Currently reading: Black-Eyed Saint by Dale Lucas 📚
I spent most of the day adding a new section to my site, only for there to be an Azure Static Web Apps outage for deploying to prod 😖
The burrito cravings have come on strong and sudden 🌯
Gross. Using the “New Outlook” that was forced on me, and there’s a sneaky ad at the top of my inbox, designed to look like an email, even though it isn’t. Accidentally clicking it - I didn’t notice the “Ad” box at first, and assumed it was a marketing email - opens a browser window that triggers a uBlock rule. And this is happening to a paying MS365 customer!
I’m very nearly done painting my Sylvaneth, at last. I’m waiting for the bases to dry, then I can finish airbrushing the giant sword and applying the last couple of washes/highlights. 🤞🏻 everything will be finished today.
I had a realisation the other day, that I still don’t know how I feel about: I’ve been continually employed (full or part-time) since I was 13 years old.
Thanks to Wrestlemania, Kingdom has been thoroughly lodged in my head for the last 2 days and shows no signs of leaving anytime soon.
It feels slightly odd buying a new, dedicated, DVD player in 2024, but here we are…
Minor rant: YouTube search is trash. Not because you can’t find things. It’s semi-decent at that. It’s because it throws a “For You” section in the middle of results (on web, at least) that is increasingly in my experience not related to what you’re searching for, or - more recently - not “for me” in any way. The stuff it’s started inserting has been proper put-you-off-your-food gross or otherwise highly NSFW and there’s no way I’ve found to tell it to stop showing certain things - the usual “not interested” controls are removed and even reporting videos doesn’t seem to work. It’s never shown me anything like these videos in my regular recommendations1, so it’s very odd it thinks they’re something I’d want to see inserted amongst search results.
The worst I could previously say about the “For You” section is that it would ignore any preferences you’d indicated around “don’t show me this channel” - annoying, but usually still somewhat related to my search. It is possible to use uBlock to create a cosmetic filter that hides “For You”, but it catches some other (non-problematic) elements on the page, requires setup on each device, and could break at any moment if YouTube decides to update the HTML. So far from an ideal solution, but it can be a stopgap until YouTube fixes whatever is going on.
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Usually - Warhammer, comics, pro-wrestling, wood-working, video games, computer hardware, and software development. ↩︎
Micro.blog is effectively a universal timeline for not just Micro.blog but also ActivityPub, Bluesky, and other services. We want to make the web a little better by encouraging people to post to their own blog while still being connected to friends.
It hurts my non-American brain that this even needs to be a question, or that a law might be required: The Boss Is Calling Late. Should the Law Let You Ignore It?. The only number my boss has for me is my work phone, and that automatically goes to Do-Not-Disturb at the end of the work day.
An interesting post that’s helped me understand a bit more about the way Bluesky’s “composable” moderation and federation works: Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far. I’m tempted set up my own PDS, just to test it out.
Finished reading: The Rose at War by Danie Ware 📚
Folks who have read the Sharpe books — do you recommend reading in timeline order, or release order? I’m feeling tempted to pick them up and give them a go.
Nothing puts me off a product category I’m interested in faster than the Instagram ads algorithm.
Looks like I’m going to be visiting that there London town in May, in what will be my first trip away from home since… ooh, 2018?
Finished reading: Lazarus: Enmity’s Edge by Gary Kloster 📚
I did some work last night on improving build times on my blog.
An initial implementation, that covers just the existing images, brought times down to ~30 seconds. It’s such a dramatic improvement I might just roll it out this weekend and deal with processing new images later…
It turns out I kinda like coming into the office. When I’m the only person here.
The urge to just migrate my personal site to Micro.Blog is hitting pretty hard at the moment. @manton has been knocking it out of the park lately with the new features, and the recent pricing plan changes make it an attractive proposition. One to ponder on while I try to fix my build time issues…