Yarrr…!
So this happened today:
Hi
Checking in to see if we can catch up briefly over email. I want to ask you for a little assistance..
Helen x
Hi Helen,
This message sounds just like what you get with an address book virus! But it’s your legit email, so I guess it’s really you.
I’m at your disposal,
S.
Sorry to bother you as I’m in the hospital, do you order on Amazon?
Helen x
Oh, gosh – what’s wrong? And yes, I do. This sounds even more like an address book virus!
S.
Actually, I need help purchasing an Apple e-gift card for a friend’s daughter battling cancer. Today’s her birthday, and I’m trying to make her smile, but I’ve had trouble buying it online as I’m currently being treated for laryngitis in the hospital. Please could you help me buy it on Amazon? I’ll make sure to reimburse you today. Your help would mean a lot to her.
Let me know if you can assist, and I’ll share her email address, amount, and message to include in the gift
Helen x
Spoiler: it was an address book virus. Turns out, she knows about it already, too – one old dear already got scammed for £250. Don’t tell me Amazon can’t figure a way to stop this kind of thing. (Erm, I’m assuming everyone knows gift cards are the preferred currency of online scammers).
I asked MidJourney for Amazon gift card pirates. Not very good. Not crosseyed dude on right. I was rather taken with the grumpy cat in the middle, though.
February 9, 2026 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 5
One-oh-three
In the thread below, Carl informs us he has 153 apps on his phone. To find out, go to settings >> apps and the number should be right there. I have 103.
However, I regret to inform you, Carl, I do NOT have a free bus pass. Every time I get close to it, they kick the minimum age down the road. As it stands, I should get my pass in June of 2026 – and so, of course they’re talking about abolishing it completely.
ChatGPT’s weasel with a cellphone was so adorable, I had to run it full size. Someone once informed me that they pictured me as little and cute because I chose a weasel as my avatar. Sadly, no – I am tall and distinctly not cute.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
February 6, 2026 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 4
All very civilized
Another routine eye appointment today several towns away. I’ve been resistant to download an ‘app for everything’, but I have to admit I’m being won over.
The train app is awesome. Check the schedule, book the trip, pay for it automatically and your ticket is a QR code on your phone. Painless. Do it on the way to the station. We ought to do more of that for better reasons.
The bus has a similar app, though I don’t actually book the tickets with it. They have a map that shows you where your bus is right now.
Paying my credit card bill with my phone, ditto. Oh, by the way – I got a new debit card recently. It said the expiry date was 1/31.
I says to B, “That’s weird – it tells me the date but not the year.”
And he says, “’31 is the year.”
Yipe!
February 5, 2026 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 7
Officially old
When the kitchen window opens, the chickens come running. (Chicken. Only one loose at a time now.) That’s because we use them as feathery garbage disposals.
I opened the window earlier to chuck some stale popcorn out, and Sam did not come running.
Hm. Worrying sign. After I clomped all around the house in my wellies calling his name before I thought to look in the chicken house. There he was. Put himself to bed an hour before time.
Not a spring chicken, Sam.
February 4, 2026 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 6
Aaaaaaaa
I was trying to type Æthelred earlier – as you do – and I asked my robot friend what that letter was called. And to draw me one.
It’s called Æ — the letter “ash” (pronounced like “ash”).
It’s a ligature (two letters combined) of A + E, used in Old English / Anglo-Saxon (and also Old Norse, Latin in some cases).
Example: Æthelred, Ælfred.
Æ (ash) is usually pronounced like the “a” in “cat” — /æ/.
So it sounds like:“a” in cat / hat / apple
kind of like “ah-eh” quickly blended
Example:
Ælfred ≈ AL-fred (with the “AL” like “cat” but shorter).
Huh. I did not know that. I pronounced more like E. I guess I got carried away with Ethel in Æthelred. Nice picture, though, robot.
February 3, 2026 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 8
So I bought it.
Yesterday, ChatGPT corrected a page of my HTML. It wrote a little Python script to remove extra carriage returns (but not paragraph markers) from a text file, then told me what to do when it wouldn’t run at first. It explained the correct element order in a CSS file. It told me yes, stingrays are venomous (I saw this Youtube). It redrew an ancient map for me and made the text clearer. It checked to see if a book I wanted to repost was in the public domain, including the illustrations. It explained Chinese New Year 2026 (February 17, Year of the Horse) and helped me hook my old Epsom scanner to my new laptop.
And then it cut me off because I’d asked too many questions for free.
So I’m a subscriber now. I figured I’d could splash out for the £8 a month sub and probably get my money’s worth. ChatGPT is the best for accuracy.
Though it’s been running like ass since I signed up.
February 2, 2026 — 7:36 pm
Comments: 6
Useful when it’s useful
This lovely bronze age sword appeared in my Twitter today, with no further information. No link or nothing. I don’t believe anything without a link nowadays (and probably not even then, once everything is written by AI).
But speaking of AI, someone asked if the sword was real, and Grok found the article.
AI taketh away and AI giveth. Good weekend, all!
January 30, 2026 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 1
I learned so much today
I hate learning stuff.
There’s a book about the history of this region written in the 1830s, long in the public domain. Google Books has it as a pdf file, but it’s a shitty pdf file that isn’t searchable. I’m looking for something specific in it.
So I went hunting.
Turns out, there’s a reputedly powerful command line tool called OCRmyPDF that looked like it would read and OCR it in one go. But it’s open source and natively Linux, so I had to install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and a distro (I chose Ubuntu because it’s for babies). Which is kind of awesome, because I like Linux, but not enough to make it my main computer.
Command line for the win.
But turns out I also needed a copy of Ghostscript (which is a program for handling pdf files). And Tesseract (which is the thing that actually does the OCR). They just would not play nice with each other. Until they did.
And yes, it successfully OCR’ed the whole six-hundred-some pages and the resulting text is…pretty much shit. Which I don’t understand because I thought the original scan was okay. I’ll have to think on’t.
Bonus thing I learned today: the regular old command line terminal is not exactly the same thing as the Windows Power Shell. You can get either, but the latter is what it defaults to.
January 29, 2026 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 6
My robot pal
I had a recalcitrant problem with the web page I’m trying to make – on first load, it showed a 404 File Not Found error. Worked fine when you started clicking links, but it loaded ugly.
If you can’t read the text:
Niceee glad that fixed it!
Two-panel layouts are sneaky like that — one tiny name/target mismatch and the whole thing acts haunted.
Now your users won’t be greeted by a sad 404 anymore, which is a big UX win.
If you want to level it up later, a little “Select a document from the left” welcome page in the iframe looks super polished.
If you hit any more weird iframe behavior, feel free to toss it my way — happy to debug with you.
Something about its chummy tone creeps me out, but ChatGPT fixed it. Or rather it kept explaining what I should do until I saw the problem. I hadn’t replaced a placeholder filename with the real filename. It’s the HTML equivalent of having a t-shirt made up that says [your text here].
Wait. I’d kind of like that. Note to self…
January 28, 2026 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 4
Did they though?
Twitter outrage of the day is this altered picture of Daniel Pretti. He’s been tweaked to make him ever so slightly more attractive and the altered picture has been used in several places, including MSNBC.
The buzz is, imagine dying for your cause and your comrades don’t think you’re attractive enough to be a martyr.
But there’s a twist. I can’t find the post, but somebody asked Grok whether the photo had been altered. Yes, Grok answered, it had – but it looked like the altered photo had been released by the White House.
Now, that there is some 4D chess.
I tried asking Grok myself, but it’s being a little bitch tonight.
January 27, 2026 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 7