If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I’m quite keen on the idea of getting Big Tech out of my life as much as possible. If you haven’t, well done – we’re only in the first paragraph and you’ve already caught up.
This is largely inspired by a post from Neil Brown on why “NSFW” is an outdated term and should be retired. I came to a slightly different conclusion, which I’d like to lay out here.
There are two kinds of people: those who have lost data, and those who will. I’m one of those who have lost data, so I’m going to take a moment to tell you how I go about avoiding that.
It’s taken a long time for the 21st Century to arrive in Bridgend. You might think that since I work as a web developer and maintain a homelab and a gaming channel on YouTube as a hobby that I’d have a fast Internet connection. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Websites are being forced to gate content behind age verification to pander to the “won’t somebody think of the children” lobby.
The legislation makes no distinction between social media giants like Facebook and Instagram and small not-for-profit sites. If a bad actor in your tiny hobby site uses it to direct message porn to a minor, you could face a fine of £18 million for something you could not predict or prevent.
That’s an inside joke, my parentage isn’t seriously in question.
I’ve had a really productive day working on the typography for a client’s site, and along the way I found myself giving the much-overlooked <kbd> element a bit of a spruce-up.
Just a quick note about a Raspberry Pi Zero that has become unresponsive over SSH.
I’ve been on a bit of a quest recently to retrobodge smart home functionality into a 1930s house. This is the story of how I tried, failed and unexpectedly succeeded in building a custom presence detection sensor for Home Assistant.
It all started a couple of years ago. I was recycling an old laptop – and I mean recycling, it was too old to be remotely useful even with a lightweight Linux distro. I always hate the process of generating e-waste, so I pondered what I could possibly do with it. Then I thought about my mum. She’s never really taken to smartphones, and I’d seen her sit down and boot up her desktop PC just to check the weather forecast.