Category: General

  • Orb Funkee Animalz

    Orb Funkee Animalz

    This is not the fidget toy you are looking for.

    Sure, you can mangle and squeeze it, but it’s not satisfying like a stress ball, and it doesn’t go back to its original shape.

    Turns out it’s rubber with some sort of white sand-like powder vacuum sealed inside it. It doesn’t dissolve in water, so it’s not salt.

    A bit of minor surgery later and the thing looks much better.

  • Stickers

    Stickers

    I keep losing my car in carparks. It’s grey and boxy, all cars are now grey and boxy and looks identical from a distance. A few stickers should help.

    This is also a test to see if this auto posts to social media.

  • Forgot to tax my car…

    Forgot to tax my car…

    Vehicle tax is a thing here, every vehicle must be taxed. If it isn’t your insurance is invalid and all the ANPR equipped police cars driving the streets will find you.

    Except they’re supposed to send you a letter reminding you it’s about to expire. Not an angry red letter telling you it has expired. Also this letter was dated 15th August and I received it today a mere week later. In the same batch of mail was some tat from China posted on the 16th of August. I’m fairly sure mail from China isn’t supposed to arrive quicker than mail from Wales…

    So I logged in and “paid” my £0 for the coming year.

    With my old car I used to have a yearly direct debit set up and the money would just leave my account automatically. I guess they can’t do that with this one…

  • Accidental Fruit Tart

    Accidental Fruit Tart

    Attempted to cook a fruit pie, but the pastry I’d made was more like biscuit dough and didn’t want to stay together. Ended up turning it into a giant fruit tart thing instead. Worked out pretty good.

    The trick it appears was to leave it to cool down after over cooking the fruit into a sort of jam-like consistency.

  • Social media sucks, so I’m going back to blogging

    I’ve been putting random stuff online since sometime in 2000. The online world was different back then, it hadn’t turned into this API driven walled garden mess. It was a non-API driven walled garden mess instead!

    My first site was an exercise in learning PHP and HTML

    Did you join LiveJournal for blogging, or subscribe to a mailing list instead? Maybe you were on AOL or Compuserve as they gasped their last. Failing that you could enrol on a forum or live chat on IRC.

    I decided I’d start my own blog, on my own site and put my thoughts and opinions on that instead. Then, like most people as social media took off I went where my friends went, and slowly switched from long-form posts to short random thoughts.

    Facebook likes to remind me of past content. Some of the really early stuff is a mixture of entertaining and “why the hell did you write that?” as I figured out what this new social media thing even was. Was it a blog? Was it chat? what do we say here?

    You’d never get away with saying this today

    So I’m going back to blogging again, and being able to write longer and (hopefully) more thoughtful content. If you’ve been here in the past, you might notice it’s a bit blank. This is a reset, I’ve kept my old blog safe but nobody but me needs to read content written in a time where online security was less of an issue, and where “let’s stick your name in Google to see what comes out” wasn’t a thing.

    I’d tell you to follow me on an RSS reader of your choice, but do we even do that any more?