Remy Sharp
-
Accessible (I Think) Split-Cell Table Headers by Eric Archived Thoughts [link]
This really isn't the intended take away from Eric's post (which is worth reading), but I needed a CSS rule that targetting Safari (because their support is weird): /* this is gross and I hate it but it works to fix Safari’s layout of the table’s top headers */ @supports (font: -apple-system-body) Gross…
Published
-
FFConf 2026 is live: Things I Learnt [blog]
As with each year for the FFConf web site, I have a distinct idea of the visual style I want. It has zero to do with the content we're presenting each year, but I do love how FFConf's site can be creative. It was like that from the very first web site - the logo was designed in early 2009 in 12 variations…
Published
-
prop-for-that: CSS reacts, JS just listens [link]
This is neat. Effectively injecting a tonne of JavaScript based sensors into the elements that ask for the particular category via data-props-for, such as: With CSS like: @container style(--live-value: 100) { .gauge__num { color: var(--max-tint); } .gauge__flag::after { content: 'max'; } } Lots of useful…
Published
-
A bouncer in your pocket by Sacha Judd [link]
Sacha has an in depth analysis of the UK's recent announcements around social media websites and children's access to them. I wanted to pull a few quotes: The Internet Watch Foundation reported that child sexual extortion cases in the UK rose 72% in a single year — criminals tricking young people into…
Published
-
20 Years of Blogging [blog]
Today is the anniversary of the first blog post on this website from two decades ago. It was about client side JavaScript to automatically (albeit blindly) select the "active" navigation. Ironically, I'd probably do this on the server side these days. Admittedly, it's imported from my prior blog and…
Published
-
Enhancing with CSS Grid Lanes [link]
I've been catching CSS Grid Lanes in the socials this week, but somehow had it in my head that it was to do with the gaps (the lanes) between the grid. It's not, it's masonry (which, why not display: masonry 🤷 There's a also a decent (albeit stiff) video on how it works. TL;DR: mostly you can swap display…
Published
-
Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move to give kids their childhood back - GOV.UK [link]
The UK government has announced they're going ahead with a social media ban for 16 year old and under. In our household we've already had this restriction in place (at a network/DNS level) so it doesn't impact our kids experiences at all, but I do know from talking to the kids that the do wish their…
Published
-
AI designed pages and prompts [link]
Based on the output of this article the author has styled their project with different AI prompts. I think what I find interesting here is after the jQuery mobile themes and especially Bootstrap you come to just visually adapt the most common style. What this author has done is asked for the design systems…
Published
-
The “Nude” Ultimatum: Privacy Is Dead - The Unknown Universe [link]
The UK government's ultimatum to Apple and Google is a blueprint for mass surveillance. A warning on why "nothing to hide" won't protect your digital freedom. ... We're being steered toward a future where "safety" is just a euphemism for "unrestricted access." If I had read this a few years ago, I'd…
Published
-
More molly guards [link]
I love these little deep dives into bits of UX that we take for granted. Admittedly I think extending the idea of a Molly Guard to a "Are you sure" prompt is a bit of stretch, but it's a cute story either way. This is the extension of a previous post, Molly Guard in reverse which introduces the molly…
Published
-
Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers [link]
The "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. This is really interesting and I would love to see this set the tone for other countries (::cough UK::). If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google…
Published
-
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - Ted Chiang [link]
I didn't really need to read much past the title or subtitle, but it's still an excellent essay that does a good job of drawing comparisons to concepts we already understand, for example: The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness…
Published
-
Are you standard.site? [link]
Another (shorter) entry in how how devs are adding Standard.site to their web sites to enrich the social cards.I suspect we'll start to gravitat towards tools to help us to add these - which is what it looks like David is doing.Though I'm a little wary of how BIG the card image is on top of the extra…
Published
-
How I foot-gunned our newsletter this week [blog]
For the second year running, as part of our "stay sane" strategy for FFConf, Julie and I write and send a weekly newsletter. It's structured the same way so it means we have a much better line of sight as to what we have to say. The open rate is usually around 40% (though I know some email systems synthetically…
Published
-
The 30 year game [blog]
Today I'm releasing my Game Boy game called Marbles² (or Marbles Squared). It's a port of a game that I originally wrote back in 2002, but is a game that started in my life in (or around) 1996. The development this iteration of the game, the one in 2026, took me about a week and I haven't written a single…
Published
-
When the Cranes Fly South [book]
Took me a minute to get into, but then…I cried. The good kind. It took me until around 20% of the book to get on with it properly. I was struggling to even want to pick up the book. It's well written, but the subject, end of life, was so unappealing that I found myself wanting to avoid reading the book…
Published
-
NES Programming in 6502 Assembly [link]
Source: pikuma.com
Published
-
A popover backdrop anti-pattern [blog]
After attending recent conferences and learning that I can swap out buckets of JavaScript for the HTML native popover property, I've been using it liberally throughout my own projects. For little pop out menus it's perfect. Then I also started using it for modal boxes (yes, you might be thinking ahead…
Published
-
devtools: how to query through the shadow DOM [blog]
This is a literal TIL but was so handy I had to put it my blog so that I wouldn't forget it later. Thanks to Big Brain Keith Cirkel for sharing this. As (hopefully) you know, there's the $ and $$ functions in devtools. For querySelector and querySelectorAll respectively. Well there's also $$$ to query…
Published
-
Apps I use, that you might not know [blog]
This is a cheap post to share some of the apps (macos, sorry Windows users) that I use on a fairly regular basis and think some of you might not have heard of before (whilst still being useful).
Published
-
Lost Lambs [book]
Enjoyable, well drawn characters, a pleasure to read. I really enjoyed reading this book. The story floats like a butterfly from one character to the next and it works without losing the reader. The story, I think, follows the Flynn family and though they're painted as somewhat dysfunctional, they're…
Published
-
Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story [book]
"Our diverse literary heritage reveals that we do not need a single national story" I bought and read this book after seeing Caroline Lucas speaking with Zack Polanski during a live session of Bold Politics. It's a book that tries to reclaim "Englishness" from the weaponising that the Far Right have…
Published
-
Fixing my slow Mac network speeds [blog]
For a while now both my desktop Mac (running Sonoma) and my laptop (running Tahoe - do not recommend) have had sub-optimal network speeds. My Android phone, on our network, on the same SSID, speed tests at 1.1Gbps. My laptop gets around 160Mbps and my desktop pulls in around 80Mbps. That's quite a difference…
Published
-
Web of State of the Browser Day Out [blog]
Okay, that's a stupidly obscure title. It's meant to represent the combined events: State of the Browser and Web Day Out - two events I attended in the last month. The short version is: if you get the chance to attend these events or even anything similar, I'd highly recommend that you grab that ticket…
Published
-
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), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump…
Published
-
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 throughout the day, and as the years wear on it's rather dulled my memory - that's to say, I quickly forget what branch I was working on!
Published
-
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 Jule, my wife, has it bumped to 125%). This meta tag will use the system font size to adjust the font. Importantly, Josh also points out that the default…
Published
-
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 remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it. Overall well written…
Published
-
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. By 11pm on the 30th the last of the issues were resolved. Earlier today Jake asked me: what went wrong? Fucking, everything.
Published
-
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 was for myself. Being an long-in-the-tooth old dog, I tend to learn and trick, and roll it out again and again typically without taking the time to find…
Published
-
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, apparently part of a series (this being book 6) but stands fine on it's own. There's a few references to something that happened before, but doesn't…
Published
-
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 are all linked in this post or available on my books page. Longest book: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI - 496 pages Shortest…
Published
-
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 my own reading, but perhaps yours too.
Published
-
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 from the cover features a nice silly-ish part of the story where the main character will often run into a local squirrel and add his own voice in a back…
Published
-
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 know why this book took me nearly 60 days to read, but it did which makes the events at the start of the book feel so utterly far away from the end. I'm…
Published
-
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.
Published
-
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 landscape, particularly around agentic software dev has moved along, and perhaps this should have been posted originally back in March. All the same, maybe…
Published
-
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 Julie's birthday the following Tuesday (the first year her birthday was entirely swallowed by the event). So now as I sit writing this a full eight days later…
Published
-
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've seen a bit of writing about how these tools should be run in a controlled sandbox (because they can mess with the surroudning environment), and this…
Published
-
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, quotes, etc) in my component's templates. The extremely quick read is, add /* HTML */ to the front of the template. Case sensitive and space sensitive…
Published
-
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. Interesting project, possibly for mini personal projects that want to share some data (possibly without a database? unsure). But also in some kind of collaborative…
Published
-
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 that knew of our event, but they (understandably) saw us as it was in 2009. I think the vibes you came away with in the 2009 and 2010 events would be recognised…
Published
-
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 constantly reminding me how bad it is. This excellent article takes what was an attention to detail that we took for granted (because tech is supposed to "just…
Published
-
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 this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 months to finish reading (in my evening snippets) - but it was definitely worthwhile. It was this 90 minute…
Published
-
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 detail is superb too, specifically considering power draw you would need but also, importantly, the length of cables and types to handle data rates. Definitely…
Published
-
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 that the URL is sharable and savable (perhaps through a bookmark or in a markdown doc).His latest changes include:- better import design- more resilient…
Published
-
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 algorithms. Our entire family browse the internet (the web and internet) from behind a DNS proxy that blocks a lot of social media including Facebook/Meta/Insta…
Published
-
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 space for it to find me, and throughout the month of August, this year, it couldn't find me. Until today. 30th August. This day is the knife edge. The day…
Published
-
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 book, and it's not that at all (although Rhiannon, the protagonist, desperately wants that). It's actually written on the tin, In Bloom is Rhiannon's experience…
Published
-
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 on.
Published