Jonathan Sanderson

“It’s too hard to open my new folding phone with one hand!” My hunch: that’s because the engineers tested different hinge stiffnesses, and found that if it was easy to open with one hand people did that, then fumbled and dropped it. The stiff hinge is a device longevity feature. 🙄

Meanwhile: yeah yeah the latest series of Slow Horses isn’t quite as tight and tense as previous ones, but some of the direction and cinematography is off the charts awesome.

Nooo! Not BioWare! EA, you nincompoops!

Props to the PHP and Ubuntu teams for having updated packages available, right on the announcement schedule. I patched our server via my phone, sitting in the car at school pickup, and we were back up by 16:00 BST. I hope everyone else had a similarly uneventful outage.

Oh damn it's as bad as expected: If you are running anything on PHP turn it the hell off RIGHT NOW until you can patch it. Yes this means every single Wordpress, Drupal, and Wikimedia install. www.wiz.io/blog/php2she...

Say what you like about major PHP vulnerabilities, but they do allow you to take your sites offline and replace them with over-the-top outage pages (presumably plagiarised) by Claude.

At some point about six months ago, maybe a little more, it started feeling more like vibe engineering than vibe coding.

Every service provider: “Go fully paper-free! Sign up today to ditch the wasteful paper statements that cost us a fortune and instead receive PDFs of A4 letters which are unreadable on your phone screen, via our terrible in-app mailbox.”

Do “24 hour” pharmacies actually exist in the UK? All of the ones listed near me either (a) don’t exist, as in: appear to be a Google Maps data error, or (b) are in 24-hour Asda stores, but close at 8pm.

A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:

One of those days where you can’t find the return docket for the jacket you’ve had for weeks waiting for restock, can’t decide whether to shave or make sandwiches so end up doing neither, forget to pick up your car key so the complex handover plan immediately fails, then miss your train anyway.

My chum Joe has a new season of his excellent vocabulary-based game Word Dungeon up on Kickstarter. It’s cheap, fun, and ready for you to download, print and play as soon as the campaign is over: www.kickstarter.com/projects/wha...

I’m starting to think my TV-to-academia career trajectory may not have been the wisest choice.

Absolutely loving the achingly hip new deli next to campus, which is doing a roaring trade for students who haven’t yet realised that none of us can afford a £6 iced vanilla cold foam matcha.

Today, I ordered a boxed set of Brett’s Holmes series. This sort of thing is why.

Hey Siri, what’s the EV equivalent of ‘field to fork’? Siri:

I do hope @alomshaha.bsky.social receives statutory funding for his dal recipe being forcibly rolled out to all primary schools.

/me: adds ‘mushy peas’ to the shopping list. /iphone: adds ‘mushy owls’ to the shopping list. Close, Siri. Close.

Anyone else notice that wasps are getting smarter? Thirty years ago you had to coax them into a glass or they'd be in your face for hours. These days they find their own way out after a few minutes.

I’m not sure where to start.

Trying to convince my kids that I can time travel. I’ve lived my entire life in the past, and I’m spectacularly consistent at entering the future at a rate of 1 second per second.

Me: "How's the new laptop?" Her: … Laptop: "An unexpected error has occurred" [reboots] Her: …? Me: Was it something I said? Oh, Windows. You had one job.

Undercover footage verified by Channel 4 News reveals a secret plot by senior Reform UK figures to break the law on party donations. A leading legal expert is now calling for a criminal investigation. 🔗 Read the exclusive story on Substack:

This should be the end of the Reform party. But it should also prompt a complete overhaul of the polling industry and the Electoral Commission. The priority has to be securing domestic politics from foreign influence. That that’s happening is no longer a hypothetical, it’s demonstrated.

I’ve never really worked with Martha, but would like to. She’s awesome. Contract her now so I can’t.

Soooo… this happened.

Soldering a beginner circuit. So far, I’ve had to remove the IC holder (missing some pins), got an electrolytic cap the wrong way around, then soldered the desoldering braid to the board. I’m four components in. FML.

The first question the professor posed to her new invention, the consequenceometer, was: "If I can learn the consequences of decisions before deciding, will I be more decisive?" "No," the device said, "you will probe the consequences in ever greater depth, indecisive." She never used it again.

Woop woop!

Boss move: Canada starts referring to Lake Michigan as Lake Snowflake President.

The adventure playground was closed. “Take a good look, children. Inside that fence is freedom!”

So we’ve had Jurassic Trek, Horror Trek, Psychadelic Trek, Film Noir Trek and Muppet Trek. “It’s our last season; let’s go round the room and everyone gets to make the genre they like best” is… well, it’s _an_ approach, I guess.

Wonky crane. It’s been a while.

Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? Because you smell like carrion.

I wonder precisely how much of an average lifetime is invested in the packing and unpacking of boxes and bags? Related: back from @deershed.bsky.social 2026. Awesome time. I made a butter knife!