Ross's Micro Blog

This is a brilliant and really well-made article (with video) about the history and future of the bicycle. Worth a read! https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/an-ordinary-bicycles-epic-journey/

How on EARTH are you supposed to maintain any kind of consistency in doing anything when you have small children and both parents working? Sodding impossible!!

So my kid’s current obsession is Scratch coding. But he has limited screentime. So what does he do?

(Note: I’m sure someone has already made physical scratch blocks, but I think this is an AMAZING teaching tool!!)

After a couple of weeks of illness, exhaustion and feeling out of control of everything coming my way, I finally had a few days that I totally nailed. This included a day of ace parenting today.

YES!!!!!!

Some neat command-line history shortcuts for those who use terminal/command-line: https://opensource.com/article/19/10/bash-history-shortcuts (via changelog)

Oh. Yay! Looks like I might officially be a podcast guest soon!!
😃

Watch this space… 🕳 👀

This is a SUPERB article on the why you should and how you can do “deep work”. Aimed at coders but probably applies elsewhere too.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/focus-and-deep-work-your-secret-weapons-to-becoming-a-10x-developer-8e203a6ad291/

It occurs to me that I now see WordPress (the software) the same way I see iOS and MacOS.

I don’t contribute.

I don’t install betas.

I don’t really give feedback.

It’s impenetrable (by me at least) software made by others.

This is kinda sad.

Somewhat philosophical: So much stuff in my life right now seems to be about choosing who we are and what we get to be. Maybe not all the time, but we all get to make decisions that affect what is next and how we get there.

Insane. The first angle-grinder-proof bike lock. Weighs 6KG though, so you leave it at the locking point. Interesting idea. Can’t help but think there’s a better way! https://road.cc/content/tech-news/266102-altor-saf-lock-most-secure-bike-lock-world

It’s kinda weird being a total non-runner surrounded by avid runners.

Need some sports cycling buddies.

Hah. I just discovered the Google Feud guess-the-autocomplete game. Am I the only person that didn’t know about this?

http://www.googlefeud.com/index-gb.html

Now I can write what I REALLY wanted to write! 😃

Quick tech note before I go into the weekend and forget. Quite an advanced/specific one:

WordPress: Fixing shortcodes that enqueue JavaScript when used in ACF fields.

https://rosswintle.uk/2019/09/wordpress-fixing-shortcodes-that-enqueue-javascript-when-used-in-acf-fields/

I need to categorically say that I think my son’s school is ACE. I’m 180% happy with it. The staff are amazing. Any attempt to get involved in school comms is me genuinely and freely wanting to use my skills to improve things for all schools and parents.

With that in mind…

Hmm… What should you say if you’re ACTUALLY asking for a friend? 😂

Is there a meme generator for the Bart-Simpson-Writing-Lines-On-A-Blackboard image?

Asking for a friend.

Heh. I wrote a simple button-driven vanilla-JavaScript chatbot framework in 50 lines of code.

#winning

😂

Pretty sure NatWest could save a significant %age of my £5 monthly business account fee by not sending me details of my £5 monthly account fee in the post. 😂

Worse than “the tech you use sucks” is the more personal “who the hell works with this tech?”

Because, for a large number of other people, the answer is “Well, actually, I do!”

And you just shunned them from your community by making them feel stupid.