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.
Tech & Servers
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.
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.
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
Arduino win
Today’s little Arduino win: hooked up an ultrasonic sensor to an UNO and turned it into a simple distance display. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from loose components on the bench to a working gadget that measures the world around you in real time. Next step is to log the readings and see … Read more
Anthropic
Today in tech: the US government has decided it no longer wants to use Anthropic’s AI tools while simultaneously demanding other AI firms drop their safety brakes. Meanwhile, Nvidia is printing money, Burger King is strapping AI headsets to staff to measure ‘friendliness’, and fake AI grime videos of ‘broken Britain’ are racking up views. … Read more