ross

ross, 4 days ago to random

Product idea for UK primary school parents: A re-usable dressing-up costume for special school dress-up days. Hear me out…

Take a toga-style dress and sew on a bunch of Velcro patches.

Then sell kits of stick-on adornments. Fur (for cavemen day), a sash and gold bits (for Romans Day), red dots (for Comic Relief), coloured dots (for Children in Need) and various attachments for world book day!

Win!!

ross, 5 days ago to random

Why is everything about me so in-betweeny?

I'm a late Gen-Xer, but an early/borderline Xennial.

I was born and live in Swindon which is kinda on the border of West, Midlands, South and South West England.

I rarely hold extreme opinions.

I'm destined to be middle-of-everything.

ross, 7 days ago to random

Back from holiday! Yay! So what was the story with the hire car?

Well. We had some credit with a hire car company from a booking we cancelled years ago. We needed something bigger than our EV for this trip as we were taking an extra passenger. So we used our credit to hire a Peugeot 3008 “crossover”-style car. Petrol. Automatic.

What did I hate about it, apart from being really noisy at low speed and the jolts of gear changes that we weren’t used to?

ross, 15 days ago to random

OK. This week I become a proper full-time EV zealot.

I have hired a petrol automatic for a week.

It’s crap. I hate it. It’s loud. It’s unresponsive. The brakes are harsh. Petrol is expensive and smells.

Its only redeeming feature is the range.

Everything else is worse.

(Hybrids probably represent a good half-way. But gosh I love my EV)

ross, 17 days ago to random

I am This Close to ordering a garden office/studio. Exciting!!!

ross, 17 days ago to random

Still freaks me out that “0” is falsey in PHP. In some ways that’s super clever. But in other ways it’s super annoying.

Proper type hints save the day regardless!

ross, 20 days ago to random

I used to get excited by big tech announcements. But now it's all just so uninteresting. Is this because I'm old? Is it because there's just SO MANY keynotes and product launches now that it's too hard to keep up? Or... has it actually become boring and mundane for others too?

ross, 21 days ago to random

These EV Ultra-Rapid chargers at Sainsbury’s (UK Supermarket) are FAB! Real easy to use. And they give you a QR code that takes you to a personalised real-time view of your charge.

Real nice!

ross, 21 days ago to random

So. Yay! I finished an epic book.

It was GREAT! But I gotta be honest, I wish I’d spent 35 hours reading a book that had some kind of conclusion.

I know it was part 1 of many, but I still wished things were more wrapped up.

Also, there’s too much detail in battle scenes.

But what a great read. I was totally into it for most of the time and I’m not a big fiction reader.

ross, 24 days ago to random

I’m loving all the retro gaming and emulation stuff that’s happening in a big way now (yeah I know it’s not new).

Questions:

• is there any official way to buy ROMs? Will the game owners ever catch on to this? In happy to pay!
• are downloaded ROMs safe? Can they do anything bad?

ross, 30 days ago to random

Wow! This IS a big solar storm. Southern England. We can see aurora with Naked eye despite light pollution. Long exposures working well!!

image/jpeg
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ross, 30 days ago to random

The Scrabble game logic and scoring is so well ingrained in my muscle memory. But writing it down was really hard!

Not proud of the code that achieved this. It was pretty brute force!

ross, 1 month ago to random

My Scrabblish game now has skip/swap tiles! 🙌

Two more major things to add:

1. Double/triple squares
2. Instructions!

Then the rest is just polishing.

Really happy with how this turned out.

https://words.pico.games/

ross, 1 month ago to random

Loving working on the serverless Scrabble clone. Nice, intricate logic. Fun to test!

https://words.pico.games/

Fixed some simple, but hard-to-find bugs for edge cases tonight. You can now actually play a game right to the end! 🤦‍♂️

I'm thankful for people playing and reporting bugs! 🙏

Key things to add:

• Skip/swap tiles as a feature
• Double/triple squares on the board

Then it’s kinda complete!

Nice to haves:

• Some drag-and-drop or keyboard entry
• Some instructions
• Better UI/design

ross, 1 month ago to random

My son decided to try randomly typing a game code into the serverless-scrabble thing (games are encoded in URLs).

I mean... it TRIED!!! 😂

(If you want to know what's going on: https://rosswintle.uk/2024/04/static-not-scrabble/)

(If you're bored of all my talk about this... I'm sorry. I made something neat, and I really want people to use it!!!)

ross, 1 month ago to random

Oh dear. How awfully (or wonderfully!) middle aged am I now.

I have a preferred toothpaste brand.

And I’m buying bird feeders and watching the birds in my garden.

😂

ross, 1 month ago to random

This news story is a near-perfect Ross cross-over of:

• Grammar policing
• IT system ridiculousness
• Over-enthusiastic NIMBYism

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-68942321

ross, 1 month ago to random

Ooof. Shots fired on the weekly satirical news quiz show…

“I haven’t been to Rwanda, but I’ve been to Swindon. We should threaten to send asylum seekers there. That would put them off coming.”

ross, 1 month ago to random

Nice to see Chris being productive. I like the “right tools for the job” message here!

Launching New Sites on Astro
https://chriswiegman.com/2024/05/launching-new-sites-on-astro/

ross, 1 month ago to random

How long have I been a professional programmer?

Over 25 years. That’s how long.

What was I doing today?

Debating the relative merits of the following:

if (title)

if (Boolean(title))

if (title !== undefined)

if ((typeof title) != null)

if (title ?? ‘’)

I’m not sure if this is because of my experience, or despite it! 😬

ross, 1 month ago to random

TIL what the most dangerous animal (measured by how many people are killed by them) in the UK is.

VERY interesting!

ross, 1 month ago to random

Lol. Pop quiz for web dev nerds:

Why might you suddenly start seeing Stripe test card failures today?

ross, 1 month ago to random

People with publicly visible tattoos… how do you feel about people asking about them? Is it annoying? Or do you like it … is that the point?

ross, 1 month ago to wordpress

Excellent video from @briancoords on #WordPress dot-com (!) Studio that clarifies what it is and debunks what it is not.

https://youtu.be/QEP3H17BkVI

ross, 1 month ago to random

Have been playing my little Scrabble-like game with some play testers.

It’s a static, serverless, single-page app. And the absolute beauty of not having to log in is just brilliant.

I can click a game link in any browser on any computer and Just Play.

I want to make more stuff like this.

Backgammon next? That's gotta be super easy to encode.

Game: https://words.pico.games/

Write-up: https://rosswintle.uk/2024/04/static-not-scrabble/