Nigel Small

I get that every time i go to my bloody router. So annoying.

Random opinion:

Browsers should not default to HTTPS for .local domains.

Similar to Red Dwarf, Doctor Who is (a) quintessentially British, and (b) best when budgets are limited. The latter leads to the effort being more regularly put into storytelling, rather than special effects and guest stars.

Keep it simple.

Certainly a low blow to try to (partially) blame Gatwa though. He is a good actor, as is the most excellent Jodie Whittaker. Both were let down by weak scripts, muddled vision, and unnecessarily lofty ambition for the show overall.

Why Disney Ditched ‘Doctor Who’: Sources Say Ratings, Big-Ticket Budget & MAGA Politics Were Factors In BBC Deal Failing To Regenerate The BBC confirmed on Tuesday that its 'Doctor Who' co-production deal with Disney had vaporized. What went wrong on the series starring Ncuti Gatwa?

"Let's go super woke" and "let's sell this to the puritans over the Atlantic" was always going to be a hard square to circle. Might have worked better if the script quality had been more consistent, though.

deadline.com/2025/10/why-...

#DoctorWho #BBC #Tardis

In a startup, you have no legacy or existing customers. So any decision you make is easy as it has next to no impact. Not true when you have people relying on you.

And the premise is wrong anyway. Startup culture does not make you more nimble, it actually makes it harder to get things done.

People have no boundaries or defined responsibilities, and processes are ignored or simply don't exist. In a startup, these are overhead. Elsewhere, they are essential.

Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations The following message was shared with Amazon employees earlier today.

I stopped reading at "how we want to operate like the world’s largest startup".

Corporate midlife crisis red flag 🚩

Startup culture should never be an aspiration for a mature company any more than teenage behaviour should be for a grown adult.

www.aboutamazon.com/news/company...

Just deleted my JustEat account. It's never been super-reliable as the drivers can often not find the house, but the past half-dozen orders have either never turned up, had missing items, or been cancelled. Literally unusable.

"Next"

After all the others realised this doesn't actually fulfill a full-time job, let alone a long-term career plan.

Ooh

Wait, you want beans in it?

Hallelujah, he is risen.

Tonight, I will be cooking the classic English dish "toad in the hole". For anyone not familiar with this traditional delight, you're not allowed to look it up, and must imagine it based only on its name.

Prince Andrew gives up royal titles including Duke of York after 'discussion with King' In a statement, the prince says:

I don't give a fuck how much tourism the royal family brings in, anything that perpetuates the vile levels of entitlement this mob enjoy needs to be abolished absolutely.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

I feel I may now be infringing on your IP.

This is a surprisingly popular idea. Maybe not surprising.

Excellent. I think we may have our work cut out for us.

Feeling an urge to pivot my career to become the Gordon Ramsay of the tech industry, shouting and swearing imaginatively at stupidity, complacency and incompetence until they sort their shit out.

Of all the stupid things they’ve said, this is the stupidest. And the most dangerous.

Color Engineering The tool that snaps mercurial design into mechanical focus.

Your ggplot2 charts work fine, but are they memorable? Real color engineering: brightness first (strongest differentiator), then hue, finally saturation. Most people get this backwards and wonder why their viz falls flat. www.chartography.net/p/color-engi...

Now open for building: Introducing Gemini CLI extensions Make Gemini CLI uniquely yours by connecting it to your everyday workflows and the tools you use most.

[toots his own horn]

I built the Elasticsearch Gemini CLI extension mentioned here. Google made it easy for me to roll something stable out very quickly, which is not always how LLM integrations go, so props to the Gemini CLI devs for that.

blog.google/technology/d...

This is solid truth for software eng in general, and has been my life for three decades.

Plus, it's a fundamental reason why every organisation should balance commercial and technical forces from the very top of the company. "Engineering as a subsidiary of Product" does not and never will work.

TIL Claude's new code interpreter mode has a /mnt/skills/public/ folder full of prompt instructions and Python utilities for creating and manipulating pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx files - and you can ask Claude for a copy and learn a TON about working with those formats

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/...

Hmm... WONDER about the red WALL though

While I'm certainly a long way from being proud of everything British, being part of a nation that is at the forefront of cutting-edge insults like "cockwomble" and "wankpuffin" really does warm my heart.

"the Bad Faith Threshold" is a great coinage.

The first wave of comments on a post, from those who do actually follow you, is usually interesting or fun or both.

But the later waves are of scolds, humourless reply-guys, "sorry to be pedantics", "whatabouts", and "why are you insulting".

Thames Water removes 100-tonne fatberg from west London sewer Toxic mass chiselled out of Feltham pipes amid campaign to help stop people tipping harmful substances down drains

I wondered where Boris Johnson had gone.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Is a secret US spy ring trying to take over Greenland?

The US is no longer a political ally.
open.spotify.com/episode/1U8E...