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Monthly Meanderings: August 2026

2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another edition of “What’s Chris been up to?”. Fun fact: I very nearly published this post with a “[intro]” placeholder here instead of this paragraph, despite proofreading it multiple times. “Yep, that’s where the intro will go, all good”. Now instead we have this weirdly meta introduction.

Website updates and other projects

A few website updates this month, and one of them neatly addresses the “other projects” bit too. First, I’ve added a new fitness page which has some stats and information about my cycling and running. I’ve also added some fitness-related widgets to support that page and these monthly summaries, and a new music one you can see a bit further down.

I’ve also added what I think is quite a fun new feature: a post feed builder that lets you build RSS feeds containing only posts that are semantically similar (or dissimilar) to other posts. So if you want to only hear about my fitness journey you can pin a few of those posts, or if you want to exclude posts that talk about LLMs you can exclude a few of those. It’s basically super-charged fuzzy tags, but it means I don’t have to actually tag things.

I blogged about building a family of single-user services which is where most of my coding energy went this month. Those projects were almost entirely authored by LLMs, and I’m not hating the process. The models have got a lot better at coding, and I enjoyed getting to focus on the bigger picture aspects rather than getting bogged down in details. Rest assured, all the writing on my website is still 100% me. I am the load-bearing seam, here.

Entertainment

Back in March I said ‘I can’t do “what I listened to last month” stats until next month’, and then for the next four months completely forgot about it. Well, not any more! Now I come equipped with some stats about my monthly music habits:

	Album	Artist	Unique tracks played	Total tracks played
1	Fallen	Evanescence	8	40
2	Love, Drugs & Misery	Eva Under Fire	12	32
3	NEON VOID	Sumo Cyco	6	23
4	The Strange Case of…	Halestorm	11	21
5	Coming in Hot	DIAMANTE	9	20
6	Everest	Halestorm	7	20
7	Glory Days	Little Mix	5	20
8	From Zero	Linkin Park	9	19
9	KPop Demon Hunters (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)	KPop Demon Hunters Cast	7	19
10	No Need to Argue	The Cranberries	6	19

I suspect I won’t show this every month, as it’s probably going to be quite same-y. I, shockingly, tend to play music that I like more than that which I don’t. I’ll usually either put on my “favourites” playlist, or my “daily mix” playlist which biases higher-rated tracks over lower ones. So effectively this just becomes a noisy view over how highly I’ve rated the tracks in an album. Maybe I can control for that, but then I’m not sure what it’d actually be showing… “Here are all the albums I played this month that I don’t usually play because I don’t like them as much as the other albums I’m not showing any more”? It’s a bit wordy. Back to the drawing board with that idea, I think.

I was away for a few weeks this month, including a few days at a small LAN event. Being at a computer gaming event meant that we, naturally, played some board games. Apparently I hit an h-index of 23 from these plays. That’s 23 games I’ve played at least 23 times each. I’ve been at 22 since December last year: obviously the higher the number goes, the harder it is to reach. I also go on and off games (and the whole hobby at times), which doesn’t help on that front. Anyway, here’s ~~Wonderwall~~ the plays for this month:

6 plays
3 plays
3 plays
1 play
1 play

No films this month, but my World of Warcraft habit has picked back up with the launch of the new season. They’ve made Mistweaver Monk, my previous specialisation, a lot less fun to play, so I’m focusing on one of my many alts: a Restoration Shaman:

Level 90

Female Dwarf

Restoration Shaman

309 average item level

Hirameth-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Blacksmithing		41/100
Midnight Inscription		72/100
Midnight Fishing		35/300

Mythic+

Altar of Fangs	+10	23:10	329
Den of Nalorakk	+10	27:36	325
Kings' Rest	+12	28:57	370
Murder Row	+12	28:37	371
Ruby Life Pools	+11	24:28	340
Temple of Sethraliss	+10	30:57	321
The Blinding Vale	+10	24:38	327
Voidscar Arena	+10	22:37	329
Total M+ rating	2711

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

I don’t quite like it as much as Mistweaver in season 1, but it’s a lot nicer than Mistweaver in season 2. You can actually make health bars move when you press your healing buttons, rather than ignoring half of them because they’re not worth using.

Fitness

My running kick is still going. I’ve “officially” finished the couch-to-5k programme I was doing, and I actually hit 5k on the last day of the programme. I didn’t actually mean to do that: I was saving the 5k run for this week, but by the time I noticed I’d run “too far” it was close enough that I just kept going. I have an actual 5k race coming up this month, which is exciting. Once that’s over I’m planning to work my way up to 10k. I’ve added a few widgets to keep track of some stats:

activities

6h 5m

total time

103.6km

total distance

42.3km

longest distance

🏆️ New PB 1km 2:17 1:52
🏆️ New PB 2km 5:34 4:13
🏆️ New PB 5km 14:51 12:32
🏆️ New PB 10km 36:00 27:21
🏆️ New PB 20km 1:43:33 1:13:24
🏆️ New PB 30km no previous 1:54:25
🏆️ New PB 40km no previous 2:55:52

activities

6h 16m

total time

43.1km

total distance

5km

longest distance

🏆️ New PB 800m 5:56 6:02
🏆️ New PB 1km 7:35 7:36
🏆️ New PB 1 mile 12:28 12:16
🏆️ New PB 2km 15:35 15:16
🏆️ New PB 3km 24:32 23:05
🏆️ New PB 5km no previous 38:40

As well as the running, I did a couple of long (for me) cycle rides, clocking in at around 40 km. It’s a fun loop, but both times I did it I started flagging towards the end. The second time I made sure to eat and drink plenty along the way, and my legs still raised objections about halfway round. My next goal is 50 km which would let me get to the next town over and back but the route has a lot more elevation to go with its increased length, so it’s probably going to be quite a bit more taxing. I’m not sure when I’ll attempt that, as the weather is starting to turn. I was previously bemused when people mentioned “cycling seasons” and switching to indoor trainers. Then I wanted to go out when it was raining, and suddenly I understood. Running in the rain: surprisingly pleasant; cycling in the rain: no thank you.

Around the web

Hacker News In Uncompromised Detail

When I first read the title my gut reaction was “I know everything I need to know about Hacker News, right?”. The title is accurate though. There’s so much interesting stuff, presented really cleanly. It’s a good read.

A proposal for new Netflix content rating icons

Another dry sounding title, another fun article. It starts with a treatise on rating systems and ends with a lovely satirical list of rating ideas.

Find Git commits by commit message text

I like to think I’m relatively well versed in how to use Git. I can do an interactive rebase and everything! This tip from Ham was new to me, though, and is incredibly useful.

Novice Marathon Training Plan

Hal Higdon has a whole bunch of training plans. He literally wrote the book on marathon training. I’ll hopefully be following this plan next year, assuming I manage the 5k, 10k and half-marathon training! This would be the perfect plan for someone who’s run a half marathon a while ago, and is tempted to join me in my “marathon before I’m 40” goal…

Monthly Meanderings: June 2026

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

Writing these monthly posts is making me very aware of how quickly the year is going. I’m not sure I like that at all. June saw some truly horrible hot weather in the UK; it’s almost like murdering the planet with CO₂ emissions was a terrible, terrible idea.

My dodgy knee that I mentioned way back in the April post feels like it’s finally back to normal. I had low expectations of the physio service, and I’m glad to find I was utterly wrong. When I self-referred I got an e-mail the same day with some tailored exercise suggestions, and I’ve had two in-person sessions since. I managed to get some longer walks and a jog in this month, when I wasn’t camped in front of a fan to try and keep cool.

Website updates

Another month with no new posts. I’m just in one of those slumps where nothing quite takes my fancy. It’s a bit upsetting that the three most recent posts are all going to be monthly meanderings, though.

I did spend some time adding standard.site metadata and records for blog posts. In theory that means it’ll show up a bit nicer when presented on Bluesky, but I’ve not actually tested it in anger yet. As well as pretty embeds, having a standard schema for describing publications and posts feels like it could enable a lot of cool discovery/directory uses.

Other projects

Centauri, my reverse proxy, got a whole bunch of new features in response to some requests and problem reports from a friend. Mostly the changes were exposing more options for finer control over how certificates are obtained. Providers other than Let’s Encrypt require extra account details, have different rate limits, and so on.

The only other project of note this month is a new World of Warcraft addon called Who’s Got the Keys? that shows on-screen who has a keystone for the dungeon you’re currently waiting to start. I really like being able to scratch itches like that.

Entertainment

I mentioned my wax-and-wane hobby cycle last month. This month apparently films are back in for me:

There were some big surprises for me in both directions: films I expected to like such as Disclosure Day and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die absolutely missed the mark; meanwhile Midsommar I didn’t have any particular expectations of and it ended up stealing the top spot on my watched films ranked list.

Most of my other entertainment is still coming from World of Warcraft. I’m now reasonably comfortable with my spec, and my regular group of friends is well on the way to reaching a Mythic+ score of 3400 before the end of the season. Amusingly I’m currently in the top 20 for my spec on my realm, but that says more about the low population of the server than it does about my skill, I think!

My character is now about as fully geared as they’re going to get this season. There are some minor upgrades I could make but it’s not really worth it with only weeks remaining. I now also don’t get any real benefit from doing the standard open world weekly activities, so I’ve been spending a bit more time farming mounts and transmog in old content. I’ve also levelled a whole bunch of alts, but I’ve failed to find a single DPS spec I actually like. I’m now trying alternative healers just to get some variety when we do runs where we’re not pushing keys.

Around the web

Suspicious discontinuities

An old article by Dan Luu that recently resurfaced on Hacker News. It’s an interesting look at various series that have discontinuities and the reasons for those. I’m easily won over by cool graphs, so it’s not a surprise I saved this link.

Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM

A very funny spoof vulnerability disclosure that pokes fun at all the failure modes of LLM security tooling and the possible consequences of that.

Help I accidentally a wigglegram

Fun article where the author describes how they automatically made a bunch of “wigglegrams” (stereoscopic animated gifs) from their iCloud photo library. It’s interesting how just taking multiple versions of a photo can result in something novel like this.

Finding the Best Dog Treat with Statistics

I’m pretty sure this is actually some devious attempt to make me learn statistics, but it features a dog called Bebop, so I’m going to allow it.

Monthly Meanderings: May 2026

2026-06-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another wrap-up post. This is the first one I’ve felt reluctant to write, and I think it’s because I feel like I didn’t really do anything last month. Other than play a lot of World of Warcraft.

Website updates

No new posts this month, but I finished off the refactoring I mentioned in the last update. It’s been a very satisfying process, and working on the site feels a lot less like a chore now. Features are now entirely self-contained, instead of having bits and pieces scattered everywhere, and everything is wired up together with some automatically generated code. I’ll probably write a longer post about the architecture and the refactoring process at some point.

My World of Warcraft page got some updates, now showing achievements and stats about Mythic+ runs. It’s always nice to take a break from the game… and code things relating to it instead.

Other projects

I finished off glauncher, my native alternative to ulauncher and am now using it day-to-day, which is nice. I’ve never really liked making native user interfaces, but having an LLM generate code for Gio UI was pretty much pain-free. I’m now toying with replacing a few other simple apps I currently rely on that use Electron or Webkit with Go versions.

Entertainment

Let’s start with the non-World of Warcraft updates. I seem to be on a one-film-a-month cadence recently. This month’s was fine but not earth shattering:

This Is Spinal Tap

2026-05-30

Quite funny, and it’s interesting to watch something that’s become such a cultural touchstone, but coming to it 40 years on I find it a bit slow and meandering.

SNL UK wrapped up this month, but has thankfully been picked up for another season. I really enjoyed it, despite my initial misgivings about it. I’m now back down to exactly zero TV programmes I care about.

A few board game plays this month, but overall still in the “wane” phase of my wax-and-wane hobby cycle:

4 plays
3 plays

Then, finally, there’s World of Warcraft. I started playing a new class:

Level 90

Female Night Elf

Mistweaver Monk

307 average item level

Miraceth-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Leatherworking		100/100
Midnight Skinning		100/100
Midnight Cooking		100/100
Midnight Fishing		110/300

Mythic+

Altar of Fangs	+9	~~31:31~~	273
Den of Nalorakk	+10	27:22	325
Kings' Rest	+8	25:34	283
Murder Row	+10	32:00	322
Ruby Life Pools	+10	26:39	322
Temple of Sethraliss	+10	27:08	326
The Blinding Vale	+9	~~33:10~~	271
Voidscar Arena	+10	24:28	327
Total M+ rating	2450

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

I’m still mostly playing as a healer, but this one is a melee fighter who heals while doing damage. I previously shied away from melee classes as being right on top of the enemies always felt too chaotic compared to parking at the back of the room, but I’m actually really liking it. Once you get used to it, it’s a lot easier to keep track of the fight when you’re in the middle of things instead of hanging out at the back. This spec is currently one of the flavours of the month, it’ll be interesting to see if I still enjoy it as much when it falls out of favour.

Around the web

Making an original Jubilee line door button into a Hue light switch

A really cool electronics project, that does exactly what it says in the title. The finished product looks stunning, though.

llama.ttf

“llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.”

Departure mono

This is a really nice looking pixel font, and the web page demonstrating it is well done as well. Definitely going to be using it next time I need to render text in a small space.

Mitigating floods of posts in Artemis

James has been documenting his development of Artemis, a ‘calm web reader’, and I’ve been enjoying reading along. This particular post is interesting to me as it deals with a common problem with RSS readers (“the website has altered their feed in a bad way, now there are 50 ’new’ posts that you’ve already seen”) in a novel way that just seems so obvious in hindsight.

Monthly Meanderings: April 2026

2026-05-01T00:00:00Z

It’s apparently been a whole month since the last edition of Monthly Meanderings. Not sure when that happened. This month I’ve been to a LAN party, had an MRI, and have been trying unsuccessfully to get my doctor to change a prescription. The latter two are not doing much to help shake that middle-aged feeling I mentioned last month…

Website updates

Another pair of blog posts for this month: The Case of the Unchanging Config about a problem I had with a bind-mounted config in a Docker container, and Migrating from GitHub to Forgejo, a write-up of… well… migrating from GitHub to Forgejo. That one’s been on my to-do list for a while, so it’s nice to finally get it written up.

It’s not visible when you look at the site, but I’ve been doing a lot of refactoring this month. The existing design had a package for database operations, a package for the stylesheet, a package for shortcodes, and so on. As I bolt more and more things on this gets less and less useful: those packages get bigger and bigger, and trying to understand how, say, the music import functionality works means hopping all over the place. Instead, I’m moving towards having each feature contained in its own package. It defines its own stylesheet, database operations, HTTP handlers, and so on. They’re then all wired together at the top layer. There’s still some more to do on that front, but it’s progressing in a good direction, and I’m happier with the code.

The only actual visible change is the addition of a page dedicated to World of Warcraft that automatically imports some data from the game’s API. We’ll come back to that later!

Other projects

I made a trio of new tiny projects: pdsps, a reverse proxy for a Bluesky/ATProto PDS that overrides the age verification response so you don’t need to hand over ID; irc-adze, a plugin for irc-bot that receives and announces adze webhooks; and wow-spec-switch, a super-simple addon for World of Warcraft that lets you switch specialisation with a command.

I’ve also been working on a custom app launcher in the style of ulauncher but without requiring WebKit to render things. I’ve not yet polished it up enough to open source it, but it’s not far off.

Entertainment

Another single film month for me. It was a great one, though:

Project Hail Mary

2026-04-01

A film adaptation of a book I loved that’s actually good. Huh!

Ryan Gosling does great in what is often a solo act. Early on I thought the film was trying a bit too hard to be funny, but at some point it started working and I enjoyed it.

There are lots of parallels to The Martian, Arrival, and so on, but it’s a sufficiently different mash-up of the concepts that it’s not a problem.

I’m still enjoying SNL UK a lot more than I expected to, although I keep forgetting what day it airs. They should put it in the name or something.

The rest of my “entertainment” time has been spent playing World of Warcraft. I played an awful lot about 6-7 years ago, and have dipped in and out occasionally since. I got an MMORPG itch again recently and jumped back in, and I’m enjoying it a lot once again. I’ve been playing a healer properly for the first time (after enjoying healing in Final Fantasy XIV):

Level 90

Female Void Elf

Holy Priest

280 average item level

Methrica-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Alchemy		100/100
Midnight Engineering		92/100
Midnight Cooking		1/100
Midnight Fishing		4/300

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

Around the web

git-history documentation

The latest release of git added this handy-seeming history subcommand. It allows you to reword a commit, or split a commit up interactively, without having to go through the interactive rebase song and dance.

Git has acquired a bunch of new commands in recent releases, but I tend to ignore them in favour of the old ones I know well. This one will definitely get use from me, though.

Git Koans by Steve Losh

Sticking with the same theme, this series of koans about Git and its various quirks had me laughing. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably part of the target audience for it.

SQLite prefixes its temp files with etilqs_

I think I’d come across this before, but it’s still a fun anecdote. It reminds me of Daniel Stenberg’s e-mail collection; as the author of curl his name is listed on basically everything with the inevitable influx of people contacting him.

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

I love this approach to tracking how frequently things are used, and the weird sort of archaeological record you get from rotating the colours of the stickers used.

Monthly Meanderings: March 2026

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

Since last month’s update I’ve been unpleasantly reminded that I’m middle aged, through the medium of a dodgy knee. There’s nothing quite like not being able to stand up without groaning to underscore that you’re not young any more. The ongoing game of “will this seemingly mundane activity make my knee go funny again?” is a delight to play, too. I’m great at it.

Website updates

Two new blog posts this month: the longest way to represent a date is a short thought experiment on absurd date formats, and modern CSS is fun goes through some neat new CSS features I’ve used recently for this site.

I did some design tweaks this month: headers now have a blue background behind them¹, and a lot of components have been redesigned to have a consistent style. You can see that component in action in the new “now playing” widget I’ve added:

Icon for Hire — The Grey Scripted Scrobbled 0m ago

Instead of each component defining its own styles (which were mostly copied and pasted), there’s now a single class that handles the drop shadow, border, background colour, and the optional title. It also applies a consistent format to elements that are clickable: they use the blue accent colour for their borders, and have a glow effect shown on hover.

The now playing widget is part of a larger bit of work I did on importing some music stats. I’m pulling in the data from my Navidrome instance. A new music page shows my most listened albums and artists. Navidrome doesn’t store a complete play history, just the last play and the count, so I can’t do “what I listened to last month” stats until next month.

Other projects

Other than a minor bug-fix update to contempt, my Dockerfile templating/updating tool, I’ve not done much on my other open source projects. I’ve got a bit more work to do finish migrating all my repositories from GitHub to my private Forgejo instance. I’ve also been thinking about mirroring my public repositories to Codeberg so there’s a non-GitHub way to access them.

Entertainment

I apparently only watched a single film in March:

The Substance

2026-03-18

I really didn’t get on with this. It’s too long for what it is, and over-the-top in a way that just didn’t work for me.

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley were great, but nothing else really was. The cinematography and sound design were too affected, the plot was pretty shallow and obvious, most of the body horror fell into the uncanny CGI valley for me.

It’s not completely without merit: there were around 40 minutes in the middle where I was really into it, but that’s not really enough given it’s closing in on a 2.5 hour runtime.

There’s something to be said for the message it’s presenting about women in Hollywood, too, but it was very heavy handed. Dennis Quaid’s character is even called Harvey; it’s not so much a subtle nod as a sledgehammer to the face.

Instead of films, I’ve been watching a bunch of TV. After devouring The Pitt last month, I struggled to find something to fill the hole it left. I settled on catching up on Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D.. They’re both mostly about getting things done without personal drama becoming the primary focus. They’re not quite as grounded as The Pitt, but at least they’ve not completely gone off the deep end like 9-1-1 where the first responders end up in space somehow?

I’ve also watched the first two episodes of SNL UK. I didn’t have very high expectations, and it gave me a pleasant surprise. Both episodes so far have some hilarious sketches, and are obviously written by British comics with the typical darker, more sardonic humour that separates us from the USA.

Last but not least, board games! I spent a weekend at a tabletop/LAN event with friends, so got to physically play some games for a change. I also kept up with some turn-based games on Board Game Arena, as usual.

6 plays
4 plays
4 plays
4 plays
3 plays
3 plays
3 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
2 plays
1 play

Around the web

Warranty Void if Regenerated

Some really cool speculative fiction about a future where all software is written by LLMs, and the social effects that may have. Unfortunately the story itself is written with an LLM, and that becomes painfully obvious about a third of the way in. By that point I was already hooked, though.

My 2-step process for AI-free blogging

Speaking of LLM-generated text, this short piece by Manuel Moreale made me laugh. I’m by no means anti-LLM, but I really hate people publishing the output like it’s their own work. It breaks the social assumption that the writer put more effort in than the reader, and makes me wonder how much is hallucinated.

25 Years of Eggs

An interesting applied use of coding agents. I’m a sucker for personal statistics. I have no explicit desire to keep my receipts, or generate graphs of my egg consumption, but seeing the graphs makes me question that. The journey to get there is a great read, too.

I made a one-page notebook

The clever paper folding is interesting, but I really like some of the small touches on the page. There’s a nice little “in reply to” callout providing context at the top of the page, you can click to rotate the image further down, and there’s a details element containing a textual version of it. It has that great ‘small web’ vibe of someone who really cares about what they’re doing.

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

I haven’t read the full paper, but the summary given by the article is equal parts interesting and amusing. They developed a “Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale”, what more is there to say?

It’s meant to resemble painter’s tape, but I’m not sure quite how well it works. ↩︎