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Sean D. Sollé

@sd.solle.uk
571 followers 831 following 5K posts

I write software and terrible, terrible jokes. (Thank you for putting alt-text on your images).

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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 22/04/2026
Bought an ice lolly for the first time in ages. I'm sure the jokes on the stick used to be better than this:
A wooden lolly stick with the single word "Rowntree's".
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 20/04/2026
This is absolutely brilliant … please make sure you aren't drinking tea when you watch the teaser video, because the logo alone almost made me spit-take:
The new, Onion-owned Infowars logo: INFOWARS in an all-caps sans-serif font, "INFO" in bold, and "WARS" in an narrow style.

The final stroke of the W runs diagonally bottom left to top right, perfectly parallel with the first stroke of the A, hinting at italic, but the final stroke of the A is vertical and parallel to the same in the R.

Some clever hand-tweaking pushes the upper curves of the R and the S Together to form single glyph, with the upward curl of the S tucking neatly inside the left leg of the R.

INFOWARS letters are in rainbow colours (red on the left, violet on the right), and the 'O' is — of course — the Onion logo.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 19/04/2026
For fans of alt-text, here's the unpictured bench from the previous post.
A weathered wooden bench, with my feet (in sneakers) and a copy of "H is for Hawk" all resting on top of an earth-brown towel placed on its seat.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 19/04/2026
Bought "H is for Hawk" the day it was published, and read it in a suitable landscape. Just back from seeing it at the cinema. Hands down the most heartbreakingly wonderful adaptation of any book I've ever read.
A photograph of "H is for Hawk" taken from an (unpictured) bench atop Sharpenhoe Clappers.

In illustration of Mabel the goshawk stares from the cover. Behind her is English countryside as far as the eye can see, lit by shafts of sunlight breaking through thick clouds like daggers through a duvet.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 18/04/2026
You should always check both sides before completing the transaction …
A photograph white and ginger cat asleep in the grey foam insert of a packing box. He is occupying the largest of five holes.

Alas, I have no idea who owns this cat, who took the photo, or what the box originally held ☹️
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 17/04/2026
Hah. I once decided that a nail brush couldn't be a brush for cleaning nails, because why would anyone want to clean nails before hammering them in? A nail brush was clearly akin to a wire brush — i.e. a brush made from nails. Like this:
What my brain reasoned a nail brush was.

In fact I was thinking of a thing for combing wool — aka a "flax hatchel":

https://www.gleekrueger.com/store/p71/19th_c._Flax_Hatchel_Oak_&_Forged_Iron_Carding_Tool_Primitive_Hetchel_Hackle.html#/
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 14/04/2026
Gravy a song: ♫ Still Gravy After All These Years ♫
Paul Simon, as featured on his 1975 "Gravy" album. He's standing on a metal fire escape with city buildings behind him, wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt, jeans, and a pork pie hat ready for the gravy.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 14/04/2026
The only fintech I care about is my Nokia.
Photo of my hand holding my Nokia 6150e GSM phone. Its bitmap LCD display reads "CELLNET" and it has full bars for battery and signal. The display shows "Menu" and "Names" at the bottom left and bottom respectively, above two dedicated physical buttons that straddle an up-down rocker.

On the next row, a green "call" button and a red "hang up" button perch above the 1 & 3 keys of a standard three column, four row numeric keypad, with 1-9 as a 3x3 grid, and *0# on the bottom row.

Despite receiving a signal from CELLNET (now O2), the phone is branded Orange (now EE), because I've unlocked it for any network.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 10/04/2026
Night all! ♫ commencing countdown, engines on .… ♫
Screenshot of iOS alarm app taken just now, showing an 0055 alarm for the Artemis 2 splashdown
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 10/04/2026
"Wearing the traditional jacket sewn from printouts of my words …"
A photo of Morris Dancers wearing rag jackets and hurling sticks back and forth between each other. 


https://www.priddyfolk.org/lineup/dancing/
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 09/04/2026
There's an old joke about the best place to keep a nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away. @theoatmeal.bsky.social has a lovely twist on that …
Screenshot of section of an Oatmeal cartoon. It's mostly white text on a sort of deep browny purple background:

The Sun 

A friend of mine and fellow ModelS owner recently had solar panels installed on his house. Even under grey Seattle skies he managed to reduce his energy bill by 80%

What I find insanely wonderful about this is that technically my friend is now driving a car which is powered by the MOTHERFREAKIN SUN 

[An arrow points from the last two words to a cartoon of an electric vehicle with its charging cable plugged into the sun].

I love this idea. In a traditional gasoline automobile there's a combustive explosion happening in the engine block, which is located roughly 36 inches from my crotch. In my friend's case, this explosion is happening on the surface of the sun, which is located approximately 92 million miles from my crotch. 

[A hand-drawn graph, with Y axis labelled "LEVEL
of HAPPINESS" and X axis labelled "DISTANCE
OF CROTCH FROM EXPLOSIONS" at 3 feet, the level of happiness is zero, and annotated with a sad face. At 92 million miles, the level of happiness is almost off the scale, as indicated by a smiley face].
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 09/04/2026
"An electric vehicle charges at 3.6kW for one hour. How many kilowatt hours does it receive in that time?"
Screenshot of ConnectedKerb's iOS app, showing its 3.6kW charger delivering 3.63kWh in — erm — 34 minutes.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 06/04/2026
It took about five minutes for that to go through 🤣
Screenshot of me replying to Quinn's post, with "Processing … " and a spinning daisy progress indicator.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 06/04/2026
"This is a rebellion, isn't it? I rebel!"
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 06/04/2026
I don't know how many times I've watched this since it first aired, but today is the first time I noticed *this* twenty seconds into the video …
Screenshot of Too Many Cooks, twenty seconds in.

Morgan Burch sits at a desk covered in books in her bedroom. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she's looking over her glasses at us (the viewer). Her name is superimposed in a yellow serif font with a back drop shadow (it's the title sequence).

There's a globe and a table lamp to her right, a busy noticeboard on the wall behind her, and to her left is
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 04/04/2026
And, frankly, having had a BP (yes, as in, British Petroleum) CHAdeMO charger with buggy firmware make my EV desperately unhappy, I'd much rather trust code I could review myself 🤣🤣
A BP Pulse "Tritium" DC charger with buggy CHAdeMO code that the support operative said "oh, yeah, we have no end of problems with those" on hearing I'd been foolish enough to plug a Nissan Leaf in.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 04/04/2026
Yeah. Leaf was UK's best-selling EV, so CHAdeMO was everywhere for ages. More and more though, new sites here are going CCS only. Worse still, when the CHAdeMO side develops a fault, it doesn't get fixed. There's a bug in certain firmware releases of a popular charger that decides it's 1970 …
Photo of an Osprey DC charger reporting that it's 1970, and it's fully charged my EV to 1%.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 04/04/2026
Before you put down money on the Leaf, buy a copy of LeafSpy, and a compatible (it's picky) Bluetooth OBD dongle. It'll tell you in an instant if the battery is shagged 🤣 SOH = "state of health" — my battery will be eight years old in August, and is still at 91% of it its factory capacity.
A screenshot of LeafSpy, showing the state of my EV'e battery. It's 72% charged (how full the tank is), and 91% healthy (compared to brand new).
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 02/04/2026
Well that's not terrifying at all …
A screenshot of the chess.com iPhone app, suggesting I play a match against a chessbot called "The Clown".

The screenshot shows a green-and-white chessboard in its starting position, and a cartoonish illustration of a clown — riffing on the "Queen's Gambit" TV show promo image of the main character resting her chin in the her hands while propping her arms on the table.

The clown appears to have a green pawn screwed into her head at a jaunty angle.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 02/04/2026
… when you ask to see who reposted it …
Screenshot of Bluesky showing that one person reposted my post, but that the post has had no reposts yet 🤣
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 02/04/2026
Ooooh! And now it's vanished from my list!
Screenshot of my Repost Bots list — now empty!
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 02/04/2026
I wonder if BlueSky are terrified of accidentally suspending their entire user base 🤣 ClearSky shows > ⅓ accounts deleted! When I find 'em, I add them to a list. It's interesting how their handle gets disconnected first (so they only show as a did: ID), and then that eventually disappears too.
Screenshot of ClearSky.app showing 60 million accounts, of which 39 million are active, and 21 million have been deleted.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 01/04/2026
Loving the original Dr Who homage!
Screenshot of BBC News coverage of the Artemis 2 mission which looks spookily like the black & white time tunnel title sequence of Dr Who in 1963
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 01/04/2026
Was worried I might be asleep …
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 01/04/2026
Man, I know take-off is terrifying, but you'd think with all that adrenaline the four astronauts would have been able to push that door harder than the two ground crew on the other side.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 29/03/2026
Hah!
Six boxes of 78mm halogen bulbs in transparent  plastic ziplock bag, held in front of a cone-shaped wall-mounted ceramic halogen uplighter throwing a large pool of light up the white wall, and a smaller pool down below it.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 29/03/2026
Want to see what you're up to while breadmaking or other oven-related activities? Then you need a …
eBay listing for a Baker Light.

The photograph shows a ceramic socket and a plug made of Bakelite, an early plastic.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 28/03/2026
It's great you can hear that I've left a tap running, Shazam — it would be more helpful if you told me which one.
Screenshot of iOS Shazam app.

It's mostly blue, with the Shazam logo's stylised "S" in white in the centre.

Large white text reads "Tap to turn off" above the logo.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 27/03/2026
I'm glad this DC power connector that works at a frequency of "once a day" handles high speed transmiss.
Photograph of small cable that lets you power an old-fashioned computer thing with a more modern computer thing from a popular online auction site.

It is labelled "Pure copper core, high speed transmiss".

High speed transmiss isn't really something you need for an item that runs at roughly 12 millionths of a hertz
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 26/03/2026
And even the branches are just leaves in the great tree of life. So really, everyone's a leaf...
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 26/03/2026
Killed two birds with one stone …
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 25/03/2026
I just want an edit button.
A screenshot of a BlueSky post that reads like a Slashdot post from 20 years ago:

I know l've said this before and recently, but I'm over the skeuomorphic UX of Bluesky that makes it look and feel like a 20 year old social media app.
I'm ready for new experiences for this kind of media/data. This information architecture is played out. Let's try some new ideas with other clients.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 25/03/2026
I bought this from @sonnyross.bsky.social — alas it was limited edition, so I don't think you can buy your own — but there's other lovely things in the shop: www.sonnyross.com/shop
A print of the now famous "I don't use AI, I'm not a fucking loser" art, atop my keyboard instead of in a frame where it should be.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 24/03/2026
Same.
Dolores from Westworld agreeing that the post doesn't look like anything to her.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 24/03/2026
But I didn't have one of those in the house! I did, however, have the remains of an old USB 1.0 hub that decades ago I bought from a Pound Shop, which willingly gave up its USB A sockets …
A green printed circuit board (PCB) which once upon a time sported four USB A sockets, but is now sitting on a pine workbench next to two recently-removed USB A sockets.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 24/03/2026
Ah, movie magic!
Fairground photobooth scene from 1978's Grease, during the number "You're The One That I Want" — a painting of Fay Wray and King Kong with cutouts for folks to poke their heads through, to be photographed as if they were a hairy ape or damsel.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 23/03/2026
So why did I solder up a cable that lets you plug two USB devices together? To connect my lovely USB train to my Raspberry Pi Zero!
A photograph of a pine bench, with a Raspberry Pi Zero in its official raspberry-coloured case and an S-Tek four port USB 2.0 hub.

One of the Pi's micro-USB sockets has a power cable plugged in.

The other micro-USB socket has a micro-USB to USB A cable plugged in — the same cable you'd use to sync a phone, or a Kindle, or to flash a Pi Pico.

Its USB A plug is plugged into the dongle I soldered up this afternoon, which connects it to the USB A plug on the hub!

The hub has two other USB devices plugged into it — their cables disappear off-screen, but I can tell you they're a keyboard and mouse — which the Pi Zero happily detects!
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 23/03/2026
I've made an illegal USB cable. If the USB police come round, can someone call my USBrief?
Two USB "A" sockets soldered back to back — perfect if you ever wanted to plug a USB mouse into another USB mouse.

The sockets are a shiny sliver metal, with white plastic slots to align whatever you're plugging in. They're joined by with four wires — red for +5V, black for 0V, and grey and white for data.

They're sat on a pine workbench. Almost out of shot are a USB plug, a piece of twisted pair white/grey cable, and a blue-handled wire cutter.The vegan police from Scott Pilgrim. They're pointing their fingers like guns, and green laser beams are firing from their index fingertips.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 22/03/2026
The term "escalate to de-escalate" comes from this June 2015 statement by Robert Work (Deputy Secretary of Defense) and Admiral James Winnefeld (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) before the House Committee on Armed Services: docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/...
Screenshot of a paragraph from https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20150625/103669/HHRG-114-AS00-Wstate-WinnefeldJrUSNJ-20150625.pdf

Russian military doctrine includes what some have called an "escalate to de-escalate" strategy - a strategy that purportedly seeks to deescalate a conventional conflict through coercive threats, including limited nuclear use. We think that this label is dangerously misleading.
Anyone who thinks they can control escalation through the use of nuclear weapons is literally playing with fire. Escalation is escalation, and nuclear use would be the ultimate escalation.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 22/03/2026
I absolutely adore "10 Things I Hate About You"! What's lovely about that prop is that it's very likely the actual book, with a dustcover whipped up by the art department at the very last minute, after someone decided the title needed to be EVEN BIGGER than the large print edition 🥰
Photograph of G. K. Hall & Co.'s Large Print Edition of The Bell Jar.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 22/03/2026
Spider-Man tells Stegron (an anthropomorphic pterodactyl riding a triceratops): "YOU CAN REWRITE DNA ON THE FLY, AND YOU'RE USING IT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO *DINOSAURS*? BUT WITH TECH LIKE THAT, YOU COULD CURE *CANCER*!"

Stegron replies: "BUT I DON'T *WANT* TO CURE CANCER. I WANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO
DINOSAURS."
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 21/03/2026
Ahahahahaha — OF COURSE they're shilling VPNs to bypass region locking. (Thanks Aric for suggesting the movie).
Screenshot of JustWatch suggesting I use a VPN to violate the terms of service of USA-based streaming services to watch Hudsucker Proxy from the UK …
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 21/03/2026
My iPhone 3 was the only one I didn't keep — passed it on to a friend when the 4 launched. I love that it wrote its name in its early pictures as just "Apple iPhone" — no model number yet!
Screenshot of the EXIF info in the first ever iPhone pic — IMG_0001 — I ever took.

It's dated 11th July 2008, and is a 2MP 1200 x 1600 image — taken inside with no flash, so grainy as anything 🤣

At this point Apple didn't include lens info!
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 21/03/2026
Today in "Enshitification Of Everything": Streaming guide JustWatch pollute their own results with sponsored "Watch similar movies" result. Dude, your ONE JOB was to list the services with what I asked for, but Amazon wave a wodge of fivers at you and you drop trou & defecate on your own product?
Screenshot of UK search results for "Tick Tick Boom". It's on Netflix, but not on Amazon — although you wouldn't know that from JustWatch's shitty search results.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 20/03/2026
Hey! I'm not sending you any more birthday presents if you're going to call them weird!
A not at all weird Schramm Javelin Prototype - a single-seat aluminum body helicopter designed by B.J. Schramm, 1965

It's parked on a concrete airfield, looking distinctly like Luke Skywalker's landspeeder, except purple. A man in a grey suit sits at the controls, clearly overwhelmed by the instrument panel.

A woman wearing a classic sixties orange and yellow outfit and sporting a highly appropriate beehive hairdo stands beside the cockpit.

She laughs politely as the man says "there are so many dials!" for the third time. "Yes", she says, "but you've had your photo taken, and now I need to get to my birthday party, so out you hop".
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 19/03/2026
"Computer, crop this image so it really enhances the size of the hamster"
AI slop of a cartoon hamster wearing a Godzilla costume holding a peanut, standing in a city.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 19/03/2026
Especially if the coffee is served in an overly large mug.
 A swan swimming in a cup of coffee. It's crudely sketched on a phone notes app, so its neck is too short, and you can't see its feet paddling furiously.

It's unclear whether the swan is tiny or the mug is huge.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 18/03/2026
Screenshot of now-deleted tweet from James Colley (@JamColley there, @colley.bsky.social here):

"Garfield is a cat and doesn't have a job. The only ostensible difference between Monday and any other day is that Jon suddenly isn't around after having been home all weekend. Garfield doesn't hate Mondays, he loves Jon and is too proud to
say it."

9:05 PM • Feb 17, 2018
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 16/03/2026
Did you know the brilliant disk imaging tool, Rufus, will happily accept a zipped image file as the source for writing to a disk? Clever, eh?
A screenshot of the awesome disk imaging tool "Rufus", showing it almost halfway through burning a disk image that lives in a zip file.

Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/
Old Raspbian image: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2016-11-29/2016-11-25-raspbian-jessie.zipScreenshot of the contents of a zip file containing a single disk image, showing the 4GByte file compressed by 65%.
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Sean D. Sollé @sd.solle.uk · 15/03/2026
Shitty shitpost banger!
A photograph of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on barely gravel path leading from arches beneath a very low bridge, proving there's no limit how far I'll stoop in service of making a terrible terrible pun.
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