Phil Gyford @philgyford@mastodon.social

It was nice to see a new regeneration of the Mace Wielder yesterday https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2018/12/11/mace-wielders-regenerations/

PROTECT ME FROM NOT KNOWING WHAT I WANT

WhatsApp groups: the new Reply-All.

We're half way through 'The Little Drummer Girl' and I'm mainly trying to reconcile the "late 1970s" setting with the presence of The Durutti Column's 'Sketch for Summer', released in 1980.

I got a very nice, lengthy reply from someone at GDS User Support about search forms, which was nice. No further insights in terms of "we've user-tested x, y and z and decided y is best" though.

I blogged a bit about search forms and how some governmental places do them: https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2018/12/05/search-forms/

Oh, maybe I'll ask the Design System team, as they offer at the end of the page.

I'm confused by this. No mention made of exceptions for search fields. Anyone know anything about it or do I need to ask in the Other Place? (Also, isn't it best practice to have a submit button…?)

The pessimist in me (90% by volume) has always expected Tumblr to become bad in some way. The pessimist is very surprised it's got so far since the Yahoo purchase before this kind of thing.

Three posts on https://crazywalls.tumblr.com flagged as porn. Which is a small percentage, but they're so far from being remotely even slightly porny that this is pretty poor.

I'll watch most things with Bill Pullman in and, two episodes in, we're enjoying 'The Sinner' so far https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09s52q3

Happy Mince Pie* Day everyone!

* Or Stollen, or Pret Chirstmas sandwich, or whatever other seasonal treat you can eat now that it's December.

Anyone have a favourite CAPTCHA that's not Google's, and won't do any tracking of users?

I've had enough. I too am resigning from the government.

Crikey. Complaining about a change (the removal of page numbers, resulting in having no indication of how far through you were) helped reinstate a removed feature.

I'm reading the final "Enjoy the Ride" in a much more ominous and threatening way than I think they intended...

Also, the main column of text is narrower than before. And a few weeks back they lost the "3/24" style page number indicator, and I always feel a bit lost without it.

The new design has finally reached the Guardian's iPad Daily Edition. Is it just me or is there a bit too much going on? It all feels a bit too busy.

Dear developers,

All those files at the root of repositories, like package.json, setup.py, tox.ini, Procfile, etc... Could we agree a convention by which they're kept in a particular directory?

Yours tidily, etc etc.

Fuck me. Being "candid" isn't burying "we'll delete your old photos and videos unless you pay" in the small, grey footnote. Flickr/SmugMug, I want to like you but you don't make it easy.