Usual caveat emptor here: what I'm writing here is my personal opinion,

This starts to become an interesting series of blog posts, my ranting about badly implemented IPv6. Some people…

I feel bad for missing my schedule earlier this month, but life got int he way, and things have been a tad complicated. But things are still mostly chugging along. As it became apparent a few months ago, my wife and I left London and moved a little further North, to Milton Keynes. A city that, before moving to England, I only heard mentioned by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in Good Omens.

Stony Stratford to Westcroft via the western expansion area. 7 stops, 4 schools, dedicated bus lanes already built. The infrastructure exists — the service doesn't.

When I last wrote about AIs (well, technically, LLMs), I have noted that I'll never use LLMs to write articles for this blog. I am not breaking said promise! Much as I've been tempted to let an LLM write a "Privacy Policy" page (since it would all be boilerplate anyway, I'm not tracking anything, and the only third party cookie is from WordPress/Automattic themselves), I don't plan on ever letting an LLM try to pass for me.

Almost exactly 20 years after the first mention of audiobooks on my blog, have I found the solution to all my woes to manage them, have them accessible, and organizing them? I think, probably, yes.

Long-time readers of the blog might remember that a few years ago I bought a Neptune 4 Pro. This was back when we lived in London, I had a bit more spare time on my hands – as most of my job involved talking more than coding – and I was playing around with a few electronics projects, for which a 3D printer is a great companion.

A contrarian display of the status of IPv6 deployment

You may remember that a couple of years ago I wrote a post about trying to find a better workflow to manage the waterfall of PDF documents that me and my wife receive on a regular basis: bank and credit card statements, electricity (and now gas), water, and phone service bills, invoices, and so on. This became particularly more important as we prepared to…

I know it's getting old having to preamble this, but what you're about to read is my own personal opinion, does not represent my employer, my employer has had no preview of what I'm writing, etc. Before someone tries putting words in my mouth (or as it turns out, on my blog), no article you've read or you'll ever read on…

When my wife and I started looking for the house we wanted to buy, we have been looking at both second hand, and newly built homes, as both of those end up with a different set of tradeoffs. At the end, we decided the right trade off was to get a new build — and it turns out that almost all of the new builds being sold are sold "on plan", with contracts drawn up well before the house is finished.

This is an extended, long-form version, of something I mentioned in passing on Threads. Just in case you think I keep repeating myself. Despite the awfully silent 2025, for reasons I explained previously, I've been writing this blog for over 20 years. Almost all of that is in English (though the original posts were in Italian), almost all of that is in long-form (though there were a few short, near-microblogging posts, from the time before Twitter), and very little of it being stream of consciousness (the early Italian posts were so.) This would suggest I'm quite comfortable with writing prose, and I even enjoy it to a point, right?

Preamble and full disclosure. The topic I'm writing about in this post is somewhat connected to my employer, Meta Platforms (i.e. the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp), who dabbles in payment rails in certain markets, and has dabbled on a larger basis before. I am not involved in any of those products, have no insider knowledge of their internal work, or their communications with the various regulators, consortiums, or national agencies.

I'm not a big fan of the whole "wrapped" meme from services — a lot of things for me don't quite line up on a calendar year basis, so I don't find that particularly compelling to look at. I also find it fairly silly to "wrap" an year at the beginning of December for any service that doesn't have seasonal patterns — the reason why Spotify, the ur-wrapper, releases theirs well before the year's end, is because for many people, most of December is spent playing Holiday music of one kind or…

One of the things that seriously annoy me about being on the Internet, particularly around the communities heavily influenced by Doctorow and Stallman, is that most of those members, confronted with business decisions influencing design and implementation of devices and services, can only respond with one of two discussion-terminating memes: enshittification or defective by design. I find these answers annoying because they neither attempt to understand how those decisions are made, nor identify a working strategy to make things any better.

Nearly exactly five years ago, after my wife and I left our first flat in London, I wrote a post explaining the reasons we left. I thought it would be a good fit to explain why, five years later, we left London altogether and now effectively live in the suburbs. So first of all, I have to say I don't regret…

Hint: not far at all. If you're one of the handful of readers of this blog, you probably noticed that I've been awfully quiet for quite literally most of 2025. Unlike the previous time I took a sudden hiatus, the reason this time is a happy one: my wife and I decided to move out of London, and get our own place, given the…

Welcome to my Diabetes UK One Million Step Challenge page! I’m stepping up for Diabetes UK this summer to support the 5 million people in the UK who live with diabetes, day in day out. And you can too...

YouTube video by Eurovision Song Contest

Welcome to my Diabetes UK One Million Step Challenge page! I’m stepping up for Diabetes UK this summer to support the 5 million people in the UK who live with diabetes, day in day out. And you can too...

Our company recently announced a fundraise. We were grateful for all the community support, but the Internet also raised a few of its colle...

Enhance any space with WoodUpp's Moss panel: sustainable, maintenance-free decor that adds greenery and acoustic benefits to your home or office.

Welcome to my Diabetes UK One Million Step Challenge page! I’m stepping up for Diabetes UK this summer to support the 5 million people in the UK who live with diabetes, day in day out. And you can too...

A contrarian display of the status of IPv6 deployment

While I understand the critiques coming from many of my peers for any "AI" project, I want to…

A selection of Genki Gear shirts — and a Latte plushie! This week's sARTSurday is not going to…

Listen to the latest episodes of Untaxing on BBC Sounds.

Illustration by Furryviza In my previous post about the life of a maintainer, I noted how more often…

Writers Sara Collins and Oliver Burkeman share books they love with Harriett Gilbert.

So I disassembled my Whirlpool AP330W air purifier, and yes I keep thinking this was a white label, low-quality job, and it's possible there is no real way to replace the filter!

This Time Self-Hosted

A quick review of a decent piece of "sleep technology" that has been making my sleep more restful over the past few weeks.

What if, instead of being surprised when an item survives a few years, we shopped only for things that will last?