Titanic is a ship that will be familiar to most, and if you would like to listen to a podcast series about her, I can recommend Titanic: Ship of Dreams. It’s a 13 part series covering everything from the construction of the ship, to modern movies retelling the disaster, to the Titan submersible that blew up while diving to visit her.
There’s also Titanic’s Best Lifeboat, an episode of 99% Invisible discussing the issue of lifeboats on Titanic and on boats in general.
Oh, yeah! Jack & Rose could have survived on that door. There was room. But then she’d be 25 within a few years and too old for him anyway, so maybe it’s for the best how Titanic ended.
When I started working at Automattic, it was just me and Matt, and two servers. A web server and a MySQL server. I knew the root password to WordPress.com. I needed it as I spent a lot of time tuning the MySQL server in those days, but I was thrilled when we got some real systems people on board like Barry. I have to admit to a certain sadness when I ran sudo and the password didn’t work, however.
Automattic in 2006, when my luggage was delayed and I was wearing a British Airways tshirt.
When I started working at Automattic, many of my colleagues I work with now, were still in school. There was a time at the start of this year that my team had the first employee and the latest employee on it. I didn’t have any grey hair then, and well, I have some now, and I make jokes about the “old days” but there are quite a few of us boldermatticians.
I spent most of my time working in Vim, in an SSH session, but that’s changed to VS Code and Cursor in recent years. I tried the Vim extensions for those, but they never felt as good as the original.
Now, it’s the upstart AIs that are disrupting everything related to my job, but while it certainly feels like it’s making me a lot more productive, apparently it’s making me dumb too. Time will tell. Andrej Karpathy uses a number of analogies in this video at Y Combinator, but one thing that resonated with me was his comparing the state of AI to computing in the 60s. There were massive mainframes that people used thin clients (or punch cards!) to interact with them. In 2025, the AI is this brain in the cloud we talk to and ask questions of in a chat window. What’s it going to be like in another twenty years?
Many years ago, I used scm_breeze to make my life easier when working with the git command line easier. The main thing it will do is add numbers to the output of git status which you can then use in other operations, like checking in, adding or deleting files.
$ git status
# On branch: add/super-duper-caching...origin/add/super-duper-caching | [*] => $e*
#
➤ Changes not staged for commit
#
# modified: [1] wp-cache-phase1.php
# modified: [2] wp-cache-phase2.php
# modified: [3] wp-cache.php
#
$ git commit 1 2 3
Just in case you don’t have any git aliases set up, it will add them too, but you can disable or change them in ~/.git.scmbrc.
One change I made was to the gpl alias because I was using gl for git pull previously.
Anyway, I’m surprised I never blogged about it here before. It’s a great toolkit. It felt a bit slow for me when I tried it before, which stopped me using it on a new machine, but it’s perfectly fast now. If I notice any slowdown, I may use a add-zsh-hook hook on chpwd to load it if I cd into my development directory.
I should have realised something was wrong when Lightroom previews were taking so long to generate. The disk holding my photo archive is corrupted, and macOS “First Aid” reports an exit code 8 when it does a file system check.
Luckily, the disk still mounts, and I have another disk where I can copy everything off, and multiple backups, but this is not a nice thing to wake up to.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of files there, and the file system check couldn’t tell me which ones were corrupted, and might need to be restored from Backblaze.
A few weeks ago, I was attending a birthday party and wanted to take some photos. I have a Godox flash, and a remote, but I couldn’t get them to talk to each other and remembered it was a bit finicky.
Being in a hurry, I asked Perplexity how to set up the Godox TT685 as a remote flash with the X1T-S and I spotted this blog among the sources. This post about the Godox TT685 was there, and the AI summarised it pretty well, and I got the settings fixed.
One thing I hadn’t forgotten was keeping the TEST button on the X1T-S down while turning it on so it would work in “close range” mode. That was painful enough figuring that out.
Is the web dead yet? We’ve had walled gardens for decades, and they’re growing taller, and now AI agents are slurping down all our content. Apparently, adding the word “fucking” to a Google search query stops them showing a summary. What if I add “fucking” to every post when I detect an AI bot visiting? “I’m a fucking AI source” now am I?
Yes, yes, I used an AI to ask a question and found my blog there. I’m still complaining about it. Humans are weird.
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