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chameth.com the personal website of Chris Smith

I feel like every month I say how quickly the month has gone. But this month went even faster. A combination of a new contract, fitting in runs, and being down with an ugly cold for a week has left the month in a blur.

Website updates

I had an urge to redesign the site, but I resisted a total overhaul in favour of some more targeted changes:

• There’s a new site-wide header, with an ASCII art logo
• Posts and other content-heavy pages now have a reduced width to aid readability
• Footnotes now render alongside the content when there’s room¹
• Some font and design changes throughout
• The film detail pages got a facelift
• The about page got a new avatar, and the links were post-it-note-ified

I actually started the process by having Claude Code generate me a set of potential designs. None of them really sparked joy, but there were some elements I liked, so I took those and iterated on them. The LLM didn’t really seem to understand my aesthetic of “handwriting and uneven lines but also ASCII art and faux code comments”. Possibly because that’s not coherent. But it’s what I like, so there.

One of the interesting effects of using an LLM to do design work is that you can prototype and throw away ideas really quickly. I had an idea that the links on the about page could all be trading cards, matching the one already there. Then they could all be shown as a fanned-out hand. In my head it seemed like a cool idea, but the prototype revealed lots of ugly truths: you can’t see enough of each card to tell what they are unless they’re fanned unnaturally wide, doing anything on hover is troublesome, and it just outright didn’t look as good as I imagined. I’m glad I didn’t have to spend hours implementing it myself to come to those conclusions!

Other projects

I don’t have much to report on other projects. Pesky work, taking up a lot of my time! I’ve continued doing bits and bobs on my personal services, and am having a lot of fun making everything integrate with Temporal. It started out as a way to run tasks nicely, and I’ve twisted it into a standardised way to do cross-service calls.

Like every other technical person on the planet, I had some fun responding to the various security issues that dropped at the end of October. I got off relatively unscathed², but cut releases for a bunch of projects that make outbound calls and which shouldn’t trust certificates issued by a CA that uses 4 as a private key. I also managed to find my very own CVE, which I’ll write more about in the very near future…

Entertainment

I’m apparently back into films. One day I’ll work out how my hobby cycling works, but today is not that day.

1. 2026-10-18
   
2. 2026-10-19
   
3. 2026-10-22
   
4. 2026-10-24
   
5. 2026-10-24
   
6. 2026-10-26
   
7. 2026-10-28
   
8. 2026-10-30
   
9. 2026-10-31
   

I’ve been spending less and less time in WoW, which is a bit sad. I was slowly working up the M+ ranks, but pretty much everything else is disappointing at the minute. None of the solo content is particularly fun, and none of it really contributes to making my character better any more. They can’t seem to produce interesting content, and what they do produce is so bug-ridden it’s hard to imagine how it ships. Without the casual content to ‘prime’ it, I’m finding myself less and less in the right mood to spend 30–40 minutes of intense activity to push a number up slightly. I’m looking forward to the WoW Forever launch; it’ll make a nice change at least for a little while.

Level 90

Female Night Elf

Mistweaver Monk

327 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	+12	26:08	370
Den of Nalorakk	+12	27:40	370
Kings' Rest	+13	27:01	387
Murder Row	+13	23:52	391
Ruby Life Pools	+12	21:31	374
Temple of Sethraliss	+12	17:37	380
The Blinding Vale	+13	24:44	387
Voidscar Arena	+13	26:31	384
Total M+ rating			3042

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

Fitness

My running has continued mostly unabated. I ran 10k for the first time just before my 39th birthday, which is a pleasing symmetry with my plan to run a marathon before my 40th³. The 10k was a bit of a slog, the first time I’ve had to push myself to finish, but hopefully that’ll get a bit easier.

I’m now running four times a week to try and build up my base fitness a bit, and I’m not going to go further than 10k for a little while. I also apparently managed to set new PBs across the board:

It’s funny to think that three months ago I was worrying about the first 20-minute-long run in the couch-to-5k programme, and now I’m running non-stop for an hour and twenty minutes. If you’d told me that back then I wouldn’t have believed you.

I’ve scheduled in a whole bunch of 10k and half marathon events over the next year. I might put a proper list on the fitness page at some point, although I’m a bit wary of announcing my physical location in advance to the entire Internet. For now, here are the countdowns for the next race in each category:

I’ve hit my local parkrun a few times, but missed a few due to my cold and the lovely back-to-back storms we had. During one of those runs I realised I spent the whole 5k talking. I’ve finally unlocked conversational pace, apparently. That’s another concept that would have seemed bizarre to me a few months ago.

Around the web

Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classic Sampler

I don’t know if it was because I grew up watching Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or just because Patrick Stewart is such a fantastically versatile actor that he seems larger than life, but his death hit me harder than I expected.

I’ve subjected my friends and others to this link before, but it seems apt to bring back out now. The album contains five full country tracks recorded by Patrick Stewart for a charity event. There’s something wonderful about how he committed to this to the same degree as his more serious roles.

“We find many users write to us in a spirit of collaboration.”

Unsung is a fun blog about software craft I’ve been enjoying a lot lately. This post talks about Linear’s aggressive approach to fixing bugs, and how it makes it better for basically everyone. I hate sitting on bugs because they’re not prioritised or important enough to dedicate time to, so it’s not surprising this piece resonated with me.

I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it’s my Home Assistant dashboard.

I’ve had a vague idea of sticking a nice pixel art render in front of my home automation software for ages. Last time I tried to execute it, I got as far as designing a single blind and got bored. Anton Frolov did that thing where you exchange money to get other people to do stuff for you, and the result is excellent.

The Real Kevin Bacon

A very well-put-together data analysis/visualisation about who is the “centre” of Hollywood, and how that’s likely to change. My money was on Willem Dafoe. Good job I’m not a betting person.

Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

I’m just going to leave the subtitle here, with no further explanation necessary for why I like it:

How I massively over-engineered a trivial problem again because I just can’t help myself