Chris Smith

From the movie Hackers: "I got a record. It was Zero Cool. Zero Cool crashed 1,507 systems in one day. Biggest crash in history. Front page New York Times, August 10, 1988."

Happy Zero Cool Day!

Company: "We’ve revised the UI to make it more balanced, more focused, and pull in more color from your theme"

Me: *sighs, starts writing some UserCSS*

Is that two separate games of Fluxx at the same time? Do you alternate between the games, or pick which one to take a move in? Seems fun!

UK users when the website asks them where they're posting from today.

Escaping Spotify the hard way · Chameth.com

Wrote a bit about getting rid of Spotify and, uh... parsing nested plist files instead.

chameth.com/escaping-spo...

Tailscale app connectors are also very handy if you have a server in a sensible jurisdiction, and want all traffic to a certain destination to originate from there.

I used www.calligraphr.com to create a font of my handwriting.

They support non-renewing subscriptions, and my month just ran out. Pleasantly surprised to receive an e-mail with a data export attached. No hard sell, no dark patterns, just did the job well without trying to extort me. Refreshing.

Yay! Subscribed, thanks for implementing it!

Cool write up, I enjoyed the music one too! Do you have an RSS feed for posts? I couldn’t find a link or anything :(

Get the location of the ISS using DNS I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They …

New blog post: Get the location of the ISS using DNS

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/get-the-location-of-the-iss-using-dns/

I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like …

Me: *about to do something productive*

Board game arena: "The round-robin tournament you joined and forgot about has started! You're now in 11 different games!"

Yeah, I can see how it could be addictive! It's a fun little game. Except when you roll NOTHING BUT TANKS... I'm going to petition BGA to implement a dice jail 😂

Ooh, some good games there. I love Space Base, and Cartographers is my most played game ever (mostly on BGA... I own a copy but much prefer just dropping pieces on the board rather than having to draw them myself!)

Haven't heard of Martian Dice before, off to the BGA tutorial I go!

I wonder how Curve pay works on the merchant/processing side… I guess it’s emulating how a physical card works, rather than the separate process Apple/Google Pay use? Which means you’d be limited to £100 transactions. Can’t seem to find any info to say either way though.

The Firewall Allignment Chart

Cosmoctopus board game setup on a green play mat showing various components including purple octopus miniatures, coloured tokens, different coloured cards and a grid of summoning locations in the middle.

Close-up of a purple octopus miniature with eight tentacles arranged around it. The figure sits on a card base with a starry galaxy design, with inserts for each of its eight tentacles. Blue star-shaped tokens and game cards are visible in the background.

Picked up a new board game: Cosmoctopus, by Henry Audubon.

Just had a very enjoyable first play. It has Splendor vibes, but with more depth and a fun theme.

I'd collected 7 tentacles and was poised to win on my next turn when my opponent got their 8th and successfully summoned Cosmoctopus.

Not _quite_ as catchy as “if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it”, but close.

There should be a tenth circle of hell, reserved for people who build devices with USB-C ports for charging that don't work with USB-C power supplies.

All you had to do was put a little bitty resistor in. It'd save so much annoyance.

Scenes of the UK and Ireland

cartoon for the guardian by Stephen Collins - script as follows: [Scene is a darkened LOFT. Amongst the boxes and junk are FOUR KNACKERED OLD FANS - three tower fans and one circular, with cracked grey plastic and buttons missing. One fan, TOWER FAN 1, is a bit taller than the others, and is addressing them] 1 TOWER FAN 1: Right lads, get ready. 2 TOWER FAN 1: This is our time. 3 TOWER FAN 1: The time when we remember who we are, and why we’re here. 4 TOWER FAN 1: We are the four crap fans in a British person’s loft, and we are here to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. 5 TOWER FAN 1: I know what you’re thinking, lads: 6 TOWER FAN 1: Surely this will be the year they finally replace us? 7 TOWER FAN 1: Our plastic’s gone all brown... I haven’t oscillated since 2018... 8 TOWER FAN 1: Dave here sounds like a spitfire and blows like a sad cat’s sigh… TOWER FAN 2: Cheers mate 9 TOWER FAN 1: But no. These people are British, and every year, they forget the sun exists. By the time they remember, new fans will cost *four million pounds* on Amazon. 10 TOWER FAN 1: So we’ll be back down there... shovelling thick air across the moaning faces of a species that cannot comprehend the concept of air conditioning, or even just closing the curtains when it’s hot out... 11 TOWER FAN 1: ...while they incessantly bang on about normally hot countries which this country is now temporarily a bit hotter than. 12 [The loft hatch opens and a person comes up the ladder] PERSON: APPARENTLY IT’S HOTTER THAN GREECE, LISA

british fan chat

A photo of a hammer, set inside a grey square that's titled slightly. At the bottom of the square is a caption: "THIS, DEAR READER, IS A HAMMER. IT IS ALMOST ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO THE ARTICLE. ENJOY.". At the top and bottom of the grey square are two tilted rectangles, that are a translucent blue. They overlap the square and the background, appearing like sticky tape holding the square in place.

I gave all the floating figures on my site a little sticky tape effect, and I love it.

#indieweb #smallweb

I feel like “share” in mobile apps is pretty synonymous with “open the share sheet so you can send it to a person/group/app”. The word “post” would make me pause, but I can definitely see someone clicking through to try to get to the actual sharing. “Publish” would be a way clearer label

ever since this thread from @pfrazee.com I've wanted to make this and it's finally ready: repoview.edavis.dev

if you're a nerd of a certain age, I think you'll especially get a kick out of it

enjoy!

An app can be a ready meal · Chameth.com

Another week, another blog post:

chameth.com/an-app-can-b...

In which I stretch an analogy too far while talking about writing software for yourself, and a little about using LLMs to do it.

Part one felt to me like it only existed to set the background for part two. Waiting and watching them together is what I’d tell past-me to do, if I could!

Poking around a bit more, it seems unless you manage to start the gesture perfectly on the thumb it will just trigger a random swipe on the page.

In a screenshot the thumb is 55px, which I think is 18pt. Apple say the minimum touch control should be 28pt. Not 100% on the maths, but feels right...

Yesterday I added a little wave pattern to the edges of some boxes on my website. Last night I woke up questioning why the waves didn't actually wave. Now they do!

I remember first learning CSS 20+ years ago using examples that came on a CDROM attached to a magazine. It's come a long way!

Nope, they just slotted right on!

New intro time, I think! Depending on where I am in my hobby-hopping cycle, I'll be posting about:

• Programming
• Video games
• Board games
• Baking
• DIY
• 3D Printing
• Electronics
• Films
• Books

Assorted favs/genres/etc: Go, FFXIV, Warframe, Cakes, Obsession, Sci-fi, Horror, LitRPG

#promosky