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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: July 2026

2026-08-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another roundup post. This month has been very… exercise-y. Which is, for the record, not normal for me. For the previous year my only source of exercise has basically been walking, but that’s not a great fitness activity for me. When my regular walks entered the 10-15km territory it got more and more annoying to find the time and/or an interesting route.

I also managed to injure my knee while walking through a particularly muddy field, and spent a few months going slightly stir crazy. Coming out of that I started running three times a week, bought a bicycle, and added in some strength exercises along with the ones the physio recommended. If you told me a few months ago that I’d be annoyed at not being able to exercise too much on rest days I’d think you were mad.

Website updates and other projects

Before we talk even more about exercise, let’s do the usual topics I cover in these posts. The only website update this month has been a post about… exercise. Maybe I have a problem. Anyway, in Tracking PBs without the dark patterns I talk about building a slimmed-down, single-player Strava to track my personal bests, without all the nonsense that annoys me.

Other than the PB tracker, I’ve not been working much on personal projects. I’ve not really had any other itches that need scratching, just the usual background noise of dependency updates and other project maintenance.

Entertainment

Behold, the section where I normally talk about the films, TV programmes, and board games that have kept me entertained this month: […]. Yep, not a single one.

I have played a few games, though. A friend and I finally got around to trying out Escape Simulator 2, and it’s just as good as the original. The rooms feel a bit more detailed, and there are a few cool interactions that probably wouldn’t be possible in the old version. There’s also a hard mode for all the rooms which we’ve not yet tried, but sounds like it’ll keep us amused for a bit longer.

I’ve also been playing a bit of World of Warcraft, but it’s now in the awkward stage where I’ve done most things I can reasonably do this season, and there’s not really any point in doing anything else. All the gear will become mostly irrelevant in a few weeks when season two releases, and we’ve hit the major milestone achievements for Mythic+. Feels a bit anticlimactic to get to a fairly good stage and then just… not play for a bit.

Fitness

Given how much exercise I’ve done, it probably deserves its own section in these monthly posts. I have the vague idea of aiming to run a marathon before I turn 40 (i.e., within around 15 months). That’s both scary and yet not completely impossible. I’m going to work up through the distances and see how it goes. A 5k at the start of September, 10k in November, half marathon around Easter next year, then a full marathon just before my birthday in October. That way even if it gets too tough or something goes wrong I’ll have accomplished something.

New hobbies mean new toys. My bike is nothing particularly special: a hybrid from Halfords that’s about one step up from entry-level. But it gets the job done, and has helped me remember how much I enjoy cycling. The infrastructure around here is pretty terrible, though. There are lots of little bits of multi-use paths and a few dedicated bike lanes, but they’re not joined up or signed well in the slightest. In most cases it’s easier to just stay on the road and deal with the traffic. It’s a bit sad that they’ve spent time and money to do something and it’s not very useful.

On the running side, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 165 watch. I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for a little over a year now, but using the touchscreen to navigate screens and start/stop activities while running is annoyingly fiddly. The digital crown keeps getting gummed up with sunscreen and requiring cleaning, too. The Forerunner has physical buttons, and is much better at showing the data I want to see in a clear format, and letting me set things up like target pace or distance on the watch itself, instead of via a phone app. Oh, and the battery seems like it’s going to last for a week rather than a day, which is a nice change of pace.

I’m going to need to make a nice widget to show off my monthly runs and bike rides, but for now here’s some artisanal stats:

I went out for 14 runs, totalling 48km, although a significant portion of that was walking for warmup, cooldown or recovery.
My longest actual run was a 20 minute straight run covering 2.5km.
My average running pace is 8min/km, which is a “conversational” pace for me right now.
I went for 9 cycle rides: 2 on rented mountain bikes, then the rest on my own bike. They covered 128km.
When cycling I made 8 coffee shop stops, which works out to exactly one every 16km on average.

Next month I’m hoping to ramp the running up to hit 5k by the very end. I’m mostly following the NHS Couch to 5k plan but I’m tweaking it a little bit as otherwise I’d finish on 3.75km at my current pace. I guess “Couch to 30 minutes of running” isn’t quite as catchy. I made a Couch to 5k page to track my progress and adjustments.

Around the web

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

I’ve written before about The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging, and this is a very similar take from Jim Nielsen, but it’s still super interesting to see a similar idea expressed in another way by another person.

I Built a Voice Opening Door to Moria (My Garage)

A YouTube video documenting a really cool project. What grabs me is the amount of disciplines he dabbles in: he’s part blacksmith, part carpenter, part electrician, part programmer, and so on. It’s one of the best examples of maker culture I’ve seen in ages.

There’s one bit in particular that sticks in my mind: he tried to find a rendering of the door online, and realised all the existing ones were gibberish or illegible, so he downloaded a font and worked out the exact inscription himself. It makes my inner perfectionist feel validated.

Linus Torvalds on AI in the Linux kernel

LLMs are very divisive, and there are a lot of unsettled moral and ethical issues. But at the end of the day they’re a tool that’s not going to go away any time soon. There are people on crusades to try and ban LLM tools in projects, boycott any projects that accept contributions, and so on. It’s a bit like militant veganism. I can understand where they’re coming from, but also please stop shouting at me. Anyway, this take from Linus seems pretty spot on to me.

Buttons

An interactive, graphical history of how buttons have been rendered in various operating systems and desktop environments over time. Maybe it’s just my age and nostalgia, but it really does feel like they peaked around the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m not quite sure why we went from elegant skeuomorphic buttons to ugly plain squares with weird accent colours when you click them.

Rotating sandwiches

For some reason I expected this to be static pictures of sandwiches which spun in a circle, but it’s actually recordings of sandwiches rotating on a turntable. It’s oddly mesmerising. I wonder why I’ve never seen a restaurant menu with gifs like that?

Tracking PBs without the dark patterns

2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently been bitten by some kind of strange exercise bug. I’ve gone from being mostly sedentary to struggling to not go out for a cheeky bike ride on a day that’s meant to be a rest day. Maybe this is what a midlife crisis feels like?

Anyway, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about this development is seeing my personal best efforts gradually go up. There’s something incredibly rewarding about doing a run, and then seeing a nice little gold medal because as part of that you ran your fastest 1km ever. Unfortunately the only software I’ve found that does that is Strava, and boy do I not get on with it.

The many shortcomings of Strava

Strava is basically the app for running and cycling. Everyone talks about it. It sounds like they like it. But I really, really don’t. It’s like someone went through a catalogue of user-hostile behaviours and said “we’ll take them all!”.

The problems started in the setup wizard: it touts a load of privacy features, but doesn’t offer any way to enable them. All your activities are public by default, and you have to spelunk around in the settings to turn that off. I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted my activities to be public or not, and ended up flip-flopping around a bit. There is a clunky workflow to bulk change past activities, but it’s arbitrarily time-gated so you can’t use it too often…

The bulk operations are extremely limited, too: you can set the activity visibility, and your heart rate visibility, and that’s it. Want to bulk delete things? You’re out of luck. Bulk rename? No chance. You either do them one-by-one or use some janky third-party script. I think I pressed around 300 little ‘delete’ links in the course of trying to get my activity history imported in a way I liked.

Those problems give a bit of a signal about Strava’s priorities, but I could live with them. Once I’ve stopped faffing with the initial import I’m not really going to want to change the privacy settings or bulk edit things. Alas, the problems didn’t end there.

Look at me! Look at me! GIVE ME ENGAGEMENT!

The most obvious one is that everything is an upsell. Vast swathes of the app are premium-only, and they don’t ever get out of your way: they stick around acting as adverts. We’re all used to freemium apps that try to hawk upgrades, but the sheer amount of screen real estate taken up by these is egregious. I started a premium trial, expecting things to get a lot better, and… they didn’t really. All the premium features are still branded as such, so now instead of “look at what you could have if you paid us” it’s “look at what you’re getting for paying us (don’t even think about cancelling)”. Subscribing also makes your avatar get a premium outline, and there’s no way to disable it. I really hate that. Now I’m an advert myself. I don’t want to be part of their weird dark patterns, thank you very much.

And while we’re talking about dark patterns: there’s so much engagement bait that I physically cringe at it. You get a notification for logging an activity with a vague call to action to check it out. You get a separate notification when you break or come close to one of your PBs, but it doesn’t tell you which; there’s plenty of space in the notification for it, but they want you to hit the app instead. It all just feels so slimy to me. I don’t know whether it doesn’t bother other people as much, or if they’re desensitised to it, or just don’t realise how pleasant things could actually be.

Making a replacement

I realised pretty early on that if I only want automatic PB tracking, I could just write something myself to do it. I already use Health Auto Export to exfiltrate data from Apple Health, including workouts. I can just make a service that receives that data, crunches some numbers, and activates the dopamine receivers in my brain when I set a new record. But I didn’t really want to bother doing that if I could avoid it. I tried a whole slew of different apps and none of them did the thing, at least not without a subscription. And Strava had soured me on fitness subscriptions. I finally resigned myself to making something.

And by “myself” I mean “an LLM”. This is one of the first projects where I’ve not written a single line of code, and I’ve barely even reviewed anything produced by the LLM. I gave it an overall architecture and some sample data, and had it write a plan. I critiqued the plan, had it broken down into a few different phases, and then had it work through them. I occasionally stopped it when I saw it doing something stupid, and gave it a couple of technical steers, but my feedback has mostly been functional. I’m probably not going to be releasing it publicly any time soon for that reason — I don’t want to publish it under my name when I’ve not even looked at the code. I also wouldn’t be comfortable making software this way if other people were going to rely on it, but for non-critical, personal-use-only software I’m happy with the approach.

Anyway, I called it “Pompei Band”. Project names are hard. One of my common techniques is to put a term into an anagram finder; in this case “PB dopamine” anagrams to “Pompei Band”, and it even abbreviates to PB. Weird, but I like it. This is how it shows recent activities on the homepage:

Dashboard entry for a recent run in PB

You can click through to see the standard activity details most tracking apps show: a map, heart rate, pace, gradient, and heart rate zones. You can also click on each effort to see a history of them, which gives a nice overview of progress:

1 mile run PB history

It pretty much does exactly what I want, and has none of the annoying behaviours that Strava leans into. When I first drafted this post I wrote “there’s a few more bits I’d like to add at some point, but I can happily prompt them into existence when I want them”, but in the time I spent procrastinating before taking screenshots I ended up implementing them all. My favourite is this little history widget I added to the homepage, shown here next to Strava’s:

Recent activity calendar in Pompei Band and in Strava

The Strava one just confuses me. I’m not sure what the scale of the circles means. I’m guessing it’s time, which in effect means it just highlights my bike rides which are longer than runs. The colours for the line charts don’t work for me, and I’m not sure what three zig-zag lines are meant to represent. Pompei Band’s version uses distinct, obvious colours for different activities, and scales the brightness independently for each type of activity based on length (so long cycle rides don’t affect the short runs). I also flipped the axes so it looks more like a GitHub activity timeline, because that’s how my brain works. Nothing groundbreaking, but also none of the paper-cuts the Strava version inflicted on me.

Software doesn’t have to be awful

This blog post has been rattling around in my head for a few days. I didn’t want it to just be a litany about Strava being bad, and I didn’t want to sound like an LLM hype piece, which made it tricky to figure out what I was actually trying to say. I think the core of it is: software doesn’t have to be awful.

Everyone’s heard of enshittification, and it’s so prevalent that it’s easy to accept it as a fact of life. That’s just how late-stage capitalism works, right? But we can just make better software. And as LLMs slowly become more and more capable, that “we” grows to a broader and broader group. It’s easy to be negative about that: we’re going to drown in vibe-coded products, much like we’re already drowning in written LLM slop. On the other hand, a future where you can just say “make me single-player Strava without all the dark patterns” and get something that works just how you want it is pretty exciting.

The one thing I can’t decide: if everyone can whip up their own individual software, will the existing platforms actually improve? If Strava didn’t have all the dark patterns and engagement bait I would have just have paid for it. Will they realise that? Or will they double down even harder, try to lock you into their platform, and build moats around user data? Now I’ve said it, it seems pretty obvious they’ll try to do that. But I hope they won’t.

Why you should be using HTTPS

2016-06-17T00:00:00Z

The EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere logo

One of my favourite hobbyhorses recently has been the use of HTTPS, or lack thereof. HTTPS is the thing that makes the little padlock appear in your browser, and has existed for over 20 years. In the past, that little padlock was the exclusive preserve of banks and other ‘high security’ establishments; over time its use has gradually expanded to most (but not all) websites that handle user information, and the time is now right for it to become ubiquitous.

Why use HTTPS?

There are numerous advantages to using HTTPS, both for the users of a website and for the operator:

Privacy

The most obvious advantage is that HTTPS gives your users additional privacy. An insecure (HTTP) request can potentially be read by anyone on the same network, or the network operators, or anyone who happens to operate a network along the path between the user and the server.

Users on shared WiFi networks (such as those in coffee shops, hotels, or offices) are particularly vulnerable to passive sniffing by anyone else on that network. If the network is open (as is frequently the case) then anyone in radio range can see exactly what the user is up to.

Integrity

HTTPS also helps to maintain the integrity of your site. With a plain HTTP request, there’s nothing to stop anyone in between the server and the user from modifying the content of the request or the response. This is a frequent tactic used by annoying WiFi gateways (such as the ones you’d find in a hotel), dubious ISPs who want to serve you extra adverts, or just plain old nefarious attackers.

If you’re trying to convey some kind of information to users (and if you aren’t, why exactly are you running a website again?) it seems beneficial to both you and them if the information arrives as you intended, rather than in a modified form due to someone or something tampering with it.

Security

If your website has any kind of authentication, or session identifiers, it becomes extremely vulnerable to an attacker monitoring the traffic and stealing the credentials. This was starkly demonstrated in 2010 when Firesheep was released. This tool allowed anyone to quickly and automatically hijack social media accounts of anyone on the same network who was using HTTP to access them.

Even if your login pages are served over HTTPS, if you send a single session ID cookie over HTTP (such as a page you decided wasn’t particularly ‘important’) then an attacker can probably spoof the user’s session and gain full access to their account. Again, in the case of open WiFi networks that could be anyone in radio range.

Search engine rankings

Some search engines use HTTPS as a signal in their ranking algorithms. Google announced in 2004 that it was using the presence of HTTPS as a small positive signal, but that it may strengthen that signal over time as more and more websites switch to using a secure transport. It’s not unthinkable that at some point in the future there will be HTTPS-only search engines.

But… But… But…

There are lots of excuses for not implementing HTTPS. Most of them are either misguided or outdated.

It’s too expensive and/or complicated

In the past, getting HTTPS certificates was a pain. A number of free suppliers have existed for a while but the process for getting their certificates wasn’t particularly straight forward, and many imposed arbitrary restrictions on the certificate parameters. Even once you had the certificate, you had to fiddle about with your HTTP server configuration to make it work, remember to manually get a new certificate when the old one expired, and lots of other annoying busywork.

With the arrival of Let’s Encrypt, all that changed. You can retrieve and deploy a free HTTPS certificate with two or three commands. Renewal can be handled completely automatically with a single command executed by cron.

There’s no point; nothing on my site is sensitive

You might not think your content warrants privacy, but can you speak for everyone who accesses it? Even content that seems mundane to you — such as travel advice, or technical writing — could be used to build up a profile of a user. If an attacker is monitoring traffic in a coffee shop and sees a user looking at travel advice and weather forecasts for a foreign country, he could use that information to plan a burglary knowing that the user will be away. Similarly, some content which is perfectly mundane to you may actually be very sensitive in other countries with repressive governments. HTTPS makes it much harder for these people to snoop on traffic.

From another angle, if you’re offering any kind of information, instructions, or especially file downloads, there’s a severe risk to users if the content is modified on its way to them. An evil sysadmin could rewrite your travel advice to suggest visiting the local drug dealer’s hangout, or replace your download with a malware-infested version.

HTTPS is slower, uses more resources, etc

Back in 1995 this might have been a valid argument. Enabling HTTPS on a modern server will make an almost negligible difference to performance. If you also enable HTTP/2 (which most implementations only support over HTTPS), it’s likely to actually use fewer resources, and result in a faster, smoother experience for your users. HTTP/2 was designed to work with HTTPS, and designed with modern requirements and networking techniques in mind.

CloudFlare have an excellent demonstration of the benefits of HTTP/2, and it can show speed improvements of 2-3x in a typical environment. On top of being faster, HTTP/2 uses fewer connections which results in less resource overhead on both the server and the client.

So what are you waiting for?

If you run a website and aren’t using HTTPS, give it a try.