iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

In that 2003 concert with the flash flood, we also played Carwithen’s One Damn Thing After Another, so a nice link that they’ve played her piece “Bishop Rock” about the lighthouse @petroc.bsky.social also visited today

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Also took the opportunity to fix my now/recently played page intunemixtapefanclub.dracos.co.uk/on-now/ Which I regularly find handy

register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/sector-da... Do you know, I think Second Chance Headway Centre probably doesn’t have 484,577 employees

Top 10 charities in England and Wales - 26 September 2026
Here you can see the top 10 charities based on information contained in the annual return. The top 10 charities can be displayed for different categories by selecting from the drop-down menu. Lists are ordered with charities having the highest figures shown first. This information is updated daily.

Show charities by: Employees

Charity name Employees
SECOND CHANCE HEADWAY CENTRE 484577
Brixton House Limited 65170
NUFFIELD HEALTH 18566
SAVE THE CHILDREN INTERNATIONAL 16153
United Learning LTD 11294
THE HALO TRUST 11216
THE BRITISH COUNCIL 9446
THE NATIONAL TRUST FOR PLACES OF HISTORIC INTEREST OR NATURAL BEAUTY 8746
MSI REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES 8724
BARNARDO'S 7404

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Transmit data using high-latency molecular vibration technology using the latest Stello-Matic and Decho-Matic devices.

This is lovely – send a piece of text or a small file from one device to another, via the medium of sound waves: vrugtehagel.nl/transmit/

vrugtehagel.nl

Transmission

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

Having a very rare triple cinema day. Have seen Transformers (1986) 40th anniversary rerelease (dont think I saw it at the time; what an 80s soundtrack!), next up Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, and then Pressure

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Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is going around as essential reading and for very good reason. Honestly the most incisive and full summary of the longtermism/x-risk pathology I have seen. Every stanza is a gem, and the closing is genius, but my personal favorite, because I have had this exact conversation almost verbatim:

[nitter.app post excerpt from banteg]

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
> expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
> extremely thoughtfully

›reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
›still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
›epistemic robustness achieved

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 19/09/2026

I’m not scared, I’m angry. My sites still work, as I have spent a lot of time dealing with the issue (especially last week when scrapers started to overload the server). I wouldn’t even care about them scraping (for my specific things) if they had any indication of community, care or consideration

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 17/09/2026

@paulclarke.com Here you go, was passing on my way to Mahler 2. Lovely to see you

The Baskerville sculpture outside Baskerville House, Centenary Square, Birmingham. The word Virgil is typeset in Baskerville, backwards for printing, one plinth per letter

A slightly closer picture of the same thing

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 16/09/2026

I was early enough coming home that the Milton Keynes to London part turned out to be £43.20 total. £108.40, a 57% saving overall. Sadly no ice cream stop

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 16/09/2026

The keyboard at New Street says from 7am but it is switched off so you are all saved my poor half remembered Williams, Einaudi, Bach

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 15/09/2026

When I saw the grey background didn’t get down to the bottom of the container, and you couldn’t scroll to the bottom (only in Safari) my first thought was – is this a float bug? Surely it can’t be a float bug! And lo, it is a float bug! In 2026!

A bit of a flytipping form, where you are unable to scroll to the bottom to select No

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 15/09/2026

You will be pleased to know this is (hopefully) the last message I shall send about the awful Tax-free Childcare system. Mine has now aged out, so I closed the account on 3rd August. They sent me a few notifications. And yet, this morning, I received the quarterly “confirm your details” email!

Lots of identical messages about someone reaching the age limit for Tax Free Childcare

Dear MATTHEW

Childcare service reminder - confirm your details are up to date

To continue getting Tax-Free Childcare or Free Childcare For Working Parents, you must confirm your details are up to date with us by 12 October 2026.

You can do this in your childcare account. To sign in, go to www.gov.uk/childcareaccount. Then select 'Reconfirmation' and follow the instructions. It's easy to do and will only take a few minutes.

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Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Jukesie @jukes.ie · 14/09/2026

Dates have been saved as this will be a wonderful event from @mysociety.org

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 13/09/2026

Ticket machine does not let you buy the £33.50 super off peak to London because of how it works. Trebles all round. Thankfully the ticket office is very nice, and also can help you when all trains to London are then cancelled due to a fatality

Ticket machine offering £72 tickets only

Ticket machine offering more expensive tickets

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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 11/09/2026

Justin Fletcher is the voice of Shaun the Sheep?!

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Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Listen you sound nuts if you try to explain that a bunch of silicon valley luminaries are involved in a weird cult that started with a harry potter fanfic and that their weird bboard flame war has spilled over into the real world That's absurd is what that is But also... It's true

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Google mistreated their heritage and lost all of the newsgroups, e.g. groups.google.com/g/uk.railway So I thought I’d lost the post where I announced the first version of traintimes.org.uk (the live departure boards, in 2001). But I’ve tracked a copy down :) traintimes.org.uk/announcement

Google Groups web page for uk.railway: "429 Too Many Requests"

In message <>
"Alan J. Flavell" <> wrote:

> Since the offering from North West Trains (as they then were IIRC) some
> considerable time back, where a contributor to this group provided an
> alternative access page to remove the usability impediments that had been
> misguidedly designed-in (pointlessly, as the alternative acces page
> demonstrated in a very practical way), things seem to have only got worse
> with the user interface.

But a contributor has hopefully done it again. :-)
<http://www.dracos.co.uk/railway/> takes the information from the National
Rail site, but removes all the JavaScript and frames, adds text links and alt
tags for the imagemap, stops all this opening in new windows rubbish, and
works for all the regional pages as well. I'm open to suggestions on how to
improve it further (it's a bit late and I'm sure I've missed something), and
I hope it's of use to someone.

ATB,
Matthew
--
Inigo Montoya: You seem a decent fellow, I hate to kill you.
Westley: You seem a decent fellow, I hate to die.

http://www.dracos.co.uk/

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As @infrequently.org noted in infrequently.org/2023/02/the-..., and the same applies with AI coding

The complexity merchants knew their environments weren't typical, but sold their highly specialised tools to folks shopping for general purpose solutions anyway. They understood most sites lack latency budgeting, dedicated performance teams, hawkish management reviews, ship gates to prevent regressions, and end-to-end measurements of critical user journeys. They grasped that massive investment in controlling complexity is the only way to scale JS-driven frontends, but warned none of their customers.

Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human. At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening: lots of lint rules, lots of tests, Claude-driven end to end tests, Claude-powered fuzzers running daily, automated code reviews and security reviews, automated code refactoring, and so on. Without these, you can end up with a mess that is hard to maintain down the line.
– Boris Cherny

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 11/09/2026

I’ve been running @theyworkforyou.com for over 20 years; if you want to point your ill-managed swarm at trying to compile a local democracy version, I probably have some thoughts on a slightly easier way of going about it than hacking ruby packaging

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Never mind policy and all the rest, I fixed the bug you can see in the below image (that should be, as you can guess, “MP”) last week, but failed to merge it in time! (The MP who abstained, by voting both Aye and No, was Gareth Snell. votes.parliament.uk will not tell you this, confusing things.)

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 09/09/2026

I hadn’t looked after my last post until today. Umm, hope they’re enjoying it?

A graph showing numbers of hits to my honeypot by bots, from 31st August up to and including today. Started off relatively slow, “only” 250k hits in the first five days, but then the bots liked what they had tasted, increasing their explorer traffic massively until we're at nearly 900k hits yesterday alone.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 06/09/2026

It is certainly possible to get a computer to do something quite complicated from an idea, and for the result to be superficially impressive and in detail poor. Annoying bot scrapers, graphical implementations of Zork I, rubbish rip-offs of sites you run. Easy to throw something up

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 05/09/2026

“One of the clearest findings from the discovery is the importance of consistent ways to describe people, organisations and locations.” Councils, for example. It’d be good for the government to have an official reusable list of them. Or countries. Could call it, I dunno, a register?

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 05/09/2026

So this week over 170,000 hits have been made to the entrances to my twisty little maze, and over 145,000 to deeper passages leading from them. That disguises some fun oddities, like on Wednesday it was 42.5k to entrances, and only 4k to further in; but on Thursday it was 26.5k / 49k.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 31/08/2026

Made myself a honeypot for bots to find and play around in. Wrote it in Apache Server Side Includes, like it’s the late 90s. Since 6.30am this morning, it has welcomed over 9,000 scouting bots, and nearly 3,000 follow-on incursionary bots based upon the scout’s intelligence

A page that hopefully humans never see. Nevertheless it has a cute animated cloud across a header that changes colour over the course of the day, containing a date and unique ID. It has a quote from a text adventure that changes every few seconds, currently “You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different.”, some links to other places in the maze, and an instruction to any stupid bot to turn itself off.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 31/08/2026

I can never attain this amazing Super Metroid level: unsung.aresluna.org/i-just-chose... But I do occasionally like to write commit messages this way: github.com/mysociety/fi... And made an archive of them: dracos.co.uk/made/justifi...

unsung.aresluna.org

“I just chose words carefully.” – Unsung

A blog about software craft and quality

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 30/08/2026

This is exactly what I am seeing, everywhere, same history, same pattern. FixMyStreet map pages are usable without JavaScript, have nice URIs etc. So the bots just request the same information in insignificantly different ways, over and over and over. So profoundly, utterly, pointless.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 29/08/2026

18:17:30, 34.81.209.247, all 404s /.codex/config.toml ... Slackbot-LinkExpanding/1.0 /actuator/mappings ... ChatGPT-User/1.0 /graphql/console ... GrokBot/1.0 /.hermes/.env ... facebookexternalhit/1.1 /.claude/settings.json ... TelegramBot/1.0 /login ... Amzn-SearchBot/1.0 Get. In. The. Sea.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 29/08/2026

Child is starting secondary school next week. My main task is writing a filter for the school calendar iCal feed to remove all the entries beginning with Y/Yr/Year 8–13, A level, GCSE, KS4, KS5, KS4/5, Post-18 :)

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 29/08/2026

@jonnelledge.bsky.social Everyone in Cornwall should start treating 5th March as a Bank Holiday, and then it becomes one – that’s what happened in Scotland in 2010 and 2011, when everyone took the day off on 4th January, but it wasn’t actually a bank holiday! dracos.co.uk/wrote/bad-ba...

dracos.co.uk

Bad Bank Holidays - Matthew Somerville

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 27/08/2026

If I had ever been to any of those airports, I would be thinking “oh no, m@example.org is going to be getting a lot of phishing emails.”

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/08/2026

ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc. Revision 88 / Serial number 840726 West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. >_

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/08/2026

cbso.co.uk/stories/big-... I’m going to these if you want to say hi! Mahler 2 Symphonie Fantastique Bruckner 7 Elgar Cello + Shost 10 Mendelssohn Violin + Sib 2 Beethoven 4+5 + Haydn trumpet Beethoven 6+7 Shost 5 Mahler 3 Beethoven overtures + violin concerto Dvorak 7 The Passenger Steve Reich at 90

cbso.co.uk

Big Sound for £1! | City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Our £1 tickets offer is back, and it's open to the entire West Midlands! On Tuesday 1 September between 10am and 8pm, anyone who lives in the West Midlands

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Reposted by Matthew Somerville

Julia Cushion @juliacushion.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

me when people email us (a CHARITY) with their rubbish vibe-coded versions of our FREE sites that we work hard to maintain the OPEN SOURCE CODE for

static.klipy.com

The Cheek, The Nerve, The Audacity, The Gall

ALT: The Cheek, The Nerve, The Audacity, The Gall

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/08/2026

London St Pancras to Stevenage has two Anytime Day Return fares: * £28.80, no restrictions * £30.80, "Not Underground" Is there a reason you would ever buy the more expensive one? Why does it exist? Perhaps it used to be cheaper and they didn’t want to pay TfL a fee or something

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 23/08/2026

Has Masala Merchant closed down/ changed hands? It said it was shut for refurbishment but they’re now putting up a “Vail Kitchen” sign. They did a lovely rangila shubzi special with paneer I’ve never found anywhere else

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Interestingly, Beethoven 7 has been performed twice at this year’s Proms, which I think must be quite rare? My favourite, I think. * 12th August, LA Philharmonic, 37:47. * 16th August, Swedish Chamber Orchestra... 35:00.

The Marvin Gaye Prom played 24 songs on BBC Sounds (call them 1-24), and on the TV they broadcast 1-4, 13, 5-9, 12, 16-17, 14-15, 20-24. Cutting a few for time, sure; spacing out famous ones? 13 was Let’s Get It On, but then 5 was It Takes Two.

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What is it with planners? PostgreSQL query planner going mad, and now trains – I think it’s /probably/ easier to wait at Kings Norton station for 26 minutes rather than catch the train to Bournville and back in that time (and have to buy two tickets rather than one!)

A train journey from Pineapple Road to Bromsgrove, saying I should take the train to Kings Norton, then take the train to Bournville in order to change on to a train going back to Kings Norton and on to Bromsgrove.