apply to me now – like anything to do with what skills to learn, how to learn, figuring out the industry and networking, and – most of all – deciding what it is you actually want to do. It’s also really nice to pass some experience on, so I figure I should make more of an effort to do this for the next generation, maybe do some more informal mentoring. If you’re reading this and know anyone that might be interested in chatting about tech careers, do get in touch!

Had a quick chat about a new project proposal, which was a good opportunity to revisit and try out my new approach to breaking down my sustainability consulting offers, which ties back in with that clarity & confidence thing above. Also rewrote a bunch of blurb from a previous proposal which was overly-wordy, and pretty pleased with the change there, which is a lot simpler and more client-focused. Definitely feel like I’m happier talking about the need, impact and appropriateness of energy considerations at the moment.

Misc

Creating:

Wednesday was a bit of a day, so I finished up by chilling out with Pulp’s little music editor to create a tune inspired by the Wii U’s friend list screen. If you don’t feel better after listening to that, there’s no hope left.
Trying to get my head back into the sketchbook challenge I signed up for a few months, ago. Enjoying putting pen to paper, but I still need to set up a sponsorship page, and ask around. Plus there do seem to be a lot of pages left to fill…

A collaborative effort, this one.

Reading:

Not been able to dig into my reading backlog as much this week, but these got a read. The Cory Doctorow interview is definitely worth a look.

Playing:

Badminton, for the first time in months! My legs hurt today, but not as much as I thought they would.
#son2 has got us back into Boomerang Fu on the Switch. Fast and frantic, and now with a slower-paced but still surprisingly exciting Hide and Seek mode.

Watching:

The Traitors, mostly.

Listening:

David Lynch: The Big Dream

Finally, I’m determined to clean up some of my old files, starting with my “random downloads” folder. Sorting and deleting these has been worth it – so easy to forget how … tiring having chaff lying around is. Must. Get. Tidier.

All for now. Enjoy your weekend (especially if you’re heading along to UKGovCamp!)

Weeknotes 2025-02

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

It’s been a while since I wrote any weeknotes, but I’m feeling pretty positive about freelancing at the moment. I don’t know if I’ll keep this up, but I figure it’s still a good practice, even if I tend to be more private around client work these days.

Monday: Back with aplomb

A lot of enthusiasm built up over the holidays, and a itching to crack on with freelancing. No real resolutions this year, just improving my own approach to business. Opted to come into Brighton, and spent a really nice first hour with a coffee and cake, thinking through the Road Ahead. Two basic questions: 1. What would I really like from the year ahead? (A focused list, not a wishlist.) and 2. What are the current challenges?

Keywords emerging were around certainty (about work and pipline), clarity (about what I can offer and how to do things), and focus (coming out of the previous two). 2024 was knackering in various ways, and I decided I don’t need to make that the status quo.

So, 2025 – getting better at being confident, marketing myself and finding clients, aiming bigger, and riding the wave of enthusiasm I’ve been feeling since October.

Spent a little time translating the plans into electronic version, including setting up a “map” to help structure all my thoughts, including work offered, and blog post subjects. Tending to organise into various areas of Software Health (such as code structure, security, carbon footprint etc), and then dividing these up by project lifetime (inception and needs gathering, design, build, maintenance, etc).

Tuesday, Wednesday: Spreadsheets and snow

Largely getting my head back into some work from before Christmas, auditing a somewhat creaky codebase and getting a decently documented overview of the differences between many branches. Part of auditing work is getting familiar with it, and that often means going back over the same code repeatedly, as more and more of the project’s history clicks into place. Archaeology in action. Spent a good session thinking through remedial steps, collating tasks into stages with dependencies, and estimating rough time for each. Bosh. Nice.

There was snow in Brighton on Wednesday. I left early to minimise the risk of not-making-it-home. Sadly Seaford seems to be the least snowy place in all England.

Thursday: Loose ends and soup

Went back to client with a summary of work done, and the clarity and thoroughness look to be paying off.

Also tried to continue some “daily business development” by jotting down a few blog post ideas into the map matrix above. Also finalised and published content changes to the Groundlake website to reflect my divergence from just greentech into software health more generally. 2025 is all about small, incremental, agile changes.

Replied to someone asking about career advice in the ethical data space, was nice to be asked and thinking about whether to offer to mentor more young people going forwards.

Exploded my soup in the microwave, but only a little.

Shared my game console power usage data sheet which garnered some interest, so updated it a little.

The kerfuffle around the WordPress sustainability team being disbanded was a frustrating non-surprise. I’m heavily thinking about coming up with a framework to assess tech stacks based on social factors such as ownership and policy, as well as on the usuals like security status. Good side project for 2025, I think.

Friday: Backups and chores

Had a few life chores to attend to so a disrupted day, productivity-wise. I did some digging into a failing backup for a client, and managed to set up an rclone connection to my pCloud account though, so I can start targeting some local folders for better off-site backups. I’ll need to run some batches overnight to catch up, as uploads tend to max out the home network. Maybe it’s time to consider fibre…?

Misc

Reading:

I’ve been making more of an attempt to read longer articles on my Kindle this year. Recent highlights have been:

Ismael Velasco with follow-on thoughts about grid-responsive compute, which has kicked off a lot of thoughts. Carbon Aware Computing: Next Green Breakthrough or New Greenwashing?
Rewilding Software Engineering: A good enough pathway to reasonable decisions – an interesting different approach to auditing software and data flows based on hooking into systems, rather than a traditional human-led audit.
Chapter 6 of “Ambient Media” by Paul Roquet, which digs into the idea of ambient literature and the therapy industry in Japan – Ambient Literature and the Aesthetics of Calm
Looking into the Metabolist Architecture movement – also in Japan – and thinking about how this relates to ideas of Mycelium network thinking and creation of personal and community healing spaces, in line with Roquet’s writing above.

Playing:

Been really enjoying The Case of the Golden Idol over Christmas, via Waydroid on the SteamDeck and Netflix’s access to the game. Main story done, moving on to the bonus chapters now.
Digging into the backlog by picking out In Other Waters. There’s a nice ambience to it so far, but I got slightly confused, missed a useful bit, and think I’m stuck now so will probably restart it. Seems a shame to have to do so, but I guess I’ll only lose an hour’s worth of play, and it looks intriguing enough to give a second chance.

Phew! Writing stuff down makes me realise how much I’ve done sometimes – that’s a reward in itself. Here’s hoping I carry on next week.

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms?

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms? Some open thoughts to start exploring the topic.

Or, to rephrase that: Is there a civil duty for civilians to design civility into our use of the social internet?

(Being deliberately aware of using the term "civil" extensively here – civility, civilian, civil as a whole. This is to draw attention to the overlap between the terms, and the ambiguity between them. Are civilians always civil? Are civilisations?)

Some fragments:

The accepted narrative is that social media profits from anger and hate, which is largely true, but risks ignoring the wider notion that we humans engage with all extremes of emotions. We remain drawn to content which inspires us, calms us, and makes us laugh as much as we are to what makes us angry. (Perhaps we just remember the negative stuff for longer.)
I started using Twitter in 2007 to keep in touch via SMS, before data was ubiquitous. A friend had moved to France, and it was genuinely exciting being able to text him for free (not 20p a message) by just using "DM" at the start of a text message.
Twitter grew rapidly from a network to an algorithm to a business, but at its heart was the idea of being able to post "interesting things", like spotting a monkey. Similarly, Flickr had its "Interestingness" algorithm which everyone in the photography scene was trying to decipher. It was clear that being connected was less important than being famous from this point. Being favourited was less important than being reposted.
This struggle to be interesting is still where we’re at now, it has become a way of life once we step into the public sphere. But we cannot separate out factually interesting from emotionally interesting content – facts confirm desires and passions are formed from observations. Second, we cannot separate out "good" interesting from "bad" interesting – for every anger-inducing content there is something funny, hopefully, shocking, cute. The dichotomy is not between good and bad, but been being entertained and bored.
So we remain stuck in this vicious loop of wanting to seek out the good stuff, but getting all the while annoyed by the bad stuff, but being unable to step away from any of it. In civil participation terms – a seemingly antiquated term? – this is akin to wandering around our local community and only engaging with the people shouting the loudest, or being the most egregious, the most unruly, the most effervescent. It is to ignore the quiet, the reliable and, very often, the people closest to us.
Local democracy in the UK (and possibly elsehere) is in a precarious place now, with local governance being hollowed out through the twin effects of austerity and the rise of alternative, privately-owned networks. It is much easier to partiicpate in global polls of no value than it is to engage with the complicated and charged landscape of local politics.
Does this represent a giving-up, then? Are we relieved that local decisions, despite not being what we would like, are actually taken out of our hands, for whatever reason?
Or is there an alternative to X as the "global town square"? Has there always been an alternative, just we never got round to giving it any attention? Is there an appetite for doing politics differently at this level – or is it too late? Are we happy with just shouting at each other from long distances.
Distance is a good way to think about it. Of the people that you know, in person, have met face-to-face, how many decisions are shared between you, that you jointly participate in? Can we map domains of influence to domains of contact in this way? Can we make democracy – co-deliberation, meaningful votes, sustainable feedback – something that we implement daily, not just take for granted?
In among all the clamour to make coutries "great" "again", we have lost what it means to be a citizen of that country. What do we expect of each other, of our representatives, of ourselves? And when people fail to meet those expectations, how can we capture that and turn it into something positive?
Instead of grunting and accepting the world as beyond help and beyond change.
How can we design our networks to give us back some faith in others?

Am I just rehashing arguments from 20 years ago? Have I missed anything? Where do we go from here? Drop me a line on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Midweek thoughts on Samhain and Governance

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Saw 2 butterflies cavorting through the air yesterday. Outside now, fireworks pop in the dark, but it’s still not cold. More like early September in old weathers. Ha, “in old weathers”, a new phrase to track progress like “in old money” and “in olden times”. Myths but not memories.

Abundantly mixed energies this week, with the long stretch of a fresh illness finally catching up with me after going out for local drinks on Friday. Bad sleep, usually of my own making, on top of that. And today a pulled shoulder.

But blessings too. A small piece of work has come together nicely, and I have my head round CSS flexbox just that little more tightly, like a comfortable scarf. I dealt with a few last minute unexpecteds quickly and easily, which is often the bit I try to avoid most but also enjoy the most. Further work this week is lined up, after a trip up to London tomorrow for a conference.

I haven’t been to a conference in years, and I’ve ironed off a new shirt and hoping my ill doesn’t get too much in the way of enjoying the day, a day all about Governance. I’m going with my Writing Our Legacy hat on, but this is a field I’m rapidly wanting to get into more, philosophically and practically.

I enjoy governance, I’ve decided – or, more realistically, I’ve come to realise that I enjoy it. Governance comes down to goal-setting, decision-making, transparency and feedback loops, all tucked into a package of collaboration. The word itself doesn’t lend itself to me easily though, but then I realise I’ve been effectively doing governance for over a decade though. Decisions, oversight, correction, collaboration. Got a team? Want it to do well? Governance is where it’s at.

For me, governance ties in with my personal field of software systems. I’ve used the recent point of Samhain to take stock of where I am, and write up fresh thoughts. You can find them on my “now” page.

What is the future of the tech industry TNG?

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

Holy shit, stat of the day comes from this FT article (£) on jobs for graduates vs AI.

The ISE said graduate vacancies at the large employers it surveys had grown 4 per cent in the past year, compared with 6 per cent the previous year. But graduate hiring in the digital and IT sector fell 35 per cent, while in finance and professional services it was down 5 per cent.

Emphasis added because wow. I’m sure some of that isn’t just AI, but also wider tech cycles, but still.

I’m at an age where I think a lot about giving back to future generations, especially as my own kids get closer towards finding a job or a career or whatever you want to call it these days. A conversation the other day pointed out that people are more likely to use AI for menial tasks, which blocks off those in-roads that you’d normally take as a junior, as an intern, etc. This really made me think, especially alongside the push for Universities to have more industry links.

There’s a huge conflict going on here. Do businesses want to train people up, or don’t they? Do they even want human workers, or not – the overall push for AI and ML (oh, and de–unionising) seems to be decisively against this idea. Similarly people are having kids less, and at older ages (the parents, not the kids). But where does that leave us as an intergenerational society?

As we build hyper-automation into our lives, are we thinking about those that come after us as part of our decision-making? As with ecological concerns and resource usage, how many generations to come are we designing for? Or are we just taking what we can, and closing the door behind us?

Continuous Personal Development (or “Things I’ve Been Learning About”)

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed in my work is the opportunity to learn new things. Looking back, I feel slightly spoiled that, in my first job, we jumped between codebases and languages for different projects at a rate that most people would laugh at now – I’d work across Perl, ColdFusion, HTML, Javascript, ActionScript and more, all within a year. In the background I’d be personally playing around with Java, Linux admin, and god-knows-what-came-along.

The joy of technology for me has always been the challenge of … cajoling the systems to produce something of use and of value. Ends before means. It’s a fascination which continues 25 years on, that ever-present love-hate relationship with software and toolchains that accepts that you’re never, really, going to fully understand what’s going on. That you need to think on your feet, figure stuff out fast, absorb the docs almost intuitively, and make good things happen.

The last few months have been fairly technical, and I didn’t want to lose track of the variety of things I’ve been digging into, both for clients and for myself. Here’s a bit of a (definitely incomplete) list of some of the things I’ve been enjoying learning about and applying.

Trying out Nuclei Vulnerability scanner as a way to check for exploits on an old site.
POP chain exploits that use magic methods (such as __wakeup()) in PHP objects to run code.
The difference between CVSS and EPSS scores for assessing security risks.
Docker container setup, to get legacy sites running for development locally, as well as for throwing a new staging server together.
Replacing the inner door seal on a Bosch washer-dryer machine (which is the same as Siemens. The replacement part costs between £40 and… £120?). Labour is always 5 times what you expect.
In-depth TinyMCE hacking, including adding in a lot of custom code to implement drag-and-drop functionality for any files (not just images). And the licence differences between TinyMCE v6 (MIT) and v7 (GPLv2).
Javascript MutationObservers as a way to hang events off any changes to the DOM and styling, including CSS transitions. Related: The transitionend event.
Hooking into the DOM of the GoGoCarto mapping tool to do some in-depth (and probably somewhat fragile) UI changes.
httrack as a way of taking static copies of sites, but also learning that it’s important to pre-generate any images and files required for responsive display, and to copy those into place ahead of time as well. Always a trade-off.
The difference between em and ch units in CSS.
Passing messages between iframes using the postmessage() method, and combining it with scrollIntoView() to move an iframe fully on screen when interacting with it.

OK, these are all the technical things I’ve logged anyway. It’s harder to bullet point the softer skills around freelancing right now, but maybe that’s another post?

3 (years) is the Magic Number

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

I can’t quite believe it’s been three full years since I jumped into a freelance career. Three years feels specifically like a turning point – like something is now established, rather than experimental. It’s still not a lot compared to many others, of course, but there’s definitely some significance. Three as a magic number.

Freelancing will be different for everybody, albeit with a lot of common overlap at the same time, I’ve learned. I’m ridiculously glad I joined up with The Skiff as place to work around other people: I don’t think I’d have survived this long without a small but valuable network of people treading the same road and being so happy to share.

When I took the crazy decision to make the jump, it was in an effort to take more "creative control" over the nature of my work. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure that meant, and while I’m not convinced I do now, I have realised that freelancing, for me, is about finding my place in the world. A modern world which has so much promise, but which also faces some extraordinary risks and challenges.

I’m beginning to more freely admit that I find those challenges overwhelming at times. I’ve got more concerned, not less, about the world my kids and their kids will find themselves in once my generation leaves. Solutions seem like a world away, and billionaires seem quite happy with literally starting new worlds instead of fixing the current one.

It’s hard to boil all that down into something to focus on daily, but I hugely appreciate the chance to work with organisations such as The Restart Project and Helpful Digital to support their efforts. I know Democracy, Ecology and Digital Technology don’t necessarily dovetail together. But that’s where I am, and I’ve no plans to step out of it yet.

I’m also likely to have some availability coming up over the next few months, and will be looking around to see who needs some help. If you’re after someone technical, but with a strong social drive and with an appreciation of what’s appropriate at business-level, then let’s chat.

I’m particularly interested in:

Taking on existing "brownfield" projects to get them into shape (code, but also documentation and process)
Holding projects to account for sustainability, performance, accessibility, etc.
Reviewing the environmental impact and carbon footprints of technology, and identifying improvement plans

Examples of recent work and interests include:

Overhauling a large WordPress-based product to allow much easier modification and flexibility
Website maintenance and migration to greener hosting
Lightweight carbon impact assessment for website visits
Assessment of a 7-year-old tech stack for security and other issues
Usability testing to redesign the flow of a mapping service

A lot of this stuff is hard, without easy answers. I guess that’s why I like it.

Anyway, to celebrate three years (as well as recently getting older AND moving house), I thought I’d treat myself to a new skateboard. I last bought one 20 years ago from Oddballs in Brighton. They’re still there, and purveyor of finest wheeled devices, so I couldn’t resist picking up this beauty.

Who knows where I’ll be in another three or 20 years, but at the end of the day, perhaps it’s all just about making sure we enjoy the ride.

Moving On: Possibly my last ever post here?

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Hi blog. And bye-bye blog?

In some ways I'm shocked that Blogger is still running. I like to think it's the most success Google have ever had with the old "Web 2.0" thing, haha. Here it is, clunking along like a dilapidated banger - it's not pretty but it'll get you where you need to go, and you've had some wild journeys along the way, hey?

But it's a risk. And more importantly, it's BigTech, innit? I always felt like blogging was a personal thing, and - the medium is the message and all that - it just feels a bit weird running personal stuff on a non-personal platform.

So it's time to jump. I've set up a new personal, self-hosted blog here:

https://6days.exmosis.net/

It's going to be more work. It's not going to be as reliable. But it's mine and I love it.

If you're reading this via my aggregated RSS feed, then you may have seen posts from the new site appearing already, in which case just carry on as normal.

Otherwise, you can add the new RSS Feed to your subscriptions and wait for things to pop up - or subscribe to the aggregated feed for updates across all of my network. Updates should also get posted to my Mastodon account automatically too.

It feels strange that I won't be posting here any longer. I hope Blogger does still hang around, like some massive millstone that reflects our technological past back at us.

It's a part of me now.

Reflection is not a quick-win skill

2026-02-16T15:52:50Z

There’s a part of my brain that is very impatient.

Is this a genetic thing, an in-built urge to avoid boredom? Is it due to growing up alongside the internet, as the twin notions of convenience and instant gratification truly kicked in? Or do I increasingly feel the steely fingers of time passing over me, never slowing. It’s hard to say.

So anyway, I naturally want quick results, it seems. Which, paradoxically of course, means it’s harder to see things long term sometimes. "Sustained" action can become an aspiration rather than a practicality.

Which is relevant right now. After reading about the concept of Ikigai and the overlap of purpose, skills, and needs, I woke up excited on Monday morning with a few realisations running through my head. There were directions I knew wanted to point and paths I wanted to tread. Everything seemed clearer than before.

And then, as usual, I muddied it up by writing it down

Games I've been playing

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

The train strike today gives me a rare chance to write something brief, as the bus along the coast wobbles its way along with bonus minutes to spare.

One day I'll return to the work notes blog, but it's been a while since I posted here. I seem to have settled into a bit of a rhythm in general - working during the day most weekdays, and just settling with games or TV in the evening. A lot of the world seems pretty crazy right now, even in this country, but the corner that is my own mind is just ticking along, and sometimes that's not to be grumbled about.

Recently I've been enjoying...

"The Room 2" on the Switch, after playing the first one a year or so ago. It's the kind of slightly-random, mostly-straightforward, escape-room style puzzle game that I enjoy for chilling out, with a good amount of (somewhat arbitrary) atmosphere thrown in.

"Zelda: Wind Waker" on the GameCube. Making bits of progress here but struggling to get the evening energy to have solid playtime here, which is a shame as I've really settled into the gentle, sail-powered cruising involved now. Like, I didn't expect it to be so... *relaxing* for a Zelda game - those moonlit nights when the background music fades and you"re just cruising along chasing a chest? Strange therapy.

"A Resonant Tale" on the Playdate, a very well-formed tribute to the Zelda lineage in general with plenty of puzzles and references, all packed into that tiny e-ink screen that still makes me smile. The yellow of the Playdate feels like it fits with the Zelda theme (ok, ok, in my head at least) and one of the best bits about this one is just the discord community around the game, the pulp development framework, and the device in general.

"Portal 2" and "Half Life" on the Steamdeck. Oh yes, classics. I only realised HL was momentarily free some days after watching the 25th anniversary documentary, but picked it up cheap anyway and spent a long, luxurious evening playing 3-way PvP like it was 1998 again. More of that needed. Before that, Ash and I had fun playing through the 2-player section of P2, which is, as always for Valve, so very well designed. I'm itching to go back and play Black Mesa (the HL remake), HL2, and the single player Portal 2 campaign, but can't decide on what order.

"Mosa Lina" on the Steamdeck. This absolutely needs a mention as one of the best indie "ungames" I've played in a while. Given a random selection of (lo-fi, 2D) levels and a random set of tools (floating bubbles, jumping frogs, anti-grav boxes, bamboo, etc), the challenge is to reach or knock away all the fruit on a level, and then get to the exit. The game is very clear that it's randomness first, feasibility second, and that there's no shame in re-rolling the dice and starting again. But that just makes it all the more satisfying when you do manage to achieve what you were pretty sure is impossible, whether it was by design or not.

Ok, that's me for now. I've had 4 hours sleep and this bus still needs to get across the bridge. Wish me luck.

New slow-energy site: DRPFD, one image at a time.

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Over the last couple of weeks I've been pushing on a project I've wanted to do for a while, and I'm glad to say it's "officially" entering into a Beta phase now.

The site is DRPFD, and its aim is to let me publish photos, but in a slow way, but without me having to check in daily or schedule posts manually. I've increasingly moved towards this kind of (s)low-energy, visual stream approach as a way to avoid burdening people who are already under the weight of so much text and video. The plan, as with its predecessor, is to provide tiny "content breaks" to people in a way that works for them.

(Side note: "Micro-phlogging" is a term that will never and should never catch on.)

DRPFD was originally intended as a replacement for Disposable Evidence, which has largely become useless as TinyLetter wasn't interested in fixing the ability to attach images to e-mails.

Since that inception, the aim has expanded to include:

A way to let me simply send photos by e-mail, from my phone - I don't want the hassle of the whole publishing workflow and site admin to have to post things.
A way to let me queue up posts, but not overwhelm people - one post a day is enough for anybody.
A way to publish to as many different media as possible - email and RSS as a minimum, but it's easy to publish to ActivityPub for Mastodon compatibility as well these days.
Something I can carry on my self-imposed, self-hosting flagellation experiments with.

A lot of my WordPress learning has gone into the site, so it not only includes self-hosted mail-outs, but also Let's Encrypt SSL, asset optimisation, WebP images where supported, cached pages, WebMentions, etc. The tech used is listed on the background page. The site is being hosted on a Raspberry Pi v1 Model B+, which is starring to grind now as it has to put up quite a few of my sites; I want to upgrade it to a model 3 B+ in the next week or two.

Otherwise though, I'm going to give it a run over the weekend to see how it does, even on the older hardware. There's a good chance it will crash and not return until Monday, but I'd love for people to subscribe via whatever means they want, and see what they think.

Other than upgrade the hardware, I'll also probably move the Disposable Evidence mailing list over to it, as well as try to improve performance, and integrate it into the exmosis home page, and my full RSS feed.

If you do start following, then hope you enjoy it, and all comments welcome.

And no, I still can't decide if it should be "DRPFD" or "drpfd".

UK Universities are FUBAR, Infrastructure Thinking is broken

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Most of the professional conversation in the house currently is around the state of Universities, so it's always nice to see the situation being covered in the media too. For a while, it looked like University strikes were deemed as much less important than public sector troubles but, a few months on, the fundamental issues with Higher Education in the country are apparent and readily-identifiable. The current system just isn't sustainable.

An FT article today (£) from a Professor at Oxford Brookes University is short, but sums it up well at the end:

Universities start this term stuck in the worst of both worlds: having to deal with endless regulation and government demands combined with a zero-sum, retail-style struggle for custom. In the longer term, an incoming government will have to take the whole system to pieces and start again. That will not be a choice, but a necessity.

A market-based approach to progressive and innovative learning is struggling alongside all of the other attempts to privatise national infrastructure. A need to return a profit produces a race to cut costs and minimise investment, while the valuable-yet-expensive skills - the knowledge and judgement of people - is consistently undervalued, cut, and replaced by cheaper labour and technology which inevitably results in a vicious circle of reducing the value of the overall system.

I don't see this as a failing of the Higher Education system, or of the Train network, or of the NHS, or anything else undergoing pressure. Sure, they may suffer some levels of inefficiency, and have a huge challenge to simultaneously cope with both pension schemes and technical change. But ultimately, I see this as our own failing to appreciate the role of Infrastructure in the country.

"Infrastructure Thinking" is a separate field in itself, I find, and one which is very much at odds with short-term survivalist thought. It is the same field as that which deals with maintenance, resilience, sustainability, and long-term returns which often, inherently, provide value outside (or on top of, if you're so inclined) of the infrastructure level.

Technology companies "get" the value of infrastructure, which is why they're so huge these days, and quickly battle over any political attempt to control the platforms, or indeed the battles around the platforms. It's just a shame that the rest of us don't seem to see it the same way, and insist on turning Infrastructure on its head, forcing it to be an end product in itself.

Monday hi notes

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Are short catch-up blogs more "interesting" than other content? As I carry on thinking about online vs offline and synchronous vs asynchronous activity, the contrast between "chat" and "updates" is beginning to get wider.

I mean, I love online chat. But I reserve it mostly for specific contexts, such as when I'm at my laptop. Other times, like now, I'd like to know what my friends and contacts are up to a little - not too much though, just that gentle "oh hey how are you? I'm good thanks" routine that maybe mirrors bumping into someone on the street.

I'm good thanks. Kids back at school, been tired and having difficult sleep over the warm weather the last week, but been nice getting back to work and personal projects. Been playing with GoGoCarto mapping software some more, and been setting up a new WordPress blog that I can email photos to, which is nearly ready to go - need to do some styling, and tempted to maybe upgrade the aging Raspberry Pi it runs on, but also proud of what it's doing.

Elsewhere, been enjoying a small firepit in the garden while staring at stars with the wife, testing a new Spidops-ex deck at the nearby Pokémon TCG club with #son1, and playing badminton (real life) and Cat Goes Fishing (game) with #son2.

We've also been trying to clear things out of the house, which meant finding a way to play the DVDs I've picked up in charity shops over the years, which turned into getting a portable DVD player, which also meant working out how to rip DVDs to play via SD card on it. It is obviously easier to just play the DVD directly, but I like the option of saving space, and it's also given me files I can actually play on my homebrewed Wii U. Too much choice going on here, perhaps. I'm not good at doing a simple life.

Reading has mostly been tales about or related to Vampires for some reason.

Got a few creative projects bubbling around, but too many for them all to see the light of day. A playdate game based on Brexit. A card and dice game based on energy supply auctions. A postcard. That kind of thing.

Time for lunch. How are you doing?

RoI hates Simplicity

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Catching up on an (£) FT article about water supplies (or lack of) in England. A few quotes stand out, which go towards reinforcing my view that systemic change (in general) is far more needed than technical change, for a huge amount of the issues we're facing - from environmental to staffing and training and education.

Firstly, on short term value extraction:

Britain is not the only country in Europe to be eyeing its water supplies nervously, but it is the only nation to have sold its water resources — including pipes, reservoirs, boreholes and treatment plants — in England and Wales to private sector owners, now mostly a clutch of sovereign wealth, infrastructure and pension funds.
Those companies — which bought the monopolies with no debt and were handed £1.5bn to make improvements — have borrowed £60bn since 1989. Much of that has been used not for new investment but to pay more than £70bn in dividends to water company owners.

and secondly on the need for large-scale, inefficient solutions:

“The solution is distributed infrastructure,” [Jacob Tompkins, CTO at the Water Retailer Company] says. “We should give everyone a water butt and water-efficient taps and shower heads, but the companies can’t borrow against these assets, so most prefer big water projects.”

Or, in other words, simplicity doesn't pay. Once you start looking for returns on investment, you need projects that amplify that. The idea of a simple and/or sustainable solution is inherently an antithesis to this - anything too easy, or that doesn't require further future massive investment, just doesn't fit the bill (or pay it).

Everyone knows that GDP isn't based on improving quality of life, but on how much you can spend to fix things. It's the same pattern as companies preferring built-in obsolescence for devices, and to capture the repair chain (certified repairers, official parts only, specific tools and software access, etc).

Products and projects need to not only return money in themselves, but also lead on to retaining the need for future work. Anything else - in capitalist terms - is a dead-end path.

Captchas: Who's validating who these days?

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

[Image: Screenshot of a 3-by-3 grid showing options for Captcha
verification, asking the user to select a computer mouse, but with
several confusing images that may or may not be computer mice.]

Graphical Captcha verifications seem to have shifted up a gear recently,
moving on from the old street scenes. Assuming that the work put into
clicking on road signs and markings was used to train self-driving
vehicles, I wonder what the latest round of effort is for.

Yesterday I was looking at aerial shots of buildings and being asked to
identify stadiums - can I reasonably assume that drones (or data from
them) are being trained up? That would have all sorts of applications,
from improving mapping, to delivery efforts, to military natch. The next
iteration of Google Maps could easily be near real-time, if there are
enough "eyes in the sky".

And obviously Amazon will keep pushing for delivery drones - companies
will be looking to get the infrastructure in place to combine both of
these needs, to install a network of floating data capture devices that
fit into the low-level atmosphere (sub flight paths, perhaps only just
visible to the naked eye, in safe zones or corridors at local and
regional level).

The Captcha challenge above shows something slightly different though,
which threw me enough to fail it. The images presented appear to be
*non-objects* - that is, they seem to be AI-generated _potential_
computer mice. Even the reference image is wrong - I've never seen a
mouse with that design, and the cable position is just _strange_. The
wire wouldn't last very long like that, yet it's repeated in one of the
target images.

The two other potential images, down the left side, similarly just
placed into "uncanny valley" territory for me - they don't look like any
mouse I've seen, but that wasn't the question, and at this point the
Captcha becomes something more surreal. The question is "what do I think
a computer mouse MIGHT look like". Would I imagine that the image in the
middle of the left side COULD be a mouse, in some kind of strange
conceptual world? Could I wrap my hand around it and control an
interface with a device? Is it a Burberry special edition of an Apple
Magic Mouse?

(Spoiler: I don't know the answer, as I failed the test.)

Similarly, the bottom-left image shows something _with a cable
attached_. But is it a mouse, or some kind of temperature sensor? A
mind-reading pad? A sex toy? What scale is it? I can't imagine using it
as a mouse as much as I could the one above it, but I've seen weirder.

So what's the point of this Captcha? Is it to train up a
vision-recognition algorithm to improve AI-generated pictures? Is it to
train up automated Captcha-defeating bots? Is it to test the limits of
automated product design?

Or, more sinisterly, is it to just train ME up, and get me used to a
world in which nothing is real any more? To make a point that
ultimately, it is the Captcha algorithm that wins, and that whether you
"succeed" at "the test" is ultimately down to the parameters being set
by the unseen controller?

Shrink wrapped

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Either Amazon's recommendation algorithms have totally jumped the sharks, or they know my inner urges more than I do. Not sure I want to find out either way, though.

Quotes on seeing

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H Meadows & Diana Wright:

"You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system ... But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing."

Seeing Things, Oliver Postage:

"First there was this beauty. Everything I saw was no more than what it was,

...

"All I remember is the pleasure of seeing them. I seemed to have a stillness in my seeing which allowed me to look into people without intruding or disturbing, and then I seemed able to see out again, but through their eyes. It was as if I had no substance. I was a seeing, but my seeing lit them."

Xes, iconography, and alternative approaches to navigating chaos

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Even if Twitter is taking up a bit more feedspace than I'd like, it's throwing up some good conversation.

myrmepropagandist posted a good point yesterday:

"The fediverse has a massive branding problem-- but also a legitimate excuse: it's not easy to do branding in this context.

There isn't any real fediverse logo. Most people call it "Mastodon" -- which simply isn't correct"

followed by:

"Branding is one of the reasons blueSky and the others get mentioned on the news and by content creators while we get ignored despite having a lot of success."

This was my reply to try to dig into this a little, and which probably fed into today's earlier post, which is effectively about branding and summarising my own efforts.

Branding is definitely a statement about sustainability of a product, a stamp of investment (the many failed products and companies are outweighed by the many successful ones).

I don't think the Fediverse can do the same thing, because the return is about ideas and then protocols, rather than an inherently defined/shared service driven by a small number of people.

"Anarchy" is not a brand. "Email" is not a brand. Once you put a brand on something, it becomes a statement of trust. But trust implies that something is stable, controlled. The point of anti-capitalist tech is that it's _not_ controlled. It will never be "mainstream", for that reason.

But to circle back, what should we put our trust in then? And can we "brand" those things separately? Perhaps ActivityPub is one brand, and "Democracy" is another?

I think "Branding" in an anarchist sense becomes more about rallying and connection points, in the same way that hashtags are a statement of togetherness, but tend towards disposability - or rather, an expression of current sentiment.

"Branding" becomes an ongoing process in that way, a constant connecting/disconnecting flow that is the true alternative to one company to rule everything.

...

Posting this reminds me about reading Naomi Klein's No Logo many years ago, and which I suspect would be interesting to read again. Our relationship on logos and status symbols has evolved into a reliance on them, in the same way that we rely on street signs and symbols to navigate a foreign city - we look for pointers that we feel we understand, and use them as orientation for our behaviour.

(I remember being very confused when visiting Japan, by a sign which showed someone throwing rubbish seemingly down a side alley. I had no idea if it was discouraging people from littering, or encouraging them to throw litter in a less visible place. Either way, I took my rubbish home with me.)

Applying this perspective to social services, we can see why social icons are so prevalent on sharing tools, and why companies go to great lengths to protect their icons from the whims of designers. A symbol needs to stand out, to form a chain of recognition in the brains of users who, quite frankly, are a) overwhelmed by an abundance of iconography, and b) are probably too busy to delve further.

Twitter, X, Mastodon, Bluesky etc will all continue to thrash that battle out. Musk will announce the new logo and it will make headlines because of all of this - no matter whether it is a "good" logo or a "bad" logo. The main problem with the temporary one right now is how generic it is. (Can one say the same of the letter X though? Mac OSX, Windows X, XBox, XWindows - all have some prior claim to the "uniqueness" of the letter.)

And more importantly (for me, anyway) where does that leave the idea of icons for those of us trying to escape the capitalist sphere? Can we find/invent alternative methods for navigation that don't rely on the same methods? Can we navigate using different tools, and unpick the reasons why icons are so important in the first place? Can we set up new ways of signposting and locating each other among the chaos, new forms of beacon?

Or do we just enjoy the wandering?

Circumscribed: Exploring the spiritual / religious / philosophical language barrier

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Wondering how to be more open and overt around my philosophical-spiritual practices. In fact, even trying to sum them up is an initial blocker to begin with. Western discourse has grouped a certain set of activities as notionally "religious", "philosophical" or perhaps "esoteric", largely dependent on familiarity and locality, the tools and methods used, and the kind of people involved.

While organised religion in the UK - namely Christianity and Catholicism - has dwindled in the face of rampant capitalism and the need for "productivity", a weakened form of "spirituality" has tried to gain a footing. Yet this is largely still supervised by an economic environment, leading to mass-produced trinkets that act as symbolic hand-holds, and the need for any other guidance and learning to only be trusted if delivered as a "course" or other qualified, paid-for process.

It is ironic that, while we're now sold on the idea of individualism, we still seem unable to absorb ideas for their subjective applicability purely to our own needs. We remain trapped in a digital need to be an ego. "I must be here for myself, because this is what everyone else expects."

So I'm left with trying to summarise even the starting point of what I'm thinking using words which are inherently inadequate, in a world where language is both objective and socially subjective at the same time.

Previously, I've described Eastern philosophies more as "spiritual engineering" rather than either a philosophy (which risks becoming an academic thought exercise) or as a religion (which implies unbending ritual and dogma). When I refer to "the way", I'm referring to ideas which cannot be defined.

As such, the practice cannot be labelled, tagged or branded easily. There is no end goal, no checklist to tick. One can show, but not tell. But would readers be aware enough to not jump to conclusions?

"The practice." "Show the way." Perhaps these are getting somewhere, at least in terms of simple reminders that, actually, maybe I don't need to be so precious with language, and that it is enough to just talk when I want to talk, and stay silent when I want to stay silent.

What does it take to change?

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Do people change? Or more specifically, do I change? Can I change? What prevents or forces such change? Can it happen gradually, or must we go through moments of realisation? A-ha!

As children, we change constantly, because we are so plastic that we're liquid. Or are we? Plenty of children, including myself, remain stubborn, do perhaps the early days are less about change, and more about merely coming into contact with the world, and how it works.

As we grow up, we gain the means to dictate the small part of the universe around us and how we want it to behave. This can become our comfort zone, the house-that-is-a-castle, the land-that-is-an-island. We're told, especially as a newly established middle class, that one we have a successful job/career, we will have enough money to buy what we want. This establishes the net of control in our vicinity - the direction and ownership over our own life until we die.

It is hard to change the outcomes of that setup without challenging this Narrative of Right - right to ownership, to accumulation, to personal space. That narrative is embedded in us just by the ways in which we're brought up. Skills. Responsibility. Success. Acquisition. Control.

What if we were willing to give up that self-narrative though? What if we saw it through alternative eyes - ones which saw all the downsides of such a system, instead of the ups? Control as a lack of resilience. Acquisition as increased maintenance. Success as an addiction. Responsibility as ego. Skills as entrapment.

Would I be able to change then?

After the rain

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Originally posted to last week's rest.notes:

After the rain. The slipshod petals are languidly arranged down the path, leading to the pond where the overdue flood of the water has seeped into the ducklings, swelling their feathers and their bones into a plumper form of maturity. I absorb and appreciate the smell of tarmac as my hayfever twitches sullenly. I seem busy. Everyone seems busy! Have we slept-walked into some new future, a postmodern parody of existence without boundaries and fresh peppers?

Adverse conditions are the new expected unexpected. Familiarity is dead, we killed it. I feel like I know you all, but perhaps everyone reminds me of everybody else these days.

Memories of a Walk [Photo Essay, May 24 2023]

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Last week I was feeling exhausted, so went for a long overdue walk. I'm considering moving this blog over to something self-hosted, so slightly reticent to add too much content in. For now, the full set of photos, along with some random words, can be seen in this photo essay here. Here's the opening para:

"There are days when you just need to get out and away and use your body more than your mind. This was one of them, the urge to explore and to wander had built up for too long, and so in between the writhing thoughts of responsibilities, I packed some snacks and some water, and took the bus down the road.  The land around the Seven Sisters seemed to be at its peak, and the white, giving way to brown and green, was erupting in all the colours of growth, calling out to an onlooker somewhere in the great cosmos."

These undiscovered valleys

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

"It was in these snow-tombed valleys that we identified our new species of flora, a variation of plantlife born from all the possible definitions of what it means to be a seed. The vines emitted bio-electric entropy from their thorns, while the fresh saplings harvested ideas from the earth and converted them directly into competitive advantage. The flowers, hard and beautiful, provided food for entire civilisations.

Satisfied with our findings, we carefully wrote up our field research report, burnt it on a small fire, and disappeared into the caves where the Company would never find us."

Weeklinks 2023-05-26 - tech, numbers, past, futurism, othering and healthcare

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

There is some kind of order here but I couldn't tell you what it is.

We need to examine the beliefs of today’s tech luminaries (£) - how the world’s tech leaders are pushing us towards a sci-fi dis/utopia
Liberalism’s problems are problems of success
A new product by Fairphone: fully repairable headphones (although my 12-year-old bluetooth phones have had their pads replaced twice and are held together by tape)
How Does Degrowth Apply to Our Minds? - with an ongoing discussion on the fediverse here
I don’t have ADHD, but three private clinics say I do - or “what Tories want the NHS to look like”.
From Karnataka to Gurugram: What Gandhi and Ambedkar cannot tell us about contemporary India
A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut
Assembling Community OS - protocols for a more sane internet?
Blade Runner: White Dragon Cut
Astronomers detect largest cosmic explosion ever seen

weeklinks.txt 2023-05-12

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

TECHNOLOGY CAN BE MORE THAN THIS

Cyberpunk Buddhism: Lo tech, Hi life - the fusion of simple tech with an internal sense of spiritualism.
The Critical Engineering Manifesto - or “consider everything beyond the shiny”
Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature
The Quest for Better Online Communities
Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
Examples of Alt Text - Digital Accessibility
User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment

QUESTION SHIT UP

Our Brain Typically Overlooks This Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy - clickbait spoiler: It’s about making things simpler, rather than adding to a solution and making it more complicated.
FT: We should all be asking more questions (£)

GREEN WHITE BLACK

PROGRESS IS A THING NOW

WHAT I DO AND HOW I DO IT

GAMES ARE HERE TO HELP YOU

How to Play | British Go Association
Whoa, someone has ported Celeste to PICO-8 and - yes! - the Playdate

IGNORE THIS SECTION TO STAY SANE

Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count
Wanted: one supertanker to stop environmental disaster in the Red Sea
Reuters Video: Fishing nets melt and merge into Brazilian rocks
Coronation: Met expresses "regret" over arresting six anti-monarchy protesters. Quote: "There's too many elements of the law that are too crude and too broadly defined."
‘Mind-boggling’ methane emissions from Turkmenistan revealed

Book Review: Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi

2025-08-10T15:32:09Z

Playdate handheld console finally, and so I’ve started picking through its first season of games in more depth.

Like other busy fathers, I pre-ordered one when it first came out, it arrived a good few months ago, but has remained on the to-do list while life carried on. The Playdate, developed by Panic games - of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game - is a cute-as-a-B-button little gaming device with a tasty-looking (but unlit) e-ink screen, a “season” of games which get released to you 2-per-week, and notably a small crank on the side for some unique gameplay.

I won’t review the unit or, y’know, the idea itself here, I just wanted to highlight a couple of games from the first season which caught my (limited) attention to start with…

Inventory Hero

This has actually been a perfect game for my mental state lately. Rather than actually do any hacking-and-slashing against the stream of incoming enemies, your goal is to manage and maintain the items being picked up by the computer-controlled hero. With limited slots, your job is basically to jump between the items and choose whether to use/equip them, get rid of them, or leave them for later use.

The challenge is made more interesting by some items which “spread” around your inventory, which need “unwrapping” first, or have other time-based or random elements to them. Working out whether a piece of armour is better than what you have at the moment is a key part of the puzzle. And I still haven’t worked out what the card suits actually do? HMU if you know.

It’s simple enough for me to relax with, but just-complex-enough that I don’t switch off, and the presentation is snappy and polished. It’s one of the few games which doesn’t worry about using the crank, but for that gives it a simplicity that ties in with instinctual gaming UIs that I’ve absorbed over the years - this would have made a great Game Boy game, for example.

Star Sled

Meanwhile, Star Sled is a game which relies heavily on the crank, but throws in some lovely lightweight physics to really round out the gameplay. The basic loop (ahaha) is that you need to capture stars on each level, using the rope trailing behind your spaceship. Each level then adds new challenges and bonuses to spice things up, but otherwise controls are basically steering, and a boost if you need it.

Being set in space, it’s a dark game, and is harder to play in low light, but I love the way the ship moves, and the vector graphics which bring back memories of old-school Asteroids. I genuinely have to stop myself making brake-screeching sounds out loud as I skid round cosmic corners, which has got be a good sign.

More reviews coming soon, I hope. There are some other great titles which I haven’t written about yet, and I luxuriously have some time off, so I’m hoping to delve into some of the more obscure or in-depth offerings if I can.