I always try and smile if I meet the eye of someone I'm passing. But I'm shocked by the number of people who don't smile back. Maybe their brain just doesn't process the encounter fast enough for them to smile 🤷#
Wednesday, 23 September 2026
One my least favourite parts about buying coffee from a coffee shop is the to-go containers – they keep the drink hot for ages. Useful for some people I'm sure, but not for me. I haven't had caffeine all morning and I need it.#
But I bought this drink 30 minutes ago and it’s still way too hot to drink. ☕️#
Google Maps on the web is painfully slow these days. It's close to unusable at times.#
There must be 250+ desks at my companies office. Each with two monitors attached to a very versitle arm where you can put the monitors into portait mode. But not a single person has a monitor in portrait mode.#
Maybe they just don't realise it's possible (though after I did it and my boss noticed he let employees know via his technology newsletter that it's possible). But still no one has done it.#
To be fair, I've put mine back in landscape mode. A regular 21" monitor turned sideways isn't wide enough for certain content.#
I didn't realise that GitHub has its own version of Patreon: GitHub Sponsors (example of one here)#
I've got quite a fancy – though simple – homepage these days: clowes.me. But I have to admit, I do love those old school simple HTML homepages of old.#
They're often hosted on the domain of the University they work for, haven't been updated since 2007, and have an outdated photo of themself on there.#
Some examples:#
When I create a website I very quickly start adding things which increase the load time. Custom fonts, JavaScript to do various things, complex CSS.#
So I'm rather enjoying how lightweight the site currently is (when there's no images involved anyway. I need so sort something out there, as currently there's no resizing or CDN, just the raw images delivered from a server in the Netherlands). Your average post page is about 6 KB:#
And there's just two files to load the page – the page itself and the CSS:#
Will I be tempted to add things? Probably. But there's something magical about how fast it loads right now. Someone could visit my blog on dialup and I'm sure it would load fast still.#
It's almost spooky how quickly things loads. It feels like I'm loading local files.#
Actually, I was lying about this blog not doing anything to make images more efficient in my last post.#
It is! It's reducing the width/height and also doing some sort of compression, I presume. Clever Claude.#