mdtable-pretty-printer is a plugin for Inkdrop which tidies markdown tables in your notes. This is the first plugin I’ve written for Inkdrop, and was an interesting experience. Plugins are written in JavaScript, which I don’t write a lot of, and follow React-based patterns which I’m...

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Tom Scott has just finished ten years of his weekly Things You Might Not Know series on YouTube. Simon Willison has wr...

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I’ve been really interested in Gemini space for about a year now, having read the protocol and used a few web proxies to explore Gemini space. I finally went whole hog and downloaded a Gemini browser, Lagrange on my home com...

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I had to write some PHP to tell me when to put out my bins because my council doesn’t follow their own rules for collections. Every week my council organises the collection of our 5 bins – but there is a pattern to how they are collected. This is a pretty simple pattern,...

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We have a few large projects on at work to replace key legacy systems and are discussing how to do that. Most of the discussions so far have tended to end up in a position where an incremental piece of delivery of the large overall system has been rejected because we know it will require rework later. In this case, knowing about the rework is good! For large projects which ...

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I like riding my bicycle. I like being outside; I like getting exercise; I like that I can do it solo and leave all my daily concerns at home as I cycle on a dedicated paved path which winds its way between crop fields and over bridges. Or at least I did until I moved house from somewhere I could be on that path in seconds, to somewhere where I have to dismantle my bike, put it in the bo...

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A few years ago I read Ivanhoe and, as intended, ended up suitably grumpy at the French and felt sorry for the Saxons. Last weekend some roadworks forced me to drive through Cricklade for the first time. Cricklade was founde...

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I have never worked with a software developer who enjoyed writing their quarterly or annual objectives. Most had been previously burned out by laborious processes which either meant two objectives take hours to write, or they’re easy to write but vague enough that they take hours to evidence every 3 months. In some cases they’ve even had objectives in which they had no say because they w...

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I don’t do resolutions, but I have changed how I approach something at work for this year, and so I guess that counts, right? I now have regular blocks of time in my calendar marked out as “Busy. Any meetings added in this time will be declined.”. This was after I realised I had multiple days in a week where in 7 hours I was doing a dozen or more meetings and was feeling totally burnt ou...

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Not only are their tools terrible, but everyone involved in their creation should feel bad. Let’s name the subjects of most of my ire, in no particular order: Microsoft Teams Azure DevOps Office 365 (or whatever this week’s branding is) Each of these tools is **substantially** behind their competitors. The easiest comparison to draw is with Go...

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