Not sure of the context of the line up, but could you ask about luggage options and heated grips? Would be useful thanks.
I'm doing good thanks. Pretty settled in Dublin - currently cooking some pork carnitas for tacos later. How you doin? Any dinner plans?
I like your advice about non-tech hobbies. I've got several outdoor hobbies, but realised if I'm indoors I'll often be tinkering or working. Think I'm going to buy myself a Ukulele!
I had the nineT as a borrow bike when mine was getting repaired. Wished the repair had taken longer!
@alexlizhill.com every few years I get in a conversation about Pull Requests and end up directing people to your Lead Dev 2018 talk. It just happened again, so thanks!
Comment from copilot: Fixed in commit c5a1fa8. I sincerely apologize for this critical security mistake. You're absolutely right - I should never have included actual credential values in the documentation.
… though to be fair, it did *sincerely apologize* and promised never to do it again.
I've reset my credentials, but probably won't update my repo secrets anytime soon 😅
github.com/benfoxall/lu...
A screenshot of AGENTS.md, containing hard coded values for `TRACTIVE_TEST_EMAIL` & `TRACTIVE_TEST_PASSWORD`
So @github.com copilot decided to extract some secrets into a plain markdown file which it committed to my repo 😰
We think our cat is being bullied 😿 (keep seeing her getting chased home by a stray cat).
… I found an undocumented api for her location tracker (Tractive) and made some plots. Looks like she's been exploring way less over the last few weeks.
Yes! Handy feature otherwise I might accidentally get your blog post burned into my CRT Display
A small retro 1-bit picture of Remy on a large black background. Bouncing around like the iconic DVD logo.
@remysharp.com I just came back to a page I was reading yesterday to see it replaced with your face bouncing around. Love it 📀
Have you explained about how your approach is much more efficient? I feel like a few graphs/slides would get the message across well.
I dreamt up a very elegant and secure way of restricting which doors you could open, but then I figured:
1. I'd be doing that for me, rather than the person I made it for
2. Real ones aren't that secure either
A web page (benjaminbenben.com/catlendar), showing an Advent Calendar - kind of like the paper ones you used to get where you open a door each day and see a new picture. One of the doors is open and you can just make out a cat.
I made an advent calendar with a picture of our cat each day 🐈.
benjaminbenben.com/catlendar/
A screenshot of a slide deck. The highlighted slide is titled "QR Codes are Data", with the content of “Scanning them copies that data to your device"
I gave a talk last week about communication & data extraction with QR Codes.
One thing clicked for me recently: When you scan a QR Code, you're _copying_ data from the physical world to your device.
Was interesting to talk about performance & security with that in mind.
Thanks Paul 🙏! Sorry to hear the search has been rough, is there an end in sight?
Thanks! And thanks for sharing my post that I was searching. I got a few good leads who mentioned you specifically.
Had some final stage interviews with a multi-billion dollar company this afternoon, managed to tell:
→ The CTO & Cofounder – It's my mum's birthday today
→ Head of Engineering – I went clubbing at the weekend and considered replying to an email at 1am, but didn't
A cat with a purple hairstyle
… does anyone know where I can buy a cat wig?
A graph-based AI image generation workflow. Starting with a picture of a cat, then applying hairstyles to it.
Now we're talking 😻
… I guess this is technically what I asked for
It's getting to the time of year that people I met in the summer have started noticing that I always wear shorts
And it all packages up well. Now I've got a self-contained docker image (around 440mb) that I can deploy wherever I want.
Directions between two points south of Dublin. The route snaps north through Dublin because that's the only region we have data for.
There's something cool about making a local map server, this one is only really useful if you're in Dublin.
1. Download open streetmap data for the area you want to route through
2. Process/extract/partition your data into a bunch of osrm.* files
3. Run the server
github.com/Project-OSRM...
I'm impressed with how straightforward it is to setup your own routing service with OSRM.
(this instance finds walking directions around Dublin).
oh wow, that map view is cool. There's so much train data that I know nothing about.
Dunno if you've seen trntxt.uk by Dan Pope? It's very very data optimised (most page loads are <2k single rt)
Everything comes from a single endpoint `getCurrentTrainsXML` api.irishrail.ie/realtime/
I did some git-scraping for a few days, pulled everything into DuckDB and generated a csv file to pull into the frontend.
I've been playing around with visualising Irish rail data
benjaminbenben.com/trains/
I dug into progressive image rendering and found a bunch of common assumptions aren't quite true.
➡️ JPEG & WebP progressive-renders worse in Safari
➡️ AVIF _does_ support progressive
➡️ But JPEG XL in Safari doesn't
➡️ JPEG XL decodes much slower than AVIF
⬇️ and more
jakearchibald.com/2025/present...
Additional point: I don't want to store user emails at all if possible. Nice way to do this is storing a hash of the email to check against when they request a magic link.
