Site history
Changelog
A running log of what's changed on this site.
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- Trimmed the AI paragraph in /now's "what I'm thinking about" down to the actual point — the long-term viability of a career in tech — without the specifics.
- Turned the /now wallpaper up a bit — opacity from 0.6 to 0.8, so the sunset reads more clearly behind the windows.
- Switched the /now saved-video embed to youtube-nocookie.com — same player, but it skips YouTube's regular tracking cookies and cuts down on the ad/analytics beacon noise a content blocker would otherwise flag in the console.
- New note: "The Kitchen Project" — the six-month renovation diary I posted as a Bluesky thread in 2025, from the first demolition day to the finishing touches, now up as a proper note with all 82 photos. Backdated to when it actually happened. Also added a couple of new figure layouts for notes generally — a full-bleed single image and a 2-up row, for photo-heavy posts like this one.
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- Music: the currently-playing track is now marked inside an album's tracklist, not just on the album itself — a pulsing dot and highlighted name on the matching track, wherever the tracklist appears (the Now Playing panel, or opening the same album from the grid). Matches on a normalised track name, since Last.fm's "now playing" name and its own tracklist for the same album aren't always byte-identical.
- Fixed a real data bug in the music library: two entirely unrelated real bands are both named Placebo (UK alt-rock, and a 70s Belgian jazz-fusion group), each with a self-titled album — the original library build matched the wrong one, showing the jazz record's cover, year and genre for what is actually a Placebo (rock) album. Corrected against the right MusicBrainz release. Last.fm's own album page for this exact title pair has the same two-bands-conflated bug baked in on their side (right bio, wrong tracklist) with no query parameter to work around it, so the tracklist for this one album is now sourced from MusicBrainz directly rather than Last.fm — every other album is unaffected.
- Updated /now — what I'm working on and what I'm thinking about, both a bit stale.
- New /now wallpaper — a Devon sunset. Dropped the grayscale filter that every previous wallpaper photo had run through, and swapped the dot-matrix overlay for a plain vignette; this one's all about the colour, so it stays punchy and mostly full-brightness, just darkened toward the edges to stay out of the windows' way.
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- Homepage: fixed a structural hover/click bug in the Projects grid — a block-level link only sized to its own content, so on rows where one column's copy ran longer than the other, the shorter link's hover and click area fell short of the grid cell it visually filled. Now stretches to match, regardless of future content-length mismatches.
- Notes: published "A house, recorded," introducing the private house-history project — a full-width hero masthead, a few real numbers on the scale of the research, and a password field for anyone who already has access, alongside the usual ask-for-it-by-email route.
- Extracted the homepage's featured-project banner (the full-bleed branded card, including its password-gated variant) into a shared component, and reused it to close out the house-history note — same lockup as the homepage's /house entry, rather than a bespoke password form. Also fixed a real bug this surfaced: a couple of full-bleed elements were breaking out to the true browser viewport width instead of the site's own page-frame, bleeding past its border on wide windows.
- Notes: published "Rebuilding the shelf," on why /music is a full jewel-case simulation rather than a plain list.
- Notes: added a heroFit: "natural" masthead option — the full hero image at its own aspect ratio with no cropping and no scrim, title/description overlaid on real dead space in the image rather than object-fit: cover gambling on where a forced-height crop lands. Used on "Rebuilding the shelf"; the existing cropped-and-scrimmed masthead (used on the house-history note) is unaffected.
- Fixed the wrong description on /notes and its RSS feed — was calling the notes section "design leadership, software, and practice," which was never really what it's about.
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- Homepage: added Come to Art Club (cometoartclub.com) to the Projects section, and turned the non-featured projects into a 2×2 grid instead of a single-column list, so the section doesn't keep growing taller as more sites get added below the featured banner.
- Homepage: Projects can now feature more than one banner at once — added a second, password-gated entry (an OS-map-styled card with a password field and a View button in place of the usual link) for a private research project I'm sharing with specific people rather than publishing openly.
- Added a small Netlify Edge Function that password-gates a page ahead of the static file itself, so a direct hit on the URL with no referrer still shows a password prompt, not the content — reusable for other pages down the line, not just this one.
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- Homepage: rebuilt the Projects section into a mini-portfolio — COSTA is now the featured project, shown as a full-bleed branded banner, with the other sites I've designed and built listed below it as plain colour-coded type (title over one-line description, each set in its own project's accent colour). Replaces the old full-width "Featured Project" band that pulled a random shop title from Etsy on every page load. Dropped morning.video from the list; added Outpost and a client therapy-practice site.
- Homepage: pulled the changelog activity widget out of the Updates block into its own component and moved it under Writing in the left column, so the two columns stay roughly balanced now that the Projects column is shorter. The recent-updates list stays on the right.
- Homepage: the changelog widget now grows to fill the left column, so its hover highlight reaches the column edge instead of stopping short; removed a doubled hairline under the projects list.
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- Homepage: fixed the Featured Project random pick flashing the static fallback title/photo before the real pick replaced it — the section now stays hidden until the script has actually populated it, whether with the random pick or (on fetch failure) the static fallback.
- Homepage: fixed the Featured Project block's black background/border only appearing once content loaded — the card itself now renders immediately, and only the image/text fades in once populated. Also added "Satirical Notebooks for the Politically Resentful" to the block so the joke reads clearly rather than as genuine political nonfiction.
- Homepage: fixed the Featured Project block occasionally taking seconds to appear — it was calling the same endpoint /shop uses, which fetches Etsy data for every live title (~25, with 429 retries) to serve a full catalog the homepage never needed; now a random pick is made first and only that one title's data is fetched. Also added a pulsing skeleton placeholder so the wait (however short now) doesn't read as broken, crossfading into the real content once it's ready.
- Homepage: added a skeleton CTA button to the Featured Project loading state — without it, the button popping in on top of the already-settled skeleton text read as a jarring second flash.
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- Homepage: Featured Project now picks a random live title from the catalog on every visit (including client-side navigation back to home) instead of always showing the same fixed one, shown as a background photo blending into black via a gradient scrim, with the title/CTA overlaid.
- Homepage: added a Featured Project band introducing Covert Stories, with a live featured product from the shop.
- Covert Stories: new title, "Manufacturing Jobs" — a notebook on Andy Burnham's manufactured route to No. 10 (a resigned seat, two by-elections, no public vote on the actual leadership).
- Homepage: rebuilt the Featured Project band as a photo hero (aspect-locked image + flexible text column) rather than two half-width blocks, picking a random live title on every visit.
- Homepage: moved the Featured Project band up above the Work/Writing/Projects/Updates grid — a feature belongs higher on the page.
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- Published new note: Can personal context servers improve AI outputs? — a blind-judged test suite pitting the coach MCP server against unaugmented LLMs.
- Coach MCP: added get_talk_transcripts tool — full transcripts of three conference talks, widening the corpus beyond DLM writing.
- Coach MCP: folded the old "Running a Design Team" blog post into the get_dlm_writing corpus.
- Added /files for unlisted static asset hosting — first file is a PDF report shared via direct link only.
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- Published new note: Mute Mover — Python scripts to migrate Bluesky mutes and muted words to Mastodon.
- Notes: inline code styled to exactly match /coach — salmon with border, dark mode aware.
- /colophon: fix mobile layout — prose and diagram no longer overflow viewport.
- 404 page: animated black hole — lost content spirals into the event horizon.
- Notes: GitHub repo widget — fetched at build time, shown when repoUrl is set in frontmatter.
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- /now: merged NOTES.LOG into NOW window — NOTES field links to latest note, SITE field shows 30-day changelog strip and link.
- /now: BUILD now shows live git commit hash; UPDATED shows date of latest commit.
- /tools: added Riese & Müller Multicharger2 eBike, Dia browser; updated MacBook Pro to M4; added UHF link; Software note updated.
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- Added /zine — Nakasendo newspaper and print pages.
- /tools: 2-column layout; expanded with new hardware (TRMNL, Stream Deck Neo, Lofree Touch mouse, KAP MV Classic Dark, DJI Mic 2, AirPods Pro), instruments (Roland Kiyola, Fender Telecaster, Art & Lutherie, OP-1, Yamaha THR5), Antler/Cubitts/Tom's Studio analog items; links added throughout; Home Server renamed Software; Development merged into Software.
- Homepage: added changelog activity widget to Updates section — shows latest entry and a 30-day commit-graph style strip.
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- Homepage: Writing section moved into the left column alongside Work. Booking.com's two roles now listed under a single header. Updates feed now auto-includes the latest note from /notes at build time.
- Homepage: project, writing, and update list items are now full-block links with a bg-surface hover highlight and smooth transition.
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- Added 66 new photos to the south Devon sea essay, spanning August 2022 to June 2026. Total now 180 photographs. Sun position and Brixham tide data backfilled for all entries.
- Fixed data quality issues from the Roon export: normalised artist names with inconsistent "The" prefix (Beach Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Avett Brothers, Enemy), fixed diacritics (Bjork → Björk), normalised & vs and (Belle and Sebastian, Tegan and Sara), fixed punctuation (Fontaines DC), stripped raw rip filenames from album titles, and fixed a Beatles typo. 2 duplicate entries merged.
- Further music data cleaning (pass 3): artist name fixes (Alanis → Morissette, Sara and Tegan → Tegan & Sara, The Charlatans UK, Sigur Ros, The XX, Ólafur Arnalds collab, boygenius casing). Deduplication of SACD-R variants (Björk Medúlla, Vespertine), Nirvana anniversary editions (x3→x1), The xx bonus disc, combined releases (James Laid/Wah Wah, RATM Battle/Renegades), Sigur Rós ( ) / [Untitled], Wish You Were Here 50. 1444 → 1433 albums.
- Further music data cleaning (pass 2): edition deduplication (Rubber Soul x4, Homogenic (1997), Every Kingdom Deluxe, Bon Iver Limited Edition collapsed to single entries), corrected IDLES casing, FKA twigs casing, and Daryl Hall & John Oates separator variant. Fixed a class of self-titled album corruption where Roon appended a format tag with an em-dash (e.g. "ULTRA MONO – FLAC"). 1450 → 1444 albums.
- Improved album artwork coverage on /music — the iTunes matching script now handles artist name variations (The X vs X, & vs and), strips more edition/format suffixes, uses a two-pass search strategy, and falls back to Last.fm for albums not in the iTunes catalog. Roughly 140 additional albums gained cover art.
- Removed the album name/artist hover overlay from CD covers — the label below already shows this information.
- Music: open CD case spine now aligns to the panel center line. Dynamic panel text contrast now computed from actual album color luminance rather than a fixed dark/light override — prevents dark text on dark panels and white text on bright covers.
- /colophon: added Data section covering the four build-time pipelines (music via Roon/iTunes/Last.fm, library via shelf photos/OCR/Hardcover, photo essays via EXIF+bank tx+drafts, DLM RSS). Stack section prose tightened; architecture diagram trimmed to remove empty right-hand space.
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- Fixed key presses (h, j, k, l) being swallowed on /ask after visiting a photo essay — navigation handlers now clean up properly when leaving the page.
- Fixed the MRFRISBY hero not appearing when navigating back to the home page.
- Fixed a wide empty column gap on the library page on mobile.
- Opening a CD on /music now centers it in the view — other CDs from the row animate to stack underneath it, their titles fading out. The inside sleeve shows the actual cover art. Track listing moved from the sleeve to the album detail panel. Fixed a bug where clicking a peer CD from the same row produced a broken visual state.
- The homepage now pulls the latest DLM post automatically at build time from the RSS feed — no manual update needed.
- Added /colophon — a short technical essay on the stack, type system, colour system, semantic layer, infrastructure, and interface philosophy. Includes a wiring diagram showing how data sources connect to pages at build and runtime.
- Added /changelog page (this one), linked from the footer. Entries link to the pages they describe.
- Widened the home (/) link's click target to reach the left edge of the page.
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- Added "The advocate's trap" to the homepage and to the /ask knowledge base.
- Switched the colour system to OKLCH — a perceptually uniform colour space where equal lightness steps look equal. Hue rotates subtly from warmer (dark) to cooler (light). A hidden /colours reference page documents the full system.
- Fixed light mode accent colour — the previous value was almost invisible on the mint background.
- Added smooth page transitions: outgoing pages fade out, incoming pages slide up.
- Fixed dark mode on /ask — the panel and dock now use the site's dark green palette rather than a fixed cream.
- Added structured data (JSON-LD), theme-colour meta tags that match the palette in both modes, and a WebMentions inbox.
- Typography improvements: hanging punctuation, optical font sizing, tighter tracking on the large heading, and animated underlines on inline links.
- Fonts and hashed assets now get long-lived cache headers for faster repeat visits.
- Added humans.txt and a security contact at /.well-known/security.txt.
- /music page colours now track the site palette automatically rather than using their own hardcoded values.
- /ask gains smooth answer fade-ins, respects reduced-motion preferences, and the ring gradient now uses the OKLCH colour values.
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- /now page redesigned as a BIOS-style desktop with draggable windows. Seven panels covering what I'm working on, thinking about, where I am, and live feeds from Bluesky, Last.fm, Hardcover, and Trakt.
- Homepage: work history expanded with earlier career entries. Writing section moved to a full-width strip at the bottom.
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- Site rebuilt from scratch in Astro. New editorial design with the pistachio palette, dark and light modes, self-hosted fonts, and the MRFRISBY hero letterform that fills the full page width.
- Halftone photo treatment on the profile portrait — blended into the page background using mix-blend-mode.
- /now page draws live data at build time from Last.fm, Hardcover, and Trakt.