Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone’s perspective. That’s what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs.

…

I guess to bring this post to an end… if you don’t have a blog, change that! (especially if I know you IRL, seriously). I wanna hear about you and your life! Start that quirky and personalised website. If you already do, tell me and share! Every one of them is awesome; from digital gardens to byte-based megacities. Fill them with you and share! I can’t wait to start reading :)

Oh, so very much this.

There was a time, a couple of decades and change ago, when almost all of the people I spent time with in my real life blogged. Nowadays, it’s far fewer. Ruth shares interesting bits of tech (plus Thames Path walks!), and I keep an eye out in case Gareth shares more ‘plane-related news or Andy takes a deeper dive into his music… but nowadays the active blogs I follow are, for the most part, people I know online (or, at least, people I knew online first, even if I’ve subsequently met them in person).

That’s not bad. I like meeting people online. And increasingly, the smallweb’s becoming better-interconnected and less-lonely than ever.

Daniel really puts it well:

Blogs allow for a deeper level of thought; not everything is well suited to an in-person chat. We sometimes need time to get our thoughts in order and detailed concepts are often much better understood in writing. It’s honestly a shame that we have confined ourself to short processing times and quick responses. A back and forth can sure be fun, but so can the meticulous; and nothing’s stopping you from chatting over the stuff you’ve written – imagine how insightful that could? Blogging really recaptures that “handwritten letter” spark.

Getting updates from people over text is kinda hard too. While I’ve been abroad, I have missed so many moments in peoples lives (good and bad), of which I usually only hear a summarised fraction. I get it though, asking is hard and responding is even harder; retyping a shortened version of something for the 5th time isn’t much fun. I dream of a time where more of my friends write blogs, a world where I can easily grasp and know the wheres and whats in someone’s life without feeling like I am nagging for details; where the focus is being a friendly part of their lives…

I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!

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You didn’t “have a conversation” with ChatGPT.

It doesn’t “think you should…” It doesn’t think.

It didn’t “tell you that…” It doesn’t speak.

It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.

AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.

…

A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.

LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis, pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.

But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.

It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a fashion, a prediction of what comes next.

As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.

Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive, they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.

But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.

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Unfortunately, the manufacturers of this keyboard decided that it needed a dozen extra functions, and repurposed the F-keys F1 through F12 for these purposes.

It was nice that they gave dedicated keys to volume control/toggling muting – we use those all the time. And there are three other dedicated keys in the top right which we never use… so there was clearly capacity for a little extra. And they still they felt the need to do… this:

I don’t want any of these “special function keys. Occasionally, I suppose, I might need one², but mostly I’d just like F1 through F12 to remain the multi-purpose, context-dependent keys that they have been since they first appeared in 1965.

And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys unless I hold down the special magic button that transforms them into rarely-used single-purpose special function keys.

But here’s where the problem occurs. If the batteries get changed, or if the keyboard gets turned-off for an extended period, or sometimes – seemingly – just randomly… that function-lock gets switched off.

And I’ll grab the keyboard and, to quickly quit Steam Big Picture or a Jellyfin Client or something, I’ll press Alt+F4. Which will send the “sleep” command. And because this computer’s a bit older, it’ll hibernate.

Instead of closing one application, which is what I intended, I now have to wait upwards of a minute for the old box to finish copying all of its RAM into a file, and shutting down, and then booting up again (in response to my repeated and frustrated hammering of the space bar), and then loading everything back into RAM… just to put me back where I started³.

What’s most-frustrating is at F4 is the only key with such a time-consuming and annoying function. If I accidentally paused some music or opened the system settings or did whatever-the-hell the icon on the F6 key is supposed to mean, that wouldn’t be so bad. But man; the three or four times a year that this catches me out are just aggravating enough to piss me off without being quite bad enough for me to do something about it⁴.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

My WASD Code gets it right by resigning the effects of all double-duty keys to minor conveniences only, and making them the secondary functions of the keys to which they’re attached. I use these volume control buttons and they’re fine⁶. 

My Keychron K10 gets it right by having the double-duty keys mirror those of the Mac it attaches to⁷: again, all minor, low-impact functions that are easily and quickly un-done. Also, when you lock it to traditional F-key mode it stays that way, even if it’s disconnected and left unpowered for an extended period.

These keyboards – which are my daily drivers – show that an Fn key can be done right.

Here’s what “doing Fn right” looks like, to me –

1. Where keys do double-duty, it’s a low-impact and quickly reversible operation, so there’s little cognitive load or delay in correcting any mistakes.
2. The default state is the traditional key function, or if that’s not the case, switching mode is easy (doesn’t involve looking up an underdocumented shortcut or installing a proprietary driver).
3. When you switch the default state, it stays switched and doesn’t swap back to factory defaults just because of a loss of power or other arbitrary and unrelated trigger.

Sadly, a great number of keyboards get their Fn key implementations wrong. And I hate them for it.

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When it first appeared, Google Search was a breath of fresh air. Simple, powerful search that Just Worked. It’s little wonder that the phase “to Google” something became synonymous with “to search for” something.

Somewhere,  Google lost its way.¹ Perhaps the latest example of that is the injection of AI into every search²:

Apparently the kids these days don’t “Google it”. At least, not in their colloquialisms: they’re still probably using the search engine.

They say that they’ll “search it up”.

And this presents us with an opportunity:

Let’s reclaim the phrase “to Google”

I was inspired by a blog post by Mr Scribs (itself inspired by a Fediverse conversation), discovered via Bubbles:

We should turn the verb use of googling into an insult.

Example: “That’s so unbelievable it sounds like you googled it.”

I love this, and I’m absolutely going to start using it. “To Google” can absolutely transform from meaning “to search for, using a Web search engine” to meaning:

• to seek knowledge in a lazy and convenient way, without regard for its accuracy
  (“I Googled from a guy at the pub that 5G caused Covid”)
• to acquire information that can’t accurately be sourced or verified
  (“don’t quote me on that, though: I Googled it”)
• to prefer an answer to a question that’s mildly more-convenient for the asker, even if getting it was ethically problematic
  (“pass me the jump leads, I’m going to Google one of the hostages”)

DeGoogling is so… 2010s. Let’s make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb, in a way that better represents what it means to continue to buy in to the ever-increasingly toxic Google Search ecosystem.

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So today I returned to the house to try to disassemble my sit/stand desk. An enormous and heavy thing that was constructed in-situ, it survived the flood without significant damage but is sort of hard-to-move for the purpose of getting it out of the way of the folks who’ll hopefully soon be repairing walls, floors, electrics and the like.

Unfortunately it proved just too difficult to disassemble the beast. I’d anticipated that it would be able to be easily separated into two major pieces – the “top”, and the “frame” – but the guy who built in for me¹ made some creative decisions about the placements of the controllers and the motors which has meant that the two now can’t be separated without taking the whole thing apart into a lot of tiny bits.

I’ll speak to the builders when they come. Maybe a floor can be laid elsewhere in the house and then the desk, which I’ve collapsed as small as its little motors will carry it, can be moved onto the newly-constructed floor so that it’s out of the way here.

So I got started on my other hardware task of the day: attempting to repair Ruth‘s laptop. It’s reporting via LED codes a graphics fault and its screen isn’t coming on, and the most-likely cause it an un-seated signal cable. So I picked up some teeny-tiny screwdrivers (my usual ones all being packed in boxes) and had a go.

But no dice; I’ve reseated the cables and it’s still sad, so I’m guessing it’s an actual issue with the screen. Sigh.

Two for two on hardware failures today. I should go back to writing some software. Fortunately; there’s lots of that that needs my attention too, this weekend!

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Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.

But it didn’t. CI complained that test coverage had dropped. Wait, what? All I did was move some code and add a unit test.

Then I realised that the coverage analysis tool was only counting files that actually contained any tested code. By adding a test to part of a previously-untested file, that file became part of the scored codebase. Uh-oh.

Looked deeper. Turns out the code coverage tool was also counting the test files themselves as being part of the code-under-test.

Fixed all of the above. Code coverage score dropped by about 40%. 😱

Now I’ve got more work to do.

Happy Friday. Check what your coverage tool is inspecting, folks.

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The elder child took me to the cinema to see The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act tonight. I was pleased and impressed that it didn’t take the (ample) opportunities for a trite nor easy way out, instead finishing its arc in a satisfying way that did justice to everything that had come before it. Like its original source material, this wasn’t a story about people escaping or overcoming their antagonist… it was a story about found family and coming to terms with the reality that we’re given, for both its joys and tragedies.

(Unlike the story the inspired it, though, it is of course not completely bleak, and is even hopeful right up to the very end.)

So yeah. Not bad. Was a good crowd to see it with, too. The audible gasp from the entire auditorium at the moment that it becomes apparent that Caine still exists was enjoyable to be part of.

Oh, and in case you haven’t seen any of the bajillion places that have doubtless already leaked the “store exclusive” merch QR qode that appears at the end of the movie, here you go: https://glitchproductions.store/pages/u2fsdgvkx19pzajepvyzbljzzv48kjlz331hmw9mith7fo5l1tzw3vji92nudusk

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Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.

…

Well this is unsurprising and unshocking. Turns out that if you give your chatbot help interface unrestricted access to your backend systems – rather than, say, the access level of the human talking to it – then obviously hackers are going to try to jailbreak it in ways that you can’t possibly predict or guardrails against and, if/when they succeed, they’ll break into all the systems to which you’ve given the system access.

This shouldn’t even have to be said. Meta’s mistake here is so self-evident that they should be embarrassed.

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👋 Hi! If you came here after going to ChangeNames.co.uk, congratulations: you just dodged getting scammed.

To actually change your name for free as a British citizen, without giving your personal information to scammers (or anybody else who doesn’t need it!), I suggest you use FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. Want an alternative? DeedPoll.lgbt is good too!

I help people change their names

As a British citizen, you can change your name for free. That’s the entire premise behind my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, which since 2011 has helped thousands of people change their names¹ for free and without a solicitor.

I aim to run the most-ethical service of its type:

• As noted, it’s completely free and collects no personal information whatsoever.
• It’s funded out of my own pocket so it doesn’t need to depend upon advertising.
• It’s open source so anybody can inspect my code, or run it themselves, or even set up a “competing” copy (so long as they give away the code to that, too)!
• I try to answer every email I receive from anybody who’s having difficulty with the process.²

Scammers will barely help you, but they will steal your data

Others, however, don’t.

I’m not talking about all the paid-for services. Some of them provide a useful service, albeit one that you don’t strictly need to pay for.  I’m not a fan of those that try to market themselves as “official”, though, because that just feels like fraud. No, I’m talking about a level of sliminess that goes well beyond merely charging somebody for something they’re entitled to for free.

Like… let me show you an email I received today:

I tried to visit their website but it looks like they haven’t even bought the domain name they’re advertising, yet. Just for fun, I’ve registered it and set it up as a permanent redirect to this blog post³.

Their TikTok channel exists, but it’s not at the URL they provided. So far, so incompetent.

Both their YouTube and TikTok channels provide a link not to their “website” but to a kit.com page that asks for some personal details with the promise of a deed poll at the end of it.

When you fill in the form – and obviously you shouldn’t do so using real information – you get added to a marketing email list and a handful of other mailing lists get pushed at you.

Kit.com require double-opt-in confirmation for mailing lists, but the email tries to trick you into clicking the button, saying that clicking the “confirm your subscription” button “help us know you have received the deed poll and everything works”. In reality, they’re just trying to legitimise their spamming.

And what do you get out of it after all this? A hyperlink to a publicly-accessible Google Drive folder called “Deed Polls”[sic]⁴ that a more-ethical outlet could have just linked to in the first place. it contains a couple of Word documents that require you to delete a ton of underscores in order to type your own content in.

Oh, the the templates are full of mistakes. Here’s one (there are others!):

Of all the scammy free deeds poll services I’ve seen, ChangeNames is the worst

What we’ve got here is…

1. a marketing scam pretending to be a deeds poll service,
2. being run ineptly, e.g. marketing using a domain name they haven’t yet purchased and providing broken links to their own social media,
3. that are using unethical techniques to harvest personal information,
4. in exchange for a deed poll template that’s riddled with errors. 🤦

But the really insane thing about this whole scam is that a human being found my video about my own (superior, ethical) service FreeDeedPoll.org.uk… and then figured that they’d email me to see if I’d like to pass some traffic to their (inferior, unethical) competitor.

That bit… that’s the bit that blows my mind.

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Today I learned something that is probably already well-known in some circles… but I hadn’t noticed it before and it made me go “wow”:

There’s a really simple algorithm for converting ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes into the emoji representations of the flags of those countries.

I made an interactive to show how it works (enter a two-letter country code!). There’s a longer explanation below:

Here’s the essence of the algorithm:

1. Take the two-letter country code, e.g. FR for France.
2. Get the character code of the uppercase variant of each letter: so F becomes 70 and R becomes 82.¹
3. Add 127,397 to each of them, so now F is 127,467 and R 127,479.
4. Render the unicode characters at those codepoints: F turns into 🇫 and R turns into 🇷.
5. Concatenate those characters and you get the emoji of the flag: 🇫🇷

I’ve often find things that are wonderfully clever about Unicode, but this might be my new favourite.

func countryEmojiFlag(countryCode string) string {
  cc := strings.ToUpper(strings.TrimSpace(countryCode))
  if len(cc) != 2 || cc[0] < 'A' || cc[0] > 'Z' || cc[1] < 'A' || cc[1] > 'Z' {
    return ""
  }
  return string([]rune{rune(cc[0]) + 127397, rune(cc[1]) + 127397})
}

Today was also the day that I discovered that while SU is a reserved 2-letter ISO 3166-1 designation for the Soviet Union, the flag of the USSR is not a registered emoji. But if it were, we can work out what codepoint it’d be at! So I can type this – 🇸🇺 – here, safe in the knowledge that if that emoji comes to exist in the future, then you’ll be able to revisit this blog post and see it!

You know what: there might be a game in these country codes and their flags somewhere. Like: a game where you have to get from one country to another: like, say, from the 🇨🇰 Cook Islands (CK) to 🇧🇯 Benin (BJ). But you’re only allowed to change one letter at a time and you have to land in a real country. I think the fastest route between those two takes three steps, e.g. 🇨🇰 Cook Islands (CK) to 🇹🇰 Tokelau (TK) to 🇹🇯 Tajikstan (TJ) to 🇧🇯 Benin (BJ)… It’s probably a bit easy though: I haven’t yet found any that require more than three moves and most can be done in just two.

It gets a lot harder if you require letters to only be changed to an adjacent letter, but this variant makes some permutations impossible. Maybe there’s an optimisation puzzle in the style of the Travelling Salesman problem? Or maybe by mixing in geographical restrictions such as an inability to visit a certain continent that would make it more challenging and fun? Just brainstorming here…

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But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s still more than half-full”.

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But don’t think I’ve stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day… I still don’t think I “get” it. I’ve even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but… nope. It’s still all gibberish to me!

Think I need the ELI5 version!

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…

Because I have access to wp-config.php, I added the following to my file:

define( 'WP_AI_SUPPORT', false );

…

A useful tip.

Personally, I’ve got what feels like an even-better approach (for me, at least) I switched to ClassicPress a year and a bit ago, and haven’t looked back! It’s a stripped-down fork of WordPress with no Gutenberg, lighter JavaScript, and a handful of other features… plus ClassicPress is already AI-free and staying that way.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use AI with ClassicPress. Just that you’re not having to install the feature if you’re never going to use it. With WordPress’s good plugin architecture it seems strange to me that such divisive features would become part of the core product, but that just seems to be the direction that the project’s been going in for a while now.

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…

Three Rings CIC is, and always has been, a fully-remote organisation. We were doing remote working almost two decades before the Pandemic made it cool (and well before tools like Slack and Zoom were a thing: we cut our remote-first teeth using IRC as our collaboration tool!), but, there are still sometimes occasions when it’s good to have as many people as possible physically in a room.

When, last year, the Nightline Association announced it was closing down, it put one of their key services, Nightline Portal, which helps Nightlines to take and handle calls these days, in serious risk: someone had to host and maintain it, and that had always been the Association. At the point the announcement was made, in February, the Portal team had about four months to find it a new home.

It took me some degree of back-and-forth with the Nightline Association on one side, and it required some careful governance and planning at our end (as well as a few shifts in short-term priorities!), but – helped by the fact we all wanted the best possible outcome for Nightlines – we got an agreement in place, a budget plan agreed, and were able to ensure Portal would keep going, for free faster than I think anyone had expected.

That mattered to Nightlines, because to them, it’s critical infrastructure. And it mattered to us, because Nightlines were where Three Rings began, back in 2002. Today, we support everything from major national charities to tiny community shops, but Nightlines remain close to our heart. Almost all our team – across a wide range of “x decades ago”! – started as Nightline volunteers; we’ve nearly all spent the night awake, quietly waiting out the small hours, in case one of our fellow students needs someone to talk to in a crisis and offering a listening ear when they called. We weren’t going to let that community lose something it relied on.

But adopting Portal meant a lot of work, against the clock. Data validation, new agreements, rebudgeting, and, once that was all done, a full migration to shift Portal from the Nightline Association’s server infrastructure to ours. So to get that done, we organised an in-person meetup, “Portal Camp,” in a reasonably central hotel. Volunteers gave up their weekend, left their homes on Friday evening for two more days of work, and we brought everyone together. We spent Saturday morning planning, carrying out test migrations, preparing comms, and agreed yes – we can go.

…

About a year ago I helped look after the technical side of the “lifeboating” of Portal into Three Rings, right through the point that everything went wrong and my developers almost missed dinner (and, indeed, had to eat at their laptops!). I mentioned at the time my awe and pride of them, but JTA’s post goes deeper and further and hints at the (much bigger) structural and procedural changes that were needed to adopt Portal.

A great thing about volunteering with Three Rings is that we get to ask, on any given day “how can we do the most good?” Not “will this give value to shareholders?” Not “what’s the marketing strategy for this?” Not “can this deliver return on investment?” Those are questions for a very different kind of organisation to us. We get to ask, each and every day, “how can we do the most good?”

That question is why, for me, adopting Portal into the Three Rings family, last year, was a no-brainer. Dozens of voluntary organisations depended upon it, and we had the skills and volunteers and technical infrastructure to stop it from dying.

Anyway: JTA’s post on LinkedIn is better, and more-interesting, and somehow also funnier than mine, so go read that. And if you want to talk volunteering with me, I’d love to chat!

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No surprises here, but it’s interesting/staggering to see quite how large the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.

I enjoy the fact that there’s a real-time ticker on the site so you can watch Amazon (for example) burn five thousand dollars a second.

When I tell people that generative AI, as it’s currently used, is unsustainable, this is what I’m talking about. Unless there’s a quantum leap in AI efficiency (for which I’ve seen no evidence of the feasibility) or a dramatic increase in the charged cost of LLM services (on the order of a tenfold increase assuming the increased cost does not drive any customers away; more if it does), this whole thing looks like a house of cards.

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Today’s random article: Carl Person
Today’s topic: Carl Person

Just sometimes when you’re playing the “hey, Wikipedia, give me a random page” game, you get a hole in one. That’s what happened today when I landed on the article for… Carl Person.

Yes, Person is his actual surname. Speaking as a person with a stupid name, it pleases me to find people whose names probably cause them at least as much trouble as mine does. Wikipedia wasn’t any help at understanding where the surname Person comes from (and Carl himself isn’t even noteworthy enough to appear on the list of “notable people with that surname”, it seems).

However I did enjoy discovering jazz saxophonist Houston Person (which sounds like the beginning of a news headline about somebody from Houston!) who once released an album called… Person to Person! Excellent. Also, actress and filmmaker Marina Person whose documentary about her father, filmmaker Luis Sérgio Person, was titled simply Person. I think the name might be related to Swedish surname Persson – literally, “son of Per” – where Per is a Scandinavian variant of Peter. This probably means that there’s a “Per Person” somewhere in the world, and I want to meet him.

Anyway: back to Carl. He trained as a lawyer and spent the 1960s working in a variety of corporate law firms. These included the one for which Richard Nixon was a partner, during that period after Nixon failed to get elected as Governor of California and announced that he was retiring from politics… only to come back six years later to be elected president and, well, you know the rest.

The interesting bits of Carl’s career came later.

After the American Bar Association endorsed the concept of a paralegal in 1967, Person founded the Paralegal Institute, a name that’s so-polluted with people using it that even the closest-named Wikipedia article seems to be talking about something similar… but different. (This seems to be pretty much par for the course in the American paralegal system, though: did you know that a “certified paralegal” and a “certificated paralegal” are two completely distinct and non-interchangeable things?)

Anyway: other things he did as part of his legal career were –

• Represented other members of The Teenagers (then The Premiers, because confusingly the band changed their name to “The Teenagers” when they got older) in their efforts to reclaim shared copyright of their 1956 hit Why Do Fools Fall in Love from lead singer Frankie Lymon and Gee Records.
• Represented playwright Mark Dunn in his successful claim that The Truman Show was based upon his 1992 play, Frank’s Life, whose script he’d previously attempted to sell to Paramount.
• Helped Ralph Anspach (whose book I read before writing this 2013 blog post!) in his appeal against a ruling that Anspach’s board game Anti-Monopoly was derivative of Parker Brothers‘ stake in Monopoly: the appeal was successful at least in part because Person and Anspach were able to prove that Monopoly was, itself, derived from Lizzie Magie‘s The Landlord’s Game. (Fun fact: this was the second time Carl successfully took on Parker Brothers; the first being the Masterpiece case, representing Christian Thee!)

In 2012 Person put himself forward to be the Libertarian candidate for the presidential election, losing out to Gary Johnson (who had in turn switched sides after he realised he wasn’t going to become the Republican nominee). Gary Johnson eventually got 0.99% of the popular vote, almost breaking the 1% barrier that only 33 third-party candidates have ever achieved in US history.

Not a bad bit of reading for a hole-in-one article.

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Today’s random article: Cirrothauma
Today’s topic: Cirrothauma murrayi

My random landing page today is a genus for which there’s only a single species, so I hopped over to that species’ page.

And what a species!

This is the blind cirrate octopus (cirrothauma murrayi), a species found beneath the oceans all around the world but at such a depth that they’re not well-understood. We’re not even sure whether the specimens we’ve studied represent a single species or two separate species!

The Latin name comes from oceanographer John Murray, best known for his Challenger Expedition from 1872–1876, but whose four month North Atlantic Oceanographic Expedition in 1910 – which he self-funded – was the first to find this unusual species. It was described by Carl Chun, whose previous claim to fame had been the discovery of the (also amazingly alien-looking) vampire squid, seven years earlier.

(The vampire squid is its own amazing thing: did you know that it turns itself inside out to evade predators, exposing the inner surface of its spiked tentacles? Also it can spit glow-in-the-dark mucus to dazzle an attacker.)

You can tell it’s a cirrate octopus by those fins on its head. Cirrates are one of the two major families of octopodes: they’re the ones that do have a pair of mini strands dangling off each sucker on each tentacle, but don’t have an ink sac. They’re also notoriously fragile, and when we’ve pulled them up for research purposes they’re often in poor condition by the time they’re on the surface… and that’s especially true for deep dwellers like the blind cirrate octopus.

As for blind: well – it’s got eyes… but those eyes don’t have lenses. As a result, they’re probably able to tell light from dark but probably can’t make out the particular shapes of objects. (This is a great example, contrary to claims of irreducible complexity in the eye by proponents of “intelligent design” of an eye with only some of the components that seem essential to a fully-functional organ that still provides value for its host!).

Speaking of which – do you know how cool the eyes of an octopus are?

1. Like all cephalopods, they have no blind spot because their retina is in front of the nerve fibres instead of behind them.
2. Like squid and possibly cuttlefish, they can differentiate the polarisation of light. (I believe that sheep and goats can, too!)
3. Their pupils automatically rotate to stay horizontal, no matter which way up they are!

There’s some debate about whether or not octopodes and other cephalopods’ eyes evolved from a shared ancestor or are an example of convergent evolution, and the arguments for both are really interesting.

Of course, our friend the blind cirrate octopus is, umm… mostly blind. Very different from other octopodes.

As I said, we know so little about it! We don’t know what it eats (we think it probably eats whole shellfish). We don’t know how it breeds. We don’t know how commonplace it is or whether its environment is under threat.

But what we do know is that it’s a freaky-looking thing from way down deep. Thanks, Wikipedia, for telling me about this strange beast. Let’s see what you have to share with me tomorrow!

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It turns out there’s a baby bottle warming station on the other side of the bins.

(It is possible they my brain is struggling from a lack of sleep.)

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But I’ve got a NAS sitting at home on a fibre connection, so I figured: I might as well just host something similar here.

Here’s how I did it:

1. DNS

I pointed her domain at my static IP, plus a subdomain for the “backend” interface. Suppose her site would be at example.net (and www.example.net) with the admin interface at admin.example.net: my DNS configuration might look like this:

@     10800 IN     A 172.66.147.243
www   10800 IN CNAME example.net.
admin 10800 IN CNAME example.net.

2. Caddy

I’ve got a Caddy webserver acting as a static server and a reverse proxy already, so I just added a new static site with a configuration like this:

example.net, www.example.net {
  root /volumes/example.net/public
  encode gzip
  templates
  file_server
}

It probably wouldn’t be much harder to set up something like this from scratch on e.g. a Raspberry Pi: Caddy’s fast and easy to get set up.

3. Editor

I used the OpenVSCode Server Docker image to provide a browser-based VSCode interface in which she could edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript and drag-drop files from her local machine. I’m using Unraid on my NAS so I didn’t have to think much about running a new Docker container, but I guess that if I did then I’d have typed something like:

docker run -d \
  # 7890 is the port on my NAS that I'll proxy Caddy to:
  -p 7890:3000
  # /mnt/user/example.net is the path on my NAS;
  # /example.net is where it'll appear within VSCode:
  -v "/mnt/user/example.net:/example.net" \
  # this tells OpenVSCode-Server to mount the directory to begin with:
  -e OPENVSCODE_SERVER_ROOT=/example.net \
  gitpod/openvscode-server

Now all I needed to do was point Caddy at it. For the time being I simply restricted access to only “computers on my local LAN”, but it’d be easy enough to add authentication using basic auth and/or client certificates if she wanted to be able to work on her site from elsewhere:

admin.example.net {
  # Restrict access to 192.168.* LAN:
  @allowed {
    remote_ip 192.168.0.0/16
  }
  # Proxy permitted folks to the container:
  handle @allowed {
    reverse_proxy http://nas:7890
  }
  # Block everybody else:
  handle {
    abort
  }
}

That’s literally all it took to put together a web-based editing environment that publishes directly to a static website. And because it’s on my own infrastructure, it’d be trivially easy to modify it in the future if she decided to go in a different direction, e.g. a PHP site, or continuous deployment from a repo, or static site generation from a shell.

That’s all!

Here’s a test site I threw together using exactly this stack, demonstrating the entirely browser-based editing workflow (not shown is drag-and-drop to upload, but I promise that works too!):

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• Legs two
• Growing up the wall, four
• Seagull in flight, five
• Long-nosed dead man, nineteen
• Pornography, thirty
• Use your tongue, fifty-nine
• Smiling in a blindfold, a hundred and one

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