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.
George Wendt played the part of Norm on the TV show Cheers for many years but I just heard he passed away at the age of 75. Here’s an interview he did with his co-stars Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson.
The Atlantic Accelerator is the final level in the game Syndicate. This game was developed by Bullfrog, and published in 1993 by Electronic Arts, who went on to publish a few more games.
This final level is insane. The mission briefing warns that you are completely outgunned and outmanned, and it finishes with a “good luck” message.
As soon as you enter the map you’re assaulted by enemy syndicates wielding mini guns. You have to pause the game and then frantically select all your agents, put on shields and fight back. It can take more than a few goes to get this right. This video shows how easy it is to be overpowered. Jump forward to about 4:00. Warning, it’s loud!
This video below shows how it’s done. Select all agents and put on shields. Select agent 3, enable panic mode and let him or her take out the nearby enemy with a laser. Mop up the rest with lasers.
An idea I picked up from a comment on that video is using plenty of shields and a flamer (flame thrower). The enemy syndicate stop firing after a certain length of time, which makes mopping them up easy. This worked mostly, but in the end there were two enemies left who refused to stop firing. Cross fire was more effective at reducing the numbers of enemy, however.
Syndicate Plus. The benefits of shields. Make sure you switch before it runs out.
These last two guys kept firing, I got bored. Shields and flamers takes a while.
I finished this game in the mid-nineties. I bought it a good few years ago on GOG and I finished it again, but this was probably my first play through in a decade. Still a great game after all these years.
I upgraded my Samsung Galaxy S23Ultra a few days ago to One UI 7, or Android 15 and it has mostly been a good upgrade, but it hasn’t been perfect.
The first and most annoying, change was to the notifications when you pull down on the screen. There’s no sign of the quick settings anywhere. It turns out you have to pull down from the top right. This comment on Reddit explains how to fix it by:
Tapping the pencil icon.
Going into panel settings.
Change it from Separate to Together.
The other annoyance is the three rows at the end of the quick settings panel.
Play music / Media output
Nearby devices / SmartThings
Smart View / Modes
You can sort the order they appear in, but you can’t remove them. I never use them. Annoying.
The camera is fine. The UI has been changed a little. I haven’t noticed any change in picture quality yet.
I’m glad the apps drawer in the default launcher can now be scrolled vertically again. That is a feature of almost all third-party launchers, and “Home Up” used to enable it, but One UI 6 removed it years ago.
I had to delete my phone from my car’s Android Auto interface to get it to connect reliably again. I should say “reliably” with quotes because Škoda cars seem to have problems with this phone (or at least the 2020 Kamiq does), and I had to buy an Android Auto dongle to make it work. Thankfully, the new version of Android seems to work ok with the dongle.
The “do not disturb” Meeting widget is now two spaces big for no reason,
I like the UI refresh, the rounded corners are nice.
Here’s a cracking demo by DJ_Level_3 and Marv1994 done on an Oscilloscope, with the music creating the visuals. The music is great too, but of course, it’s not really responsible for the visuals, there are high-frequency sounds doing that, which we can’t hear. Utterly amazing stuff.
The demo got 1ST PLACE in Wild, and 1ST PLACE in Crowd Favorite at the recent demo party, Revision 2025.
This video will be even more upsetting if you don’t eat meat because there’s nothing in this video that you don’t know already.
Thanks to my wife, I don’t eat meat very-often these days. She hasn’t eaten it in years, and her influence is showing in our cooking and meal prep.
Try eating meat less often. Have a vegetarian or vegan meal once a week at first. When you realise you’re not missing out, have meat less often! You don’t need to give it up entirely. Unless you want to.
What struck me most about the Kurzgesagt video was how it laid bare the reality of animal suffering in the meat industry. They didn’t sugarcoat it. Most animals we consume live in truly horrible conditions, not for better meat quality but simply for cheaper prices. Meat is cheaper now than it was for our parents. The video breaks down the situation by animal type, chickens, pigs, and cows, and shows the specific challenges each faces in industrial farming.
The most eye-opening part? Often, we could avoid most of this suffering by paying just a bit more – sometimes only pennies per meal. That’s a small price for significantly reducing animal torture while still enjoying meat occasionally.
Remember, this isn’t about perfection or judgment. Every meat-free meal makes a difference. Whether you’re doing it for ethical reasons, environmental concerns, or health benefits, reducing meat consumption is a personal journey.
Have you tried reducing your meat intake? What vegetarian dishes have surprised you with their deliciousness? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below. I cooked a delicious sweet corn butter masala today that was mildly spicy, but rich in flavour and very filling.
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