2025-10-29 23:11:15

Ross stands in front of a large poster reading “Adventure this way!” that has an Iron Golem on it that is pointing to where Ross is standing.

Phew! Epic day with the kids:
– Science Museum
– Minecraft Experience
– Getting lost in Westfield Shopping Centre
– Finding a Nintendo pop-up store!
– Driving to London and back

Hooray!!

2025-10-27 22:46:22

We played a silly family car game just now. It has raised a very interesting question.

What would happen if you exposed a marshmallow to the vacuum of space?

We are now down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos titled “X in a vacuum chamber”

Can flies fly in a vacuum chamber?

Is this even ethical?

2025-10-26 19:54:53

Hacktivate looks like a very interesting little game for MacOS/iOS.

Security and code-breaking challenges, that teaches text encodings, image processing, and command-line stuff.

You probably need to be at least a beginner computer nerd to not be totally confused (you will find out in the free tutorial). But this seems very clever.

https://www.hacktivate.app/

2025-10-25 21:10:25

I love my iPhone 13 mini. It’s 3.5 years old and still 100% fine.

Today I replaced its battery.

Just about!

What an incredible faff!

At one point I was convinced I would not get the new battery connected.

But screw you, Apple! It’s is done!

Previous attempts to change batteries have failed to improve anything. Let’s see what happens.

2025-10-23 09:09:23

I’ve become so interested in how to make change happen.

There are so many ideas about it and so much advice.

I’m definitely guilty of research/document/present the argument. Maybe that’s a UK-Corporate thing?

Today I watched @GeePawHill’s course intro (vimeo.com/823115313?fl=pl&fe=sh) and read @aurooba’s latest post (aurooba.blog/why-we-choose-wha)

And I’m also holding in mind what I know about neurodiversity.

And I think that all I can take away is that this is really hard, and everyone is different.

2025-10-22 20:51:25

I've had several good conversations about AI/LLMs today.

After a few weeks of thinking I could see what they're useful for, I think I'm officially a skeptic now.

Every conversation has had:
– They’ll get better though!
– Yeah, sure they make mistakes, but you learn to deal with it

Or has been about a use case where a simpler, deterministic and far more efficient method would be better.

Mostly though: I'm just sick of talking about and hearing about it. It's just become word salad now.

2025-10-20 19:50:58

Still trying AI.

Last week: Oh. Claude Code seems really clever. It’s guided me to best practice for a thing I don’t know much about.

This week: Me consulting the docs and finding out this is not best practice at all, and Claude apologising and tearing its own recommendations to shreds.

It’s still just an over-confident bullshit machine isn’t it?

This happens every time.

You folks having success… are you lying? Or are you not validating the results? I don’t get it.

2025-10-18 18:52:24

Things the curious engineer in me does…

This is the old malfunctioning motor from my dishwasher. Those are some pretty hefty looking electromagnets!

I wondered how much copper there was coiled up on each bar.

Turns out, about 20g. Total of 180g of copper. The whole assembly weighs 410g.

Scrap copper is worth about £6.50/kg. So it’s not worth much. But it’s not worth nothing!

2025-10-17 08:08:32

Is “Rotated poop emoji” now a trend in logos? Or is it purely accidental? 🫣

(With apologies and respect to those that I know that have ties to one of these orgs)

2025-10-14 21:45:13

So it turns out that if you barely ever see anyone because you remote work, and then you see many trains, planes, restaurants, bars and offices at a team on-site, you might pick up nasty bugs that you no immunity to.

🤧🤒😴

(Sorry, team. Hanging out with you was great though!!)

2025-10-12 09:36:56

@ivory Is there an option in Ivory that makes copying the text of a post not include the link to the post?

I mostly use this to copy my own posts to other platforms and deleting the link every time is quite tedious.

2025-10-10 21:15:45

I’ve been quiet this week because I was out in Ireland at an on-site gathering with my team.

Amazing to finally meet them – in many cases for the first time!

Face-to-face contact is so important.

I hope we get to do it more often.