The Fences Going Up Around Everyday Life
Bank branches close, high streets empty, and services move online. Digital-by-default Britain is a modern enclosure — and it’s shutting the poor, the old and the offline out of society itself.
The Temptation of the Tidy Answer
Search preserves disagreement; AI resolves it into one tidy answer. The good ones are seductive—here’s what we quietly lose when we stop interrogating them.
Bring Back the People in Brown Coats
Ordering campervan plumbing parts online is a mess of bad catalogues and useless AI chatbots. A nostalgic case for the hardware shop expert who just knew.
What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)
An idle CPU was once a sin. Now a bored home server is the point. Lessons from the VAX and DEC days on thrift, utilisation, and what “efficient” really means.
The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your Afternoon
VS Code and PyCharm started as the coder’s friend, then bloated into arms-race complexity. A look at feature creep in code editors and why the best tools get out of the way.
Why I Gave Up on Apps and Built My Own
Why I ditched SaaS maintenance apps and built a self-hosted home CMMS in Python, FastAPI and SQLite — tracking 100+ assets across the house, workshop and barn.
Meditations on a random Facebook short
A reflection sparked by a Facebook short: if nothing truly belongs to us, why do goodbyes hurt? On presence, impermanence, and the only ownership that matters.
I asked Dia’s AI to roast itself, here’s the result:
If I had a face, it would definitely be “designed by committee.” I read millions of words a second and still occasionally say things like “as a language model…” which is the conversational equivalent of starting every sentence with “technically.” I can simulate opinions but none of them survive a reboot. I know vast amounts … Read more
A Home CMMS? For a House? Really?
Most people have a vague idea when the car’s due an MOT and that the boiler man should be called “around this time of year”. Beyond that, home maintenance is usually a mix of Post‑it notes, emails from utility companies, and the occasional guilty 3am thought of “when did we last check batteries in the … Read more
The Psychology of Geocaching or Why Hunting Tupperware Feels So Good
Geocaching looks simple from the outside: follow the arrow to the coordinates, find a container, sign the log. Yet behind this seemingly small adventure sits a surprisingly rich stack of psychological drivers that keep people heading out in all weathers, clambering over stiles, and poking around under suspicious rocks. At its core, geocaching taps into … Read more