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You Should Write to Your UK MP about Corruption Now

Sat 6th November, 2021
by

2 min read, 263 words.

Category: politics

Tags:

I’ve just emailed my UK MP to complain about government corruption & Owen Patterson. You should do the same. As always, we need as many people as possible to speak out.

This is what I wrote, if anyone wants some ideas:

<My Name>
<My Address>
<My Email Address>

Dear <MP Name>,

Like many others, I am angered - but not very surprised - by the latest revelations of government corruption, revealed by the corrupt behaviour of Owen Patterson.

I do have to admit to being slightly surprised that the government’s reaction to this was naked collusion and a blatant attempt to water down the rules & standards!

The existing Committee on Standards needs to be strengthened, not weakened by the introduction of another Conservative-dominated committee overseeing its work.

The government needs to adopt the recommendations of numerous independent bodies - such as the …

Continue reading “You Should Write to Your UK MP about Corruption Now”

A ‘git up’ alias that works for any default branch

Mon 1st November, 2021
by

1 min read, 165 words.

How to find a git repositories default branch name

Speedrunning Computer Games History with a 6yr Old - Part 4

Sun 19th September, 2021
by

2 min read, 466 words.

updated Wed 20th October, 2021

Category: personal

Tags:

Hand-drawn map of the Kingdom of Hyrule.
Figure 1. Our hand-drawn map of the Kingdom of Hyrule. I drew a 2x1 grid in Inkscape and printed it out, then we filled it in as we went along.

It’s been about six months since the last update. We’ve mostly been camping, playing outside and generally enjoying the summer - although we have also squeezed in some gaming, here and there.

Favourite Games So Far

We spent almost all of our game time playing Legend of Zelda. It’s a towering achievement – a truly great game. I’m amazed that this thing is from 1986 – it doesn’t feel like it.

It’s also a great example of a different kind of co-op game. One where you play together by collaborating: discussing what to do & where to go next, how to tackle things, etc…​ We also took turns …

Continue reading “Speedrunning Computer Games History with a 6yr Old - Part 4”

How to Contribute a Change to Nginx

Sat 14th August, 2021
by

5 min read, 1143 words.

updated Fri 17th September, 2021

Category: tech

Tags:

Two screenshots of the nginx Welcome page, side-by-side, showing the page before the change and afterwards. The one on the left is dark-on-light and the one on the right is light-on-dark.
Figure 1. The nginx “Welcome” page, before & after my intended change.

I wanted to add dark mode support to the default nginx “Welcome to nginx” page. This is about the simplest change I could choose to make - it’s a simple, backwards compatible, small additive change to one single index.html file. My initial version of this change looks like this, and is added to the files <style> element, in the <head> section:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  body {
    background-color: #363839;
    color: #d1cec9;
  }
  a {
    color: #c4c4ff;
  }
}

So, this is the process of getting that change from my brain, into the upstream nginx codebase. 

Continue reading “How to Contribute a Change to Nginx”

Cssmin is Unmaintained & has a Bug with Complex :is Selectors

Thu 5th August, 2021
by

1 min read, 126 words.

cssmin is unmaintained & has a bug with complex :is selectors

Custom Per Page CSS With Pelican

Sat 24th July, 2021
by

2 min read, 317 words.

updated Sat 2nd October, 2021

Category: tech

Tags:

Sometimes I want to have a just a tiny bit of CSS that’s unique, just for one page or post. I don’t want a whole stylesheet, or to have to add this to my site-wide theme, just for one post – I want a simple way to add it in the post itself.

This is how I did it:

Continue reading “Custom Per Page CSS With Pelican”

The CSS :is selector is pretty neat

Mon 19th July, 2021
by

1 min read, 119 words.

You can use the new CSS :is selector to write complex CSS selectors in a much more compact way

Don’t Put Eggs Under Your Tomatoes, if you have Raccoons

Tue 13th July, 2021
by

1 min read, 126 words.

They will dig up your garden to get them.

Running python webservers on port 80 without root

Sun 11th July, 2021
by

1 min read, 175 words.

updated Fri 1st October, 2021

How to allow python (or anything else) to listen/bind to port 80 without being root

Ninja is a surprisingly nice build system for tiny projects

Tue 22nd June, 2021
by

1 min read, 154 words.

Ninja is a surprisingly nice build system for tiny projects. That's more or less the opposite of what it's designed for, but it works really well for tiny things.