iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 03/10/2026

They’ve somehow linked the train with one going the other way on the same line

A live departure board for a train from New Street to Kings Norton but the live info appears to be about a train going the other way

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 30/09/2026

Very excited to announce that I will be speaking at @ffconf.org in mid November, on 25 years (!) of the traintimes.org.uk concept. URLs, performance, millions of PWAs; why and how you can do a lot with not a lot. Perhaps see some of you there :) 2026.ffconf.org

2026.ffconf.org
“it makes me a bit sad how much faster devices have got yet our experiences have often got slower”
See Matthew Somerville speak at #FFConf
For people who still give a damn about the web and its community.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 26/09/2026

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

I was travelling to Hitchin for a memorial on Sunday, all trains to London were cancelled, and so it was somewhat annoying that on that day I was getting over 2 million bot hits to my little server, from over 1.3 million different IP addresses, slowing down or timing out traintimes.org.uk

Graph showing hits to my honeypot in September. Starts off slowly, building up after a few day to the 500k to 1 million daily level, spiking to 2 million/1.5 million on Sunday/Monday, dropping down to "only" 300-700k daily since.

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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 · 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

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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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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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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/09/2026

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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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/09/2026

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 · 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 · 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 · 30/08/2026

Looks like it might be a localisation string for the US only

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

It doesn’t even find my first commit on GitHub, if you eg imported CVS into GitHub. It says mine is @devfort.com: github.com/devfort/wild... (2008-11-23) but I think it is actually this WriteToThem one from 2004-12-07: github.com/mysociety/wr... Or there was this from Acorn User in 1996 :)

*Info

Counter strike
Author: Matthew Somerville

In our February 1996 issue we carried a version of the computer board game Reaction which is one of the most popular progs of the year.

Matthew Someville has send us his version of the program which includes a computer player but most usefully has been 'downgraded' to run in Mode 28.

Matthew says that he spent a couple of hours with ChangeFSl to scale all the graphics to two-thirds of their size and re-arrange the icons to fit onto the smaller screen, so now non-RiscPC owners can play the game.

Okay, so you do need a multi-scan monitor...

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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 · 22/08/2026

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.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 22/08/2026

Whilst this may have been the case when @jonnelledge.bsky.social first wrote it in May, it has not been the case the past couple of months! The half planted with tropical-looking plants looks okay, the other un-planted half (who knows, my guess is some Network Rail/Council boundary mess) is dry mud.

First up:

Some British railway stations whose names write cheques they can't cash

Pineapple Road, Birmingham. Not tropical.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 20/08/2026

My third result is Mexican! But at least they’re not in France. I’ve noticed it’s started zooming out much more often when you’re searching, even when you’ve already gone to the place you want to search. And searches for “ice cream” return any restaurant or shop that vaguely mentions it

My most relevant Vietnamese cuisine restaurants, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican. At least they are all nearby I guess

Ice cream search in Stirchley - including Farmfoods, pizza restaurants, burger joints, and the Vietnamese from before

Ice cream search in town, good results sure but also… Upper Crust??

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 17/08/2026

“If you have any more cryptic clues or crossword puzzles you need help solving, feel free to share them!”

Google AI overview result for "teaching sentiment with an old coin for a test (9)"

The answer to the cryptic crossword clue is EDUCATION (9 letters).

Breakdown:
• Definition: "Teaching" = EDUCATION
• Wordplay: An anagram of SENTIMENT ("sentiment") + O ("an old coin") inside or combined? Wait: SENTIMENT + O = SENTIMENTO ... let's check letters: S-E-N-T-I-M-E-N-T-O is 10 letters. Wait, "sentiment with an old coin for a test" -> An anagram of SENTIMENT + O minus something? Or is it an anagram of SENTIMENT + O? Wait: SENTIMENT (9 letters) + 0 (old coin) -> anagram for EDUCATION ? Let's check letters of EDUCATION (E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N) vs SENTIMENT + O:

Google AI overview result for "teaching sentiment with an old coin for a test (9)"

The answer to your crossword clue is MORALTEST (9 letters).
Clue Breakdown
• Teaching sentiment: MORAL
• For a test: TEST
• With: Combined alongside (MORAL + TEST)
Here is a fun, helpful way teachers use chants to help young learners remember coin values:

Google AI overview result for "teaching sentiment with an old coin for a test (9)"

The answer to the crossword clue is TRADITION.
Breakdown of the Clue
• Teaching / Sentiment: Defined by tradition (a traditional belief or teaching).
• Old coin: TRAD (short for an old coin/token, or a traditional style/reference).
• For a test: ITION (reminiscent of 'exam' or a suffix/part indicating a trial or test structure, or tradition built from parts).
Would you like help with any other clues from this crossword?

Google AI overview result for "teaching sentiment with an old coin for a test (9)"

The answer to the cryptic crossword clue is HALFCROWN.
Clue Breakdown
• Definition: "an old coin" points directly to the Half Crown (a former British coin worth two shillings and sixpence).
• Length: 9 letters (H-A-L-F-C-R-O-W-N).
If you have any more cryptic clues or crossword puzzles you need help solving, feel free to share them!

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 17/08/2026

Nice to know you probably shouldn’t bother trying to get on the 1232

A railway station departure board showing trains to London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Salisbury and more. The Edinburgh train has “FULL AND STANDING” underneath it

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/08/2026

I scrolled all the way down past the gap and discovered... an email chain between an MP’s chief of staff and a dementia carers group? Not sure where the leak would be – could be staff computer, or the carers, or the MP case management system? Being included to help evade spam filters?

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/08/2026

Just had the weirdest phishing email ever. Starts off normally enough, looks like a Sumup email but button goes to some random URL, with a random From address, as usual. But I noticed the email was very long with a lot of empty space at the bottom...

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 09/08/2026

I requested my data before closing my (now useless) account, and the email telling you your export is ready looks like phishing. They send you another email at the same time explaining you’ll get this email. That email says “Emails from PayPal will always contain your full name.” But it doesn’t!

PayPal

Hello,

batch_dar_req@paypal.com has shared a folder '11F1-[...]-[...]-9313-[...]' with you.

Create DropZone Account

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 09/08/2026

An organisation wanted paying via PayPal account only, so I logged in for the first time in a long time (exhibit A; looks like my last payment was actually for some fruit in August 2020), it sent a 2FA code to my phone fine, logged me in, and then... immediately closed my account (exhibits B & C)

Paypal Activity page showing no transactions in past 3 years (as far back as it lets you look on this activity page, though you can generate a year PDF back up to 7 years somewhere else)

[PayPal header and navigation]
We're permanently limiting your account.
You can no longer use PayPal as we've decided to permanently limit your account after a review.

We're no longer offering PayPal services for this account
We strive to provide our customers with seamless and user-friendly services. Unfortunately, sometimes we're unable to offer services to an account for a variety of reasons, including local laws, our policies or the policies of our partners.
Why is this happening?
After a review, we found unusual activity on this account that we can't support.
What can you do with your account?
Your account has been permanently blocked. However, you can still view your transaction history, download account statements and request copies of your data.
What about funds left in your account?
Before you can withdraw or transfer any remaining funds from your account, we need to hold them for up to 180 days to cover any financial liabilities. We’ll review the account and email you when funds are available.
We keep your personal information with us for as long as you have a PayPal account. After that, we retain your information as required by applicable laws for up to 10 years. We'll delete all of it at the end of that period. If we're no longer required or allowed to keep your personal data by law during that period, we'll delete everything immediately. Find out more about our data policies.
How can you learn more?
To learn more about the types of account activity we can't support, read the Supported Activity section in our Help Centre.
We understand this news may be disappointing. We apologise for the inconvenience.
{body.paragraph.queryAdvance.children}
{body.paragraph.queryOmbudsman.children}

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 09/08/2026

Five book series (I’ve read four so far); post-apocalyptic (in some unexplained manner), where the protagonist Ropa is a teenager who can talk to the dead and at the start is scraping a living from passing on messages, larger mysteries unfurl. (Plus really nice sprayed edging if that’s your thing)

The five special edition books in the Edinburgh Nights series with their sprayed edging

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

The last CrossCountry train I was on, I had to stand from Sheffield to Birmingham. As the current Private Eye notes, they could improve this for many by leasing a few extra trains

16
SIGNAL FAILURES
Cross stitch-up
COULD Andy Burnham's leadership at last overturn the London-centric Whitehall bias that has made CrossCountry trains chronically overcrowded?
CrossCountry's routes radiate from Birmingham to Aberdeen, Manchester, Nottingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Bournemouth and Penzance - but not London. Most have just two to five carriages with minimal luggage space. It deters passengers with high fares that can be dearer than going a longer way round on other trains (Eye 1622).
Alas, mandarins don't use CrossCountry to travel into London - mandarins who were so generous with taxpayers' cash when they set up eye-watering private finance deals for new
"SuperExpress" trains to modernise the London routes of LNER and Great Western Railway (Eyes passim). The deals are recorded as a potential £5.9bn liability in Department for Transport accounts.
By comparison, the net extra cost would be trifling if CrossCountry leased six trains (30 carriages, identical to existing CrossCountry ones) that have done nothing since Avanti West Coast discarded them in 2024. The government knew since 2018 that they'd be discarded but still blocks even this moderate relief, let alone planning faster, cheaper and more comfortable CrossCountry journeys longer term.
Latest statistics show a 10 percent rise in passenger miles travelled on CrossCountry in this year's first three months, compared with a year earlier, but miles run by CrossCountry's trains didn't match that growth, rising just 3 percent. Meanwhile, LNER passenger miles rose by a measly 0.9 percent, but LNER train miles shot up by 17 percent after a new Whitehall-approved timetable last December gave LNER more slots to/from London.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 03/08/2026

Oh joy, I will no longer have to confirm my details haven’t changed to a government that should already know they haven’t, every three months!

...about to reach age limit for Tax-Free Childcare

...won't be eligible for Tax-Free Childcare from 5 September 2026 because they will be abo[ve...]

[A child is usually eligi]ble for Tax-Free Childcare until the first Saturday in September following their 11th birthday.

060

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 31/07/2026

I’m no historian, but I think the Romans in Pompeii… probably put roofs on their houses?

A screenshot from a Google blog post containing a “hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78A.D.” - all the houses to the right are just slightly redder more built up walls, not houses at all

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 30/07/2026

Still not as weird as the bbc.co.uk/weather/map though, which even quite zoomed in, apparently only has three places:

A satellite map of England/Wales, showing Manchester, Cardiff, and London only.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/07/2026

Discovered the East Riding of Yorkshire was the only English county I had never been to, so just went on holiday there :) Saved 20% on the train: split.traintimes.org.uk/PIR/BDT/n/10... Or peak, would save 50%, similar price to off-peak: split.traintimes.org.uk/PIR/BDT/n/08... Saw some puffins :)

North Landing, where we saw some nesting puffins, and missed a sign saying the cliff footpath had been eroded…

Spurn lightship - a lighthouse on a ship!

A gargoyle escaping from the door of Bridlington Priory Church

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/07/2026

I like the adverts for 🍍 Pineapple Road, though if you do want to go to Stirchley Baths, 🍫 Bournville station is actually quite a bit closer :)

Picture of the Hazelwell pub, the Birmingham skyline with a blue sky and puffy white clouds and some birds (could be the buzzards, or the trailing local rooks, but probably gulls), a Camp Hill line train, and Stirchley Baths.
Wording underneath says:
Your new station
PINEAPPLE ROAD
Direct to Birmingham

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 09/07/2026

I can see how someone could think this, but I don’t feel guilty – my logic is that I want the museum (BMAG) / theatre (Rep) / orchestra (CBSO) / arts centre (MAC) to exist, and I can support them a bit, and so I do; any exhibition/play/concert/gallery I manage to go to is a bonus

A person is stood at an information desk in an art gallery. The person behind the desk is saying “…and for £150 you get to enjoy a year of feeling guilty for never visiting any of the exhibitions you’d have free access to”

372

Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 05/07/2026

The first screenshot of Wordle on this Apple story is a bit… queer? Has a curse? Buyer beware? Definitely not super. apps.apple.com/gb/iphone/st...

A Wordle screenshot where the top half is solving the word Daisy (Adore, Candy, Daily, Daisy) but the keyboard is showing U R E as green and T I O A D L N M as grey.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 03/07/2026

The lgo.org.uk chatbot has a privacy policy that doesn’t mention the chatbot at all, and links you to a page of nothing, but does remember the name I asked it to use even when it hallucinated some text about it not doing so.

Me: Please call me Bill
LGSCO AI Assistant: Thank you for your message. For your privacy and safety, please do not share personal information such as your name or contact details in this chat. I am an AI assistant and cannot store or use personal information. If you have questions about making a complaint or need guidance, I am here to help. Let me know how I can assist you further.
Me: I will call you Sally
LGSCO AI Assistant: Thank you, Bill. As an AI assistant, I

Me: Where's the privacy policy for this chatbot?
LGSCO AI Assistant: The privacy policy for the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which covers how your information is handled when using this chatbot, can be found at https://www.lgo.org.uk/privacy?q=chat . This page explains what data is collected, how it is used, and your rights regarding your personal information. If you have further questions about privacy, please refer to that link for full details.
Me: That page says "Your search has 0 result/s"

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 30/06/2026

Aha, I knew writing it here would mean after ages looking I immediately then did find it - here’s “This isn’t fucking Dalston”: web.archive.org/web/20120208...

Graph showing where Dalston may begin and end based on asking people along the high street

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 26/06/2026

Can’t decide if my favourite is linking to a Sky Sports YouTube video saying it has crossword tips, or anagramming two six letter words to get a six letter word, or a synonym for half-drunk being “half” + “ed”

Search for: he scored, though half pissed (6)

AI Overview
The answer to your crossword clue is TIPPED.
* The definition: "he scored" gives TIPPED (as in tipping a ball into a goal or tipping a shot over the bar).
* Wordplay: "though half pissed" refers to the word "PIST" (an alternative spelling of 'pissed', or half of the letters from 'PISSED') plus ED (a common abbreviation for 'half' of the word "EDITION", although simply pulling half the word "PISSED" or altering it creates the clue's wordplay).
If you're tackling more tricky anagrams or crossword puzzles, for tips on how to get the seasoning and consistency just right:

AI Overview
The correct 6-letter crossword answer for "he scored, though half pissed" is BODGED.
A clever play on words, "scored" can mean "bodge" (to make or repair clumsily), while "half pissed" acts as an anagram indicator for the word "bodge" embedded inside a synonym for half-drunk ("half" + "ed").

AI Overview
The answer to the crossword clue is TIPPED.
The phrase "he scored, though half pissed" provides the wordplay: an anagram of "though" and "pissed" leaves you with TIPPED (which means "he scored" as in knocked/pushed a ball in, while being an anagram indicating "pissed" can also be a synonym for half-seas-over or tipsy).

AI overview
The solution to this crossword clue is TOTTED.
The clue uses a play on words: "scored" means to keep score or total up amounts (TOTTED), and "though half pissed" hints at taking the first three letters of the word "TOTTED" (tot) and the first three letters of "TED" or another anagram representing "pissed" / drunk. Alternatively, it's a direct slang equivalent for totaled or counted up.
For more crossword tips and strategies to help you tackle tricky clues like this:
[Video link to: "Outrageous is an understatement!" | Sam Allardyce left angry ...Sky Sports Premier LeagueYouTube · 16 May 2021]

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 25/06/2026

Waiting for the train to leave Euston back to Birmingham, finding myself in Private Eye (joining in the Radio 3 discourse), mentioning intunemixtapefanclub.dracos.co.uk and coming across as a bit of a nerd 🤣

Radio 3 debate continues...

Sir,
There does exist an oasis of wide-ranging
music, presented with elegant concise commentary. This programme is called
"Through the Night",
At which point the verbal diarrhoea of
from 12:30am to 6:30am.
"Breakfast on 3" takes over with its ten-minute (at best) snatches of music.
DES HILL, London.

...I maintain an archive of Radio 3's
Classical Mixtape track listings going back to
2017. At least there, output seems pretty varied with the number of distinct composers ranging from 481 in 2018 to 599 in 2022 to 478 last year, with around 60 percent of composers having only one track in the whole year.
Radio 3 "Breakfast" is a much nicer thing to
wake up to than the alternatives, and anecdotally I still hear a wide array of known and unknown pieces (this morning included Mozart, Lully, Smyth, Respighi).
MATTHEW SOMERVILLE.

...In all this talk of classical bangers and anodyne presenters on Radio 3, not one mention of programmes like Private Passions or Round about Midnight. Nor indeed the week given over recently to Miles Davis as Composer of the Week.
These were all outstanding and were presented by people with a passion. Anodyne my arse.
JULIAN GREATREX.

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 23/06/2026

The stations have only been open some months now… And even if you buy a ticket online (big queue at office) you have to pick it up at the machine, and it won’t let you do that either, just gives an error! (Was in too much of a hurry to take a photo, thankfully the gate guard believed my tale of woe)

Sign saying the ticket machines at new street do not sell tickets to the new camp hill line or Darlaston/Willenhall

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 23/06/2026

Good to know Google maps thinks it’s an 8 minute walk to the station to catch a train, when you’re stood inside the station

Google maps saying my journey should begin with an 8 minute walk

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 18/06/2026

In Warwick for Purcell’s King Arthur; always wanted to hear this, but isn’t performed very often

Poster about tonight’s performance. Narrated by Mark Williams

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 14/06/2026

If you’ve just taken a photo and need to share it with someone you don’t know, or quickly want to get a photo from phone to computer, here’s an easy way to do it: soonsnap.dracos.co.uk Built by @sil.kryogenix.org many years ago, I’ve just moved it to its own subdomain and added keyboard handling

Screenshot of soonsnap.dracos.co.uk front page, asking if you want to receive or send a photo

Screenshot of soonsnap.dracos.co.uk, showing a code after adding a photo to be sent, telling the user to tell the recipient to go to the website and enter the code

Screenshot of soonsnap.dracos.co.uk, showing someone halfway through entering a code

Screenshot of soonsnap.dracos.co.uk, of someone having just received a photo

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 12/06/2026

Hmm, I can’t reproduce that here, I'm afraid. Here's me trying - account page (1), then I changed to Open (2), then clicked Next (3); it kept it showing Open reports only.

FMS account page for a fake user, open reports only

FMS account page for a fake user, open reports only, page 2

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 10/06/2026

This is the way. Speaking as someone who still somehow manages to keep a non-JavaScript slippy map working. And recently moved some forms for TfL from Word documents to being a simple (in tech terms) online form with a light sprinkling of JavaScript where it made things easier/nicer.

“They worked collaboratively throughout to turn complex paper processes into intuitive digital forms and their project management, responsiveness and genuine commitment to improving the customer journey has been outstanding.” said someone from TfL 😊

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 07/06/2026

Reddit have started locking the mobile website after a short period, demanding you get their app. Sure sign of a great product that doesn’t want to just track you; perhaps I’ll do the same on FixMyStreet. You can “request desktop website” in your browser and zoom in enough to avoid the sidebar…

Reddit website with modal overlay preventing any further usage of the site, saying get the app

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Matthew Somerville @dracos.co.uk · 07/06/2026

I guess I’ll just talk to a human tomorrow instead

Asking Google ai if a pizza express leggera pizza can be gluten free, and it says it can.

Asking for some proof, it then says it’s a well known custom order and tells you to just ask for it

It tries its best to find some way to bend reality to its prediction, finding incorrect quotes about salads, and terms

After hallucinating that you can, it finally hallucinates the opposite, that you cannot have a gluten free leggera. Which it doesn’t know as much as it didn’t know if you could. Because it doesn’t know anything.

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