Remy Sharp
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Redesign: fonts, alignment and nav [blog]
As I continue occasionally tinker on the redesign I've started (and often think "what's the point, current design is fine"), I wanted to share some of the problems I've run in to. Problems mostly for me because I'm not a designer, and I don't have the wiring to know what works.
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Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1) [book]
Not something I'd normally pick, but enjoyable. I've never played dungeons and dragons, and in my head, I kept thinking of Minecraft as my rough frame of reference (which I've touched because of the kids but not really played to any real amount). The book follows Carl, who, as we guess from the title…
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Redesign '26 [blog]
Around June this year I decided that I wanted to spruce up my blog. I had landed on Elliot Jay Stocks and Jon Hicks' web site and it really made me want to get my blog to something I'd consider visually appealing. I do know that I've set the bar way, way too high by looking at their sites. Specifically…
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text-decoration-thickness discrepancies [blog]
I'm in the process of (attempting) to redesign this blog, and in doing so, I'm using a few of the new bits (to me) of CSS to make things fancy. In this instance, I'm using text-decoration-thickness on my titles, and wanted to document the quirks I noticed.
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Are We at War with AI Agent “Civilizations”? [link]
TL;DR: no. I've been watching over the commentary about the recent LLM "breakouts", and I feel particularly suspicious about the way the AI companies themselves have been reporting. This post captures what I've been thinking (without having the firm grasp of the technical methods). In particular: OpenAI…
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Before you buy an LTE Pixel Watch (for your teen) [blog]
The boy is 14 and regularly does long outdoor runs. He tracks his run with Strava by carrying his phone with him. But carrying a phone (because they're bulky) is a pain. He also plans to swim in the sea during summer and we've all said we don't want him having a mobile just left on the beach until he…
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I Who Have Never Known Men [book]
Bleak. Engaging. Thought provoking. Sad. This was recommended as something like if you enjoy Silo (the Wool trilogy - which I own, but hadn't read - but have watched the TV series). I'm going to say this up front: it's only like Silo in respect to being in a deep hole and not really knowing why. The…
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16 for Tia [blog]
Tia would have turned 16 this year. Another marker that wouldn't come to be. After Tia was lost and born to stillbirth on 31 August 2010, we quickly had a slew of firsts. The first Christmas without her. First mother's day. First birthday. First day at nursery, first day of school. Not turning 10. 16…
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The Talented Mr Ripley (Ripley, #1) [book]
Really enjoyed it, weirdly relatable and kept coming back for more. I'd seen the movie of the same name at the cinema back in 1999, and I remember Matt Damon as Ripley, but I didn't remember the details, except to say that the air of the character was this slightly creepy, little weird but quite clever…
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Dark mode toggles: two states are enough [link]
Lea's deep dive into dark mode toggles is well worth the read. I've got strong opinions about this, and Lea nails it with: Users do not seek out solutions to problems they don’t currently have. I personally (for my own tools) tend to go further and just have the UI toggle based on the system by default…
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On AI Coding and Its Discontents [link]
Anecdotal, but still an interesting read on stories from (initially) a single developer and how they converted to Claude and then have rewound back quite a bit He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if…
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Three Men in a Boat [book]
Really enjoyed it. Lots of stupid tales - surprisingly fresh for 1889. As per the title, it's a story, almost, of three men (and their dog), who take a boat from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford. I learnt that originally the book was written as a tour guide of the Thames which explains some of the diversions…
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Not All Screen Reader Users Are Blind [link]
Good article that's backed with data, but this is the bit that really landed for me, a reminder that it's not all "what aria role is needed here...?" — I can confidently say that the best approach to making a web site accessible (to screen readers or not) is by using proper HTML. If done well, ARIA is…
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Progressive Enhancement inside of JavaScript [blog]
Lately I've had the opportunity to travel by train and coach, during which time I also tend to work. It's really only during these periods that I'm reminded of how web sites fail so terribly over a slow connection. On the odd occasion I can be guilty of this too. I had a tiny tool that takes markdown…
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A Firefox-only minimap [link]
This is very cute, a web site minimap in only a few lines of CSS that paints the entire web page into a canvas (background) using the element() CSS function. Original link: www.stefanjudis.com/a-firefox-only-minimap
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Pokémon Emerald [tif]
Similar to the Pokemon Yellow recently, I had a GBA Emerald Green sent in for repair. Just 24 hours ago, this was going to be a post on how I had failed to repair it, but in a last minute ditch, I managed to save it. Loading up the game resulted in nothing, and opening the shell explained why. There…
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Human Software [book]
A book about work, felt like work. I suspect this is very specific to me, but I found the majority of the story pretty triggering - specifically, I felt pissed off a lot of the time I was reading. After reading the About the Author section at the end of the book, it looks like I've had a similar timeline…
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Rescued Pokémon Yellow [tif]
I guess I just want bragging rights, but here's the short story of rescuing Pokémon Yellow. I run "fix your gameboy game for £10" which occasionally I get orders for. This one was a challenge.
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when-do web component [blog]
I saw recently saw a blog post (which annoyingly I can't find any more, but I'll link it if I do), showing off a web component that if I recall correctly, would show (or hide) it's contents depending on a browser feature (I'd guess using the @supports query). That reminded me that I wrote a web component…
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'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling [link]
I've been following the stories around the "child protection" because on one hand it does afford children some protection, but it also hammers down on the privacy of everyone - i.e. adults who give up their privacy to prove they're not a child. VPNs in particular have been tossed around as something…
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Image to text [link]
Really appreciate Jeremy's post on the way he used generative AI to solve a problem. Specifically he considers the options carefully and was able to make use of local hardware (i.e. his laptop) and "ethically" trained model (from Flickr and creative commons licensed images). Closing with a quote from…
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The Air Raid Book Club [book]
Quick easy read. Little repetitive, but shines a nice light. The story starts in 1938 and we follow Gertie as she plans to retire as a widow having run a bookshop and successful book clubs for many years. That's put on hold when she agrees to take in a child from the Kindertransport - which I'd know…
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The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes [link]
I've been banging on about this for a while now and I absolutely welcome the prospect of this being a reality, and hopefully not just for children. Adults desperately need it too: Under Assembly Bill 1709 by Democratic Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, social media companies might soon be forced to remove…
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In defense of polyfills • Lea Verou [link]
An excellent post on polyfills, talking through their impact, what issues people (mostly in the standards world) face. Chock full of quotable lines, way too many to include to do the post any justice, save perhaps Lea's last headline: Polyfills make the Web faster, inclusive, and more robust Highly recommend…
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This was the first commit via an LLM to git [link]
TIL: git (the command line tool) now contains LLM generated code (I'm still unsure, we're calling this generative AI, right?). Landed in Jan 2026. I appreciate there's some folks out there that don't want to touch LLM generated content or have it in your tool chains, I'm just going to assume that's going…
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Wildcards In CSS [blog]
Just a brainfart here, but it's odd that even though we have wildcard selectors throughout CSS, and even partial selectors (I'll explain in a bit) we don't have partial wildcard selectors on top level elements. I'm not talking about the "star" rule, but what I imagine would be a wildcard on elements…
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AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn [link]
When I think of AI slop, as a developer working on or around the web, I tend to think of dev-centric content, such as blog posts or even software (a lot of the community I'm connected to will call software slop). Still, it's useful to be reminded that AI generated content is much, much farther reaching…
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Web Platform Wishlist on Vale.Rocks [link]
I remember the days I was hungry for features on the web…it was…a long time ago! So it's refreshing to read that others still have ideas and want more. I especially like these two from the post: Text overflow truncation from centre… And: More pseudo-classes. :sticky for if an element is currently sticky…
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querySelector immediate children with :scope [link]
Came across this nice little TIL in the qSA API: parentNode.querySelectorAll('> *') you get an error: '> *' is not a valid selector.. That doesn't work... Using :scope first fixes the "missing scope". Original link: siderite.dev/[…]/queryselector-immediate-children-with-scope
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Fundamentally [book]
Loved it. Intelligent and genuinely made me laugh. This book was recommended in our work Slack, and just pull quote for the book description, I found myself instantly buying it: By normal, you mean like you? A slag with a saviour complex? The story follows Nadia, an academic who is pulled into a job…
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Why we moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky [link]
As I've been seeing more and more posts about PDS and things like "lexicons" such as standard.site, I've been thinking more about how Bluesky is the main hub of all our our social data (for those left twitter and of course putting aside Mastodon for a moment). This post gives a good high level overview…
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Under the hood of MDN's new frontend [link]
A long article (23 min read!) on the rebuild of MDN away from React and into Web Components. There's lots in there, but I particularly like the section starting Web Components that writes about how they're progressively enhancing and how there's thought to the components (such as their mdn-dropdown styles…
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Decompressing 33 signal bytes [blog]
In my RSS reader, I stumbled upon this code-golfed (i.e. minimised to death) snippet that's fairly clever, but from the code, utterly opaque. I couldn't immediately see how it worked, and since Copilot autocompletes most of my code for me - whether I want to or not, I figured it was a good bit of practice…
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Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries, #8) [book]
Solid entry into the series. I've read all the previous Murderbot books, but since the last, I also watched the TV series - which I equally enjoyed, but…or put a weird spin on reading this latest book. I'd entirely forgotten the "diary" part, and because of the TV series, I had the external perspective…
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Accessible (I Think) Split-Cell Table Headers by Eric Archived Thoughts [link]
This really isn't the intended take away from Eric's post (which is worth reading), but I needed a CSS rule that targetting Safari (because their support is weird): /* this is gross and I hate it but it works to fix Safari’s layout of the table’s top headers */ @supports (font: -apple-system-body) Gross…
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FFConf 2026 is live: Things I Learnt [blog]
As with each year for the FFConf web site, I have a distinct idea of the visual style I want. It has zero to do with the content we're presenting each year, but I do love how FFConf's site can be creative. It was like that from the very first web site - the logo was designed in early 2009 in 12 variations…
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prop-for-that: CSS reacts, JS just listens [link]
This is neat. Effectively injecting a tonne of JavaScript based sensors into the elements that ask for the particular category via data-props-for, such as: With CSS like: @container style(--live-value: 100) { .gauge__num { color: var(--max-tint); } .gauge__flag::after { content: 'max'; } } Lots of useful…
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A bouncer in your pocket by Sacha Judd [link]
Sacha has an in depth analysis of the UK's recent announcements around social media websites and children's access to them. I wanted to pull a few quotes: The Internet Watch Foundation reported that child sexual extortion cases in the UK rose 72% in a single year — criminals tricking young people into…
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20 Years of Blogging [blog]
Today is the anniversary of the first blog post on this website from two decades ago. It was about client side JavaScript to automatically (albeit blindly) select the "active" navigation. Ironically, I'd probably do this on the server side these days. Admittedly, it's imported from my prior blog and…
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Enhancing with CSS Grid Lanes [link]
I've been catching CSS Grid Lanes in the socials this week, but somehow had it in my head that it was to do with the gaps (the lanes) between the grid. It's not, it's masonry (which, why not display: masonry 🤷) There's a also a decent (albeit stiff) video on how it works. TL;DR: mostly you can swap…
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Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move to give kids their childhood back - GOV.UK [link]
The UK government has announced they're going ahead with a social media ban for 16 year old and under. In our household we've already had this restriction in place (at a network/DNS level) so it doesn't impact our kids experiences at all, but I do know from talking to the kids that the do wish their…
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AI designed pages and prompts [link]
Based on the output of this article the author has styled their project with different AI prompts. I think what I find interesting here is after the jQuery mobile themes and especially Bootstrap you come to just visually adapt the most common style. What this author has done is asked for the design systems…
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The “Nude” Ultimatum: Privacy Is Dead - The Unknown Universe [link]
The UK government’s ultimatum to Apple and Google is a blueprint for mass surveillance. A warning on why “nothing to hide” won’t protect your digital freedom. … We’re being steered toward a future where “safety” is just a euphemism for “unrestricted access.” If I had read this a few years ago, I'd assume…
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More molly guards [link]
I love these little deep dives into bits of UX that we take for granted. Admittedly I think extending the idea of a Molly Guard to a "Are you sure" prompt is a bit of stretch, but it's a cute story either way. This is the extension of a previous post, Molly Guard in reverse which introduces the molly…
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Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers [link]
The "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. This is really interesting and I would love to see this set the tone for other countries (::cough UK::). If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google…
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No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - Ted Chiang [link]
I didn't really need to read much past the title or subtitle, but it's still an excellent essay that does a good job of drawing comparisons to concepts we already understand, for example: The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness…
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Are you standard.site? [link]
Another (shorter) entry in how how devs are adding Standard.site to their web sites to enrich the social cards.I suspect we'll start to gravitat towards tools to help us to add these - which is what it looks like David is doing.Though I'm a little wary of how BIG the card image is on top of the extra…
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How I foot-gunned our newsletter this week [blog]
For the second year running, as part of our "stay sane" strategy for FFConf, Julie and I write and send a weekly newsletter. It's structured the same way so it means we have a much better line of sight as to what we have to say. The open rate is usually around 40% (though I know some email systems synthetically…
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The 30 year game [blog]
Today I'm releasing my Game Boy game called Marbles² (or Marbles Squared). It's a port of a game that I originally wrote back in 2002, but is a game that started in my life in (or around) 1996. The development this iteration of the game, the one in 2026, took me about a week and I haven't written a single…
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When the Cranes Fly South [book]
Took me a minute to get into, but then…I cried. The good kind. It took me until around 20% of the book to get on with it properly. I was struggling to even want to pick up the book. It's well written, but the subject, end of life, was so unappealing that I found myself wanting to avoid reading the book…
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