Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1) [book] 🔗
Vivid voice, fun and dark and original. I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), espec [...]
remy sharp's b:log
Posts
git recent: what branch did I work on? [blog] 🔗
Mega short blog post, mostly for me to remember, but also might be useful to you. In a project I'll often work on and move around different branches t [...]
Try text scaling support [link] 🔗
I've had a larger phone because I got fed up with squinting at my screen, but because of that I also have the OS level font bumped to 115% (and I know [...]
Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2) [book] 🔗
Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War. I accidentally read Dogs of War in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't rem [...]
JS Bin down in 2026 [blog] 🔗
January 27th I got an email notification saying that JS Bin had become unavailable. Then next day real life human beings were asking what's going on. [...]
Bytes I can delete after all this time [blog] 🔗
For the last few years my work-work has mostly focused on back end software (particularly around APIs). This meant that any front end work I was doing [...]
A Very Merry Murder (Malvern Farm Mystery, #6) [book] 🔗
Fine. Easy read. Guessed the murdered though 🤷 Grabbed it for the Christmas period (slightly annoyed I finished it on Jan 2nd). It's decently written [...]
Books I read in 2025 [blog] 🔗
This post is mostly data driven (from my own web site's data) to give me a sense of the quality of the books I've read, otherwise individual reviews a [...]
My 2025 [blog] 🔗
I've been doing these posts ending my years, aiming to publish on the 31st, so I'm pleased that I've managed to get this post out the door. Mostly for [...]
The Satsuma Complex (Gary Thorn, #1) [book] 🔗
Light on the brain. Just the kind of read I wanted after a few longer books. Not 100% even throughout the book - but I'll come to that. The squirrel f [...]
Butter [book] 🔗
Made me hungry and could even smell the foods, but took me a long time to read which made it feel extremely stretched and disconnected. I really don't [...]
An opportunity to learn: Advent of Code [blog] 🔗
I've written about Advent of Code in the past, but that was 5 years ago, so this warrants a new post, and there's an extra opportunity, I think. [...]
Handing over to the AI for a day [blog] 🔗
Context: back in March 2025 I decided to put aside my scepticism and try AI driven development for the day. I appreciate that in 8 months, the AI land [...]
FFConf 2025 [blog] 🔗
I've been wanting to write and share my experience of this year's event but a number of things have slowed me down - not least of all that it was Juli [...]
Building an AI Sandbox with Docker [link] 🔗
As I think about how command line AI tools can be used, I know it's already a bit of the wild west not disimilar to the way we install npm modules. I' [...]
Syntax Highlighting in Web Component Templates [blog] 🔗
A simple but effective fix to working with web components and VS Code. I wanted to get syntax highlighting and prettier support (to auto fix indenting [...]
Automerge [link] 🔗
Version control for your data: Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast. Inte [...]
How has FFConf changed since it was known as Full Frontal? [blog] 🔗
Besides the name, the entire core foundation has changed. This question came up recently by someone who had either attended back in the early days or [...]
What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail? [link] 🔗
I accidentally upgraded to Tahoe (I didn't know it existed and thought I was moving to Sequoia and the UI design is all over the place, and it's const [...]
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI [book] 🔗
I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book. I do struggle reading non-fiction, and th [...]
Making a low-budget conference look high-budget using an ATEM video mixer and a long USB cable [link] 🔗
Niels Leenheer goes through a detailed setup on how to take a single HDMI to projection into a mini event setup with holding screens. The technical de [...]
CSS HDR Gradients [link] 🔗
Very cool CSS gradient tooling by Adam Argyle.It's so pretty all I want to do is play with UI forgetting that it'll actually give me CSS.I also like t [...]
Signal Pollution [blog] 🔗
Very recently I was forced to sign up to Meta due to a product purchase (don't at-me!) and I had forgotten what it was like to be part of the algorith [...]
Fifteen [blog] 🔗
I'd been waiting for the grief to find me. I wasn't actively looking for it, I know which memories to poke to feel real pain, but I wanted to create s [...]
In Bloom (Sweetpea, #2) [book] 🔗
No quite the same murderfest from Sweetpea 1, but still enjoyably angry at the world. I think I expected the same kind of murder spree from the first [...]
Getting my highlights & notes from KOReader [blog] 🔗
It's not an intuitive process and requires a few speciality commands to work, so it made sense that I write up the process so I can duck myself later [...]
Reasons to Be Cheerful [book] 🔗
Honestly not sure what I thought of the book… I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few ye [...]
Vibe coding and Robocop [blog] 🔗
I've been immersing myself in the AI news for the last few months, trying to get understanding of the landscape, what and why there's excitement, whet [...]
Unhooking from Amazon ebooks [blog] 🔗
Over the years we, as a family, have been moving our purchases away from Amazon, except in one single place: Kindle ebooks. For me it's that I'm incap [...]
Sweetpea (Sweetpea, #1) [book] 🔗
Funny, unwavering and dark. Rhiannon, Sweetpea, is according to BuzzFeed, a serial killer - and probably a psychopath. For the first half of the book [...]
The Radleys [book] 🔗
An easy read, good for the holiday. I chomped this down in a matter of days (though it helped being by the pool to spend more time reading). I've read [...]
Spike Milligan: Man of Letters [book] 🔗
A book of letters…kinda made me want to write letters… I picked this up based on "funny books" though I'm really not sure how I landed on this book. I [...]
The Left Hand of Darkness [book] 🔗
300 pages but wow it felt 4 times longer... I found the writings quite difficult to consume. A lot, if not all the names were sounds but without any f [...]
AI: did you check your work? [blog] 🔗
There's no denying that the web industry, as with many others, has AI and LLMs as a ubiquitous presence. There's all kinds of different uses for LLMs, [...]
Showing book clippings on my blog [blog] 🔗
After jailbreaking my Kindle and seeing how simple it was and how all existing functionality was retained, I spotted that there was a My Clippings.txt [...]
Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War [book] 🔗
Maybe you've read this book, and you feel a sense of despair. I think before read the book I had a sense of despair. This book did an excellent job o [...]
How I made an LED driver smart… [blog] 🔗
…by just a little. Our family bathroom has a cabinet with an IR sensor that turns on LEDs in the side of the cabinet. The IR sensor is "wave your hand [...]
Do politics belong at web events? [blog] 🔗
This question has been asked before and discussed before and I've always looked on from the sidelines, even though, as a conference organiser, I do in [...]
Making a Killing (DI Fawley #7) [book] 🔗
Wanted to like it more, the gimmicks frustrated me. I've read every DI Fawley book and I've always enjoyed them. I'm starting to think of these books [...]
The day piracy changed [blog] 🔗
It certainly wasn't today. It was some time ago, but I wanted to mark this in my blog as a reminder that once, long ago, piracy was, well, stealing. T [...]
Devs: draw your line [blog] 🔗
This post is for my developers out there, web and otherwise. We have super powers. We can make something functional from practically nothing. And you [...]
The Time Machine [book] 🔗
Facinating for when it was written, but felt like it was sort of missing a story. I'm definitely reading these older classics so that I acquaint mysel [...]
Upgrading USB devices to USB-C [blog] 🔗
For a small home project, my son suggested adding some under lights to a plant stand we recently added to our kitchen. I figured we could do this with [...]
How to disable Google Gemini in your Google Workspace [link] 🔗
Google's AI offering came along to paid accounts without permission or request. What made it worse is that it couldn't be turned off, which… I don't e [...]
Blog Questions Challenge [blog] 🔗
I remember seeing something very similar doing the rounds on that site we used to use called "Twitter", possibly back in 2007. Anyway, fast forward a [...]
Home Assistant: how get real-time UK electricity and gas [blog] 🔗
There's a number of ways to get real-time electricity readings into Home Assistant. I'm currently using a Puck.js to read the blinking light on my met [...]
The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2) [book] 🔗
Reeks of "cosy crime" - and that's good. There's a reason that Richard Osman's series has been a runaway success for many people (or at least I can be [...]
What is good web design, and bad web design? [blog] 🔗
My son, aged 13, was given this question for his homework recently. As someone (me!) having worked on the web professionally since 1999, I felt a conn [...]
The Echo Wife [book] 🔗
Could not put the damn book down! Very easy book to read, and annoyingly difficult to stop reading late at night. The story is told from Evelyn's pers [...]
Server isn't sending content length [blog] 🔗
As part of the ZX Spectrum community I wrote a tool that can download content over HTTP from a ZX Spectrum Next, but one prerequisite is that the cont [...]