iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/09/2026

Today Microsoft Azure asked me for some feedback. Pretty sure we solved "circles" back in the 1990s. I remember radio buttons working just fine in Netscape Navigator. But maybe AI decided it's better this way. 🤷🏻‍♂️

a feedback form. There are five radio buttons. They are oval, not circular, and the labels above them are badly formatted, don't fit in their enclosing boxes, and in several cases are obscured by their own associated control.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/09/2026

I'm playing a gig. An actual Serious Gig with Proper Musicians and no comedy songs about JavaScript. You should come. It'll be awesome. Hope & Anchor in Islington, Friday October 2nd, doors 19:30, music starts 20:30. Tickets £8 in advance / £10 on the door. www.eventbrite.com/e/angel-stor...

ANGEL STORM: ALL STAR LIVE ROCK COVER BAND

Demon, Rory Gallagher, Billy Idol, Peter Frampton, Rush, Cream, Genesis, Soundgarden, Aerosmith, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, Scorpions... and many more.

(The typography on "Peter Frampton" is particularly exquisite.)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 16/09/2026

“You remember Stack Overflow? Trying to get gold badges? All that work for a few pixels?” …I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. 🤣

“Almost everything we used to signal "i'm a real developer" was a tech related hill we had chosen to die on.”

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 16/09/2026

“In a world where everyone uses the same tools, trained on the same data, we all end up being the same person… and that’s not a world I want to live in.” - @nickchapsas.com kicking off #NDCOslo

A conference expo hall full of people and exhibitor booths. Nick Chapsas is on the expo stage underneath a bank of giant projector screens.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 11/09/2026

Got a feature request for the folks at @sessionize.com...

A modal dialog over a Sessionize CfP submission form:

"Just One More Thing...

You used a lot of em-dashes in your submission. Type one in this box. Copy/paste is disabled. You have five seconds."

with a text input field and a button "Submit (5)"

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/08/2026

Today I will be mostly enjoying the fact that according to the Schema.org type system documentation, there are four categories of person: alive, dead, undead, or fictional...

Person

A Schema.org Type

Thing > Person

A person (alive, dead, undead, or fictional).

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 16/08/2026

Reason #427 why the notification dialogs in Windows 11 need a "Fuck Off" button. The choice of "Yes" or "No, thanks" just doesn't cut it, frankly. (the person who immediately replies "bUt yOU shOuLd rUn LinUX!" is reason #428 why such a button would be a good idea.)

Would you like to pin yahoo.com to your taskbar?

Microsoft Edge would like to pin yahoo.com to the taskbar.

Yes No, thanks

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 14/08/2026

Look at this. See the bikes? See the bikes stacked neatly? In the designated return area? Not discarded on the pavement like a child’s BMX? A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. And right here in the London Borough of Lewisham, too. ❤️

A dozen Forest rental bikes stacked neatly in the bike return area.

(You knew that. It’s in the post. But we are nothing if not thorough.)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 14/08/2026

I just received two simultaneous notifications on my phone. One from the government telling me WE'RE ALL GOING TO BURN and DEATH IS ON THE WAY, the other that there's a new Friday Night Comedy available on BBC Radio 4... and honestly nothing has ever captured life in the UK in 2026 better than this.

New Episode: A new episode of Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 is available. Listen now.

SEVERE ALERT issued by the UK Government.

There is a very high risk of wildfires nationally. Residents, landowners and visitors should not undertake any activity that could start a fire.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 03/07/2026

The low light camera on the iPhone 17e is absolutely phenomenal. I took this yesterday in the fruit bat house at Cotswold Wildlife Park. Near-total darkness and no flash.

A fruit bat hanging upside down enjoying a snack on some bananas

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 20/06/2026

That’s me, absolutely delighted, and laughing my ass off. I think Niels Leenheer (@html5test.com) had just fired up Doom on an analogue oscilloscope, but honestly, this could have been any one of a dozen highlights of his talk @cssday.nl. Inspiring, hilarious and thought-provoking in equal measure.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 19/06/2026

For £200, you can watch Muse at the O2, from the not-great-not-terrible seats at the side of the stage, for two hours... or you can buy an actual brand new electric guitar and have enough left for a Twix. CONCERT TICKETS SHOULD NOT COST MORE THAN ELECTRIC GUITARS! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS GOING ON?

Seating plan of the O2 arena showing Muse tickets on sale for £202.35

A Yamaha Pacifica electric guitar on sale for £199.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 17/06/2026

Table wasn’t big enough :)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 12/06/2026

I had a great time speaking at @infi.nl yesterday. Lovely people and a fantastic atmosphere. Not only that, but their office has a small tech museum! Although for some inexplicable reason my old Nokia phone is there alongside lots of obsolete gadgets that belonged to people who are really old now.

Some Nokia phone handsets from the early 2000s

Me holding an actual Atari Lynx handheld games console.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 12/06/2026

I met the very excellent @rebane2001.bsky.social, aka lyra.horse - creator of many awesome things including the x86 CPU built in pure CSS - at @cssday.nl 🤠

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 10/06/2026

“enter the Jacoba Mulder building, walk 20 meters into the enormous open patio, built with cubic beziers and border-radius.” Excellent directions there from #TheWebYouWant crew. 😀

A man in a hat standing in a big open atrium that looks like it was built with cubic beziers and border-radius.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 09/06/2026

I love how the “American” products in Lidl look like AI but they’re actually real.

A packet in a supermarket freezer.

It reads:

MCENNEDY AMERICAN WAY
DÉLI POCKET
BURGER

It is unclear what the food inside actually is.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 06/06/2026

Pretty sure the first game I actually completed was this one…

The ending screen of Test Drive II: The Duel. 16-Color EGA graphics of a guy leaning against a Porsche 959 getting arrested by a blonde female police officer.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/05/2026

I honestly thought people were posting fake screenshots. But no, if you ask Google Search, the flagship product that turned Google into a trillion-dollar brand, how many 'g's are in the word 'goggle', it confidently tells you there are two. There are days I wish you could throw bricks at a website.

AI Overview: There are 2 'g's in the word "goggle" (g-o-g-g-l-e)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 25/05/2026

I have never in my life been so curious as to what's hiding behind "View full thread", and I can't wait to find out exactly how many replies it took to get from the price of a Viennetta to the etymology of "Weyland-Yutani". But I can see it took four hours, so I'm hoping for a proper roller-coaster.

Two Bluesky posts separated by "View full thread". The first is about the price of a Viennetta. The second is about the etymology of the fictional Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien movie franchise.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 23/05/2026

Literally the first thing I thought of too… 🤣

A parody title card for a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode entitled “Watch The Irishman Suffer”

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 22/05/2026

I have seen Barbie He-Man and now you must see Barbie He-Man.

Imagine a bad waxwork museum. Imagine a bad waxwork museum that had tried to reuse a waxwork of Cindy Crawford as the lead singer from Hanson who for some inexplicable reason is wearing a fetish vest.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 21/05/2026

I love the breaks on the agenda for @cssday.nl. This is the best kind of whimsy. ❤️

A conference agenda, with breaks denoted using the HTML <br> tag.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 17/05/2026

Title plate of the New York first edition, 1851. (Which, to be clear, I do not own, because of I did I’d sell it and spend the money on Discworld books.)

MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE.
HERMAN MELVILLE
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY.
1851

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 06/05/2026

This Reddit comment will now live rent free in my head forever. www.reddit.com/r/masterhack...

“Fuck Bitbucket though, easily among the worst buckets ever made by mankind including the ones used to catch your head after being decapitated by a guillotine.”

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 05/05/2026

“What’s the food there like?” “Cloudy, with a chance of meatballs”

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 05/05/2026

yes i spent far too long sitting at a ridiculously uncomfortable hotel desk making this art about how hotel desks are ridiculously uncomfortable shut up.

two ergonomic diagrams of a chair/desk workstation setup. the one on the left is labelled HOME. It is normal and comfortable. The one on the right features a person sitting on a very low stool working on an impractically high table with their arms contorted into someplace very uncomfortable.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 28/04/2026

Slack says it's time for "Spring cleaning". I am in FORTY SEVEN different Slack workspaces. I can sign out of them, but cannot actually leave without "contacting an administrator". I have absolutely no idea who the administrator is for most of them. Can I have a way to "spring clean" those? Please?

A screenshot of Slack's "Spring cleaning" feature, telling me to sweep up my sidebar, reorganise my essentials, and quiet the noise.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 27/04/2026

Two more photos of that same sunset. I've never seen anything like it before or since..

another apocalyptic sunset. look, if you can't see the photo, I'm sorry, but honestly, it's kind of a "just like every other sunset you've ever ever not seen only this one's scary as all fuck and I can't really explain why in the alt text"

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 27/04/2026

Six years ago today, the world was at a standstill. Airports, bars, restaurants, offices closed. Entire cities in lockdown. A strange, scary time. That day, I walked to the top of Horniman Hill and saw the most apocalyptic sky I have ever seen in London. It honestly felt like the end of the world.

a blazing sun in a blood red sky. buildings loom like ghosts in the haze. it looks like something out of apocalypse now.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 24/04/2026

On the side of the basements it says “Unter Unter Unter”

A series of grey cargo sheds at the airport with the word Uber prominently painted on each.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 21/04/2026

Incidentally, this feature appeared in an overnight Windows update which also added two new Copilot integrations to Windows which I did not want, ask for or have the choice to decline. I'm so tired. So very, very tired.

Get more from every file

AI actions in File Explorer let you stay in your flow while making use of AI to take advantage of editing tools or Copilot functionality, without needing to open your file.

WHY THE FUCK AM I WRITING THIS? MACHINES CAN READ NOW. STOP PUTTING AI SLOP IN MY OPERATING SYSTEM AND INSTEAD USE IT TO GENERATE ALT TEXT FOR IMAGES YOU AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL BASTARDS.

Your PC can make sense of the toughest documents. Upload that research paper or confusing medical form and ask away! Copilot on Windows can summarise it in seconds or answer your specific questions.

(Again, why are there AI features I don't want in my operating system, but I'm having to type ALT text for Bluesky images by hand? What the fuck is the tech industry DOING, exactly?)

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 21/04/2026

Microsoft: "We are adding Copilot AI to all our products, and if that means building datacenters that will consume more power than a small city, that's the price we all have to pay." Also Microsoft: "Whoa there skippy! Showing SECONDS in your system tray clock uses more power! You sure about this?"

A screenshot of the Windows 11 Control Panel, with an arrow highlighting the new setting which enables showing seconds in the system track clock.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 20/04/2026

Conway's Law strikes again. This time it's me having to copy and paste a Customer ID and a Support PIN from one box to a different box ON THE SAME WEB PAGE because the person on the other end of the support chat can't see the same things I can see when I'm logged in to their support portal.

A screenshot showing the same customer details in the background web page, and in a pasted message in a chat session in the foreground of the same web page.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 18/04/2026

Good morning from the <body> tag on a typical Squarespace website and its one hundred and forty eight classes, which is obviously a completely normal and sensible way to build good websites that work very well and are unlikely to cause any problems for generations of future maintenance engineers. 🤡

It's a screenshot of some HTML source code. It starts like this, but I can't put the whole thing here because Bluesky only allows 2000 characters of ALT text.

<body id="collection-6193b5f4318251055941e884"
class="tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-width-full tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-image-aspect-ratio-11-square tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-text-alignment-left tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-read-more-style-show tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-image-text-alignment-middle tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-delimiter-bullet tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-meta-position-top tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-primary-meta-categories tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-secondary-meta-date tweak-blog-alternating-side-by-side-excerpt-show image-block-poster-text-alignment-center image-block-card-content-position-center image-block-card-text-alignment-left image-block-overlap-content-position-center image-block-overlap-text-alignment-left image-block-collage-content-position-center image-block-collage-text-alignment-left image-block-stack-text-alignment-left form-field-style-solid form-field-shape-square form-field-border-all form-field-checkbox-type-icon form-field-checkbox-fill-solid form-field-checkbox-color-inverted form-field-checkbox-shape-square form-field-checkbox-layout-stack form-field-radio-type-icon form-field-radio-fill-solid form-field-radio-color-normal form-field-radio-shape-pill form-field-radio-layout-stack form-field-survey-fill-solid form-field-survey-color-normal form-field-survey-shape-pill form-field-hover-focus-outline form-submit-button-style-label tweak-global-animations-enabled tweak-global-animations-complexity-level-detailed tweak-global-animations-animation-style-fade tweak-global-animations-animation-type-fade tweak-global-animations-animation-curve-ease tweak-blog-masonry-width-full tweak-blog-masonry-text-alignment-left tweak-blog-masonry-primary-meta-categories tweak-blog-masonry-secondary-meta-date ...

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 15/04/2026

I have to say, that's quite the wall of names for something that's been out less than a week. It's encouraging to see so many people showing their support for what we're trying to do here. Want to join us? Head over to usewhatworks.org and sign the manifesto.

A screenshot of the list of signatories from the usewhatworks.org home page:

Chris 'Woody' Woodruff, Fractional Architect
Dylan Beattie, Software Development Consultant at Ursatile
Steve 'Ardalis' Smith, Software Architect
Adam Wright, Software Engineer
Todd H. Gardner, CEO and Founder at TrackJS
Lotte Pitcher, Developer Relations at Umbraco
Abdul Rahman, Software Architect
Pete Buckney
Sebastian Nilsson, Renaissance Engineer
Chase Aucoin, CTO at Highwater Labs
Adele Carpenter, Software Engineer
Glenn F. Henriksen, CTO at Justify
Chris Ayers, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Nico Vermeir, Cloud Solution Architect
Stacy Cashmore, Tech Explorer DevOps
Hannes Lowette, Principal Consultant at Axxes
Mattias Karlsson, Partner & Sr. Architect at WCOMAB
Tom Grobbe, Software Engineer
Arthur Doler, Senior Software Engineer
Udi Dahan
Poornima Nayar, Software Engineer
Martijn Vriesman
Ted Neward

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 13/04/2026

Bought some Quad Lock gear. I love Quad Lock. Great kit. Got an email asking me to leave a review - "powered by yotpo" Sure! Five stars, nice comments, click the button... nope. Wait ten minutes. Still nope. And now I'm grumpy 'cos I tried to do a nice thing and yotpo screwed it up. Stupid yotpo.

Oops! Something went wrong, and your review has not been posted yet.
We would really love to hear from you -- please try posting again in 10 minutes.

Powered by yotpo

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 09/04/2026

Calling all Aussies, Kiwis, Vancouverites, Seattleites, Angelenos and, er, European insomniacs: I'm running my AWESOME presentation workshop "From Keyboard to Keynote" online in June, and each session starts at 10pm UK time, just for you. Timezones, eh? What fun. dylanbeattie.net/workshops/fr...

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 08/04/2026

Lucy Mangan deserves an award for the last line of the first paragraph of this review. I laughed so hard that milk came out of my nose. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

The Boys is back in town, for its fifth and final season. There’s too much to recap in full for those who have not yet had the pleasure of the satirical superhero show created by Eric Kripke from the comic books written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or who have not yet been horrified by the gory splatterfest (courtesy of all kinds of body fluids) of the preceding 32 episodes, which have seen orifices and appendages put to extraordinary use, and some of which have rightly entered what we will very carefully spell as the annals of TV history.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 08/04/2026

The Cars universe is off the scale. Here’s one of the Cars going through an airport security scanner, proving that plane hijacking is still a problem even in a universe where the aircraft are sentient.

A cartoon car going through an airport metal detector.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 01/04/2026

How are we living in a world where Claude Code can apparently rewrite itself in Python in three hours but I still can't type "sydney" into the time zone search menu in Google Calendar?

The timezone selector menu in Google Calendar. You can't search it. You have to scroll through the entire list of all the timezones to pick the one you want.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 27/03/2026

Enigma: Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

The cover of Enigma’s third album. It defies description. Three seated human figures face away from the camera, their sepia-tinted bodies overlaid with cogs, gears, weird drawings of bits of old radios.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 21/03/2026

New phone day. Instead of just restoring an iCloud backup, I’m choosing which apps I want on the new device. The Apple App Store has a list of every app I have ever installed, going back to 2009… witness the primordial dawn of my smartphone existence. Also, wow, the nostalgia. Echofon, eh?

A list of very, very old iOS apps dating back to 2009. Facebook, mini piano, a Ferrari game, Echofon, and more.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 19/03/2026

No, I see it using Postman to retrieve the URL, on two separate physical devices, connected to completely different networks. Also visible if I grab the page via www.apivoid.com/tools/view-h...

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 17/03/2026

You'll be pleased to hear that after a chaotic morning of false alarms and a support call, I did in fact get an email this afternoon from UptimeRobot! Except it wasn't an update, or an incident report... it was telling me that they'd launched a brand new version of their mobile app. Which is nice.

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Dylan Beattie @dylanbeatt.ie · 17/03/2026

I'd get an update by email within an hour. Paused all the alerts in the meantime. Waited an hour, two, three... no email. Their dashboard page currently looks like this.

ERROR

Oooppsie!

Unexpected error has occurred.

Try again.

(and some assorted meaningless emoji)

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