Dan Q

Today, somebody who’s running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service… emailed me to ask if I’d advertise theirs for them. Wow.

Did you know that there’s a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I’ve made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I’ve learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and flag emoji.

As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today’s random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history.

Inspired by the way that Nekoweb’s editor ‘Nekode’ works, I came up with a low-effort way to let my eldest get started with HTML and CSS editing, right from her browser, with the results selfhosted directly from the household NAS.

If the Romans played bingo, do you think the callers would have used ‘bingo lingo’?– Legs two – Growing up the wall, four – Seagull in flight, five – Long-nosed dead man, nineteen – Pornography, thirty – Use your tongue, fifty-nine – Smiling in a blindfold, a hundred and one

It’s been 97 days now since we were flooded-out of our home, and repair and rebuild work hasn’t really even begun. But it’s getting closer, and I’m looking forward to later this year sitting back in my own house (and probably at the piano!).

Today, thanks to Wikipedia, I learned a lot about a miniscule Hawaiian island with an interesting cultural and archaeological history… after I found my way there from a random page about a hip hop album!

Today’s random Wikipedia article was about a kind of seal that lives only in Lake Baikal in Siberia, which turns out to be a really, really big lake. Like: it’s got about a fifth of the world’s fresh water in it; that’s how big it is!

This year is Wikipedia’s 25th birthday, and as part of the celebrations I learned who Marcus Koh is… but that wasn’t remotely as interesting as learning about the long history of the yo-yo!

Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th birthday, and today I’m celebrating by discovering what the Argo Wilis is, along with a dive into a rabbithole about rail transport in Indonesia!

Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th birthday, and somehow as a result I ended up reading about Wesley Merritt, who was the shortest-lived Governor-General of the Philippines!

Observation: Media franchises attract fandoms, and many get their fair share of character ‘shipping (especially of the attractive characters). Soccer also attracts huge fandoms… but I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of “soccer slash” (even of the attractive players).

Continuing my effort to find a way to serve my various static sites that meets my need for ease-of-use and low-maintenance, I configured a wildcard Caddy server with webhook-based monitoring of a GitHub repository. Here’s how it works…

I’ve received another postcard-from-the-Internet: this one’s from grubbyfox, in Norway!

When we moved house, Thames Water failed to set us up an account correctly, and the hacky workaround they came up with claims that we spent our first 11 hours in the Chicory House perhaps pouring three tonnes of water into an ankle-depth 5×10 metre swimming pool.

The other week, a coding LLM helped me… without me ever submitting a single prompt to it. I just typed into it all the component parts of my problem, and in doing so the solution revealed itself to me. It’s rubberducking… silent AI edition!