Simon Hampel

Sydney

Family phone usage for September: Me (Gen-X): 61 mins talk time / 2 text messages Wife (Gen-X): 315 mins / 11 messages 17yo son (Gen-Z): 517 mins / 1 message 14yo daughter (Gen-α): 15 mins / 48 messages ... Gen-α don't know how to use phones - it's all text messaging and text chat.

I've been reading The Complete Robot - a collection of short stories by Asimov written between 1940 and 1977 - they are probably more relevant today than they've ever been, both from a pure robotics perspective, but also from an AI perspective. Really interesting considering when they were written.

We had someone post adverts for beef products for pet food on @zoochat.com - an actual person not a bot which I call "meat spam" (vs "bot spam") So we had a meat spammer posting spam about meat - but advertising genuine beef products, so there was no actual spam in the meat spammer's meat spam!

Made the mistake of upgrading to @camtasia.com v25.0.0 and the editor user interface is so sluggish, it is almost unusable - even on my 12 core machine with 64GB of RAM. Re-installed Camtasia 24.1.5 and the editor is very responsive as expected. Don't upgrade!

.bathroom { width: fit-content; } #memes #CSS

Kudos to the devs at Woolworths - on multiple occasions over the years I have given feedback on functionality of the online shopping experience and each time they have implemented my suggestions within a month or two, including most recently reverting a change. Thanks devs - much appreciated!

So I finished Satisfactory - apparently only 3.3% of players have achieved this. What next? Try and finish all of the other achievements? Work on refining my factory design some more? Go and play Factorio: Space Age, which I haven't started yet?

This is such cool analysis of PIN in @haveibeenpwned.com's Pwned Passwords. Scroll through the page and watch the heat map change alongside the explanations of how people are creating (somewhat) predictable PINs: www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01...

Does anyone still use Akismet? Is there a better way of managing comment spam these days?

For those people who use Gmail for personal email and have their own email domain name - how do you have things configured? Inbound forwarding is pretty easy - just wondering how people are sending emails from Gmail using their own domain name as the "Send mail as" ?

It's happened to us all at some point.

I've obviously turned into a bot - because I have no idea at all how to solve this Captcha on the Woolworths website. How dehumanising!

A lot of houses without power right now in the North Ryde / Epping / Denistone areas of Sydney. We still have power here fortunately.

Biggest thunderstorm I've seen in quite a while coming through right now. Almost constant lightning and thunder. Big enough storm that I'm shutting my servers and desktops down. I never do that.

My accountant has started nagging me (again) about getting last years tax returns done. So here I am, posting on social media instead. #procrastination

They have these shows on at 6pm every night of the week too!

Never going to happen

Been busy the past week coding a new Laravel Zero CLI application to manage my websites and migrate between servers. Replaces a bunch of bash scripts and allows me to export a site (files + database + server config) to the cloud, update DNS and then deploy it on a new server - all in a few minutes.

We've all done it!

That thing where you create a complex regex expression and it works first time and you start second guessing yourself because there was no debugging involved.

The Latrine Fall of 1184 was a disaster in Germany where a large group of noblemen gathered in a room above a latrine pit to discuss the distribution of power in the Holy Roman Empire. The floor caved in, causing up to a hundred of them to fall in and drown in liquid excrement.

Yay - wake up to my first day back at work to find the internet offline. At least the ISP already knows about it and a technician is on the way - but onsite ETA is at least an hour away and who knows how long it may take to actually fix 😖

Word of the day: vemödalen - n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. See also @zoochat.com photo galleries 🙄

So the Sydney, Australia feed has become the Australia vs India Test Match Cricket feed 🙄🏏 bsky.app/profile/did:...

I was there Gandalf. I was there 1300 weeks ago when the lights didn't go out. I was there the day Y2K didn't happen. We had worked tirelessly to fix all the bugs. It should have ended that day, but the criticism of tech workers was allowed to endure. There is no respect left in the world of Men.

Today's task: getting up to speed with Laravel Herd on Windows. Currently my dev servers are Ubuntu VMs in Hyper-V which are almost identical builds to my production servers. Big change to move to actual local dev and using PowerShell rather than Bash. Might have to investigate running Bash via WSL

Okay, so it's 2025 already and I'm only just installing PhpStorm 2024🙄 ... I wish PhpStorm would be more assertive in telling me that a new major version that I'm licensed to use, is available for download.

17 July 2003: Migrated to the “official” replacement for b2 called WordPress – so far so good, but given that I had already completed migration to b2Evolution branch of the b2 code - I had to restore a backup of b2 before upgrading to WP then manually adding in the posts I made since moving to b2evo

5 July 2003: "Might have to start an online discussion forum about zoos as well – been meaning to do that for ages now." This was the blog post that came before @zoochat.com was created.

Old blog post from July 2003: "Just thought I’d look it up … November 17, 2001 was when I became permanently connected to the Internet from home via my broadband ADSL connection." Prior to that I would be dialed in via 56k modem on my second phone line.

My job? I delete things people post on the internet.

Movies we've watched this week: - Home Alone - Home Alone 2 - Arthur Christmas - The Muppets Christmas Carol - Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - Over the Hedge ... we have one more night of family staying - might have to suggest How to Train Your Dragon for tomorrow night.

I have a bunch of personal blogs currently on WordPress that I'd like to move to another self-hosted PHP-based system. Lots of media (photos + video) involved. Maintaining search engine links not important. Suggestions for software to consider?

No new years resolution for me this year - 2560x1440 is enough for now.

I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.

I've been told my dad jokes are out of control this week - I think that's a combination of having the kids around 24x7 combined with having my dad staying - the dad joke energy levels are off the charts!

OH: “This whole year could have been an email.”

Loving the LotR memes that seem to be filling my feeds at the moment.

Holiday todo item: go back over everything I've bought from Amazon this year and write honest reviews of things. I find it helpful to read detailed reviews when choosing what to purchase, so it's only fair I reciprocate in the hope that other people find them useful.