HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.
Which I’m reminded of as I write about progress on our house repairs following the flood that swept through our home on Friday 13 February… 204 days ago. Because that’s how the summer’s repairs have felt: No updates. Nothing to say.
It was already pretty jarring to return from an epic holiday and get back into work-mode. But it was doubly-regrettable to discover that
the various tradespeople who’d been given access to our house in our absence had done… pretty-much nothing.
No work done. And also: no update messages. Everything had just… stopped.
I tell a lie: the restoration of the kitchen floor – a one-day task that didn’t block any of the other next-tasks on the list – happened at the start of August.
So we gathered the builders and the loss adjuster and demanded an update. Sometimes you just have to step up and say “hey, what the fuck guys, are we ever gonna get to move back into
our house?”
It turns out there’d been a few blockers. The contractor who’d been sourced to lay the new underfloor screed in the living room and library had not turned up. The new tiles that would
replace the flooring across the ground floor were still being quarried. The electrical work had complexities that had caused it to overrun be split into two visits, separated by the
electricians’ other contracts.
When I visited this week the living room’s condition was identical to how it had looked six weeks prior. Sigh.
Which is frustrating, of course, but it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of communication.
Anyway: our meeting with the various parties led to a new timeline, and it optimistically proposes that we might be able to move back into our home as soon as November… so, F-Day plus
262 through 291, I guess? Here’s hoping. (Obviously any update will make it into my now long-running series of posts about our experience of getting
flooded-out.)
We’re really keen to be back home by Christmas. The Chicory House is okay as temporary accommodation but there are plenty of things I dislike about it, and I’m ready to move back into our actual house now, thanks.
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content,
David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more
personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
…
In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between
that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to
trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they
a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds
of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the
intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
In 2014 we bought a car1, registered in my name. It’s a little long in the tooth now and we’re
thinking about what might replace it, but for the time being it’s a useful workhorse and especially valuable when we need to move the entire family and still have space for luggage.
This large car was super helpful for a trip to France via the Channel Tunnel earlier this summer… at least, once I’d hacked Le Shuttle’s
API to work around their inability to cope with us bringing home different adults than we took on the outbound leg!
This week, I renewed my driving license2. While doing so, I was invited to connect the records of the
vehicles I own. This would allow, for example, email notifications when my Vehicle Excise Duty is due on them.
How to register a car “wrong”
The newer of our two cars was easy to add: I provided the number plate; the website did some kind of lookup; and it was done. But when I tried to add the older car, I got an error
message:
I’d have probably just treated this as “just one of those things” and ignored it, were it not for the fact that our other car was added without any difficulty! Why the
disparity?
The website claimed that the details on my V5C – the vehicle registration certificate or “logbook” – didn’t match my personal information. So I pulled out
the papers for both cars… and discovered that the personal information sections were identical. The front of a V5C has a section that
shows your name and address, and on both my certificates looked the same: my name, followed by my address. So why was one failing to work?
I sat in a queue for their webchat service, and – after a lot of back-and-forth – the operator and I came to a conclusion about what was wrong: for this car only, my name
had been entered into the “company name” field in their database, rather than the “name” field.
It’s impossible to tell conclusively from a paper certificate whether the first line represents a person or a company: they’re both displayed identically.
From the looks of things, this is what happened in 2014:
The dealership filled the V55/4 form to register the car to me.
The DVLA saw my unusual name3,
figured “that can’t be a person’s name; it must be a company name”4,
and put it into the “company name” field.
The DVLA database differentiates between company name and person name, but the paper version just prints whichever one is present at the top of the address: information is
lost in the translation to paper.
So: the database was wrong, but the paper copy didn’t show that it was wrong.
Getting the problem fixed
Apparently if I send my V5C to them with the details “corrected”, with an accompanying letter explaining the the correction is to which field they should be storing the
data in, then they’ll correct it within a month or so
And then they’ll issue me with a new paper copy. Which will, naturally, look identical to this one. The only change will be in their database.
What can we learn from this?
I wonder if there’s anything that could have been different to prevent this confusion? A simple change would be to improve the layout of the third page of a V5C certificate.
This is the part of the form I need to “change” by entering a first and surname, representing no actual change to the paper version but a significant difference to
DVLA’s database.
Perhaps instead of re-listing the name and address in the same format as on the front page, this page could list each field separately, perhaps with each alongside the
corresponding field for changing it. This wouldn’t need much space, less than would be saved by consolidating submission instructions (which are repeated at least five times in some
form or another, across the form).
There are other ambiguities and redundancies that could be cleared-up at the same time. For example, the company name field does double-duty as the title field, which is an unnecessary
complication that I’m sure must make data entry harder. And the registration number and document reference number are duplicated many times on this page, even though the instructions
prohibit separating the parts.
Maybe there’s something to be learned from this for all of us who work with databases and forms. Do you have any fields that serve double-duty? Do you produce output by
concatenating fields in such a way that might result in ambiguous provenience? Do you have a process to validate that data has been entered into the right column? Are you unable to make
changes without re-generating secondary resources (like paper hard copies), the the secondary resources are functionally unchanged?
But for now, I probably ought to get this form sent back to the DVLA. So they can change their database and send me back a near-identical form. Such bureaucracy!
Footnotes
1 This car is a Seat, and – because we name all of our cars – he’s call Arthur. Yes, for
the pun.
2 The driving license renewal was super easy, by the way. Half a dozen clicks on a gov.uk
page and it was done.
4 As far as I can tell, there’s never been a company called “Dan Q”. There was a “Danq”, once, and a “Dan QB” long after, and it makes you wonder why corporate registration of a vehicle doesn’t require
as a minimum a cursory lookup on Companies House by the registering officer, but what do I know?
Quick check while I was passing, as nobody’s logged this cache during our stupidly-hot July or August (and I don’t blame them: it’s been horrible outdoors!). Anyway: the cache is fine
and healthy and looking forward to its next visitor!
I descaled the coffee machine yesterday. We live in an exceptionally hard-water area and this maintenance was long overdue.
This morning I turned the machine on and something felt unfamiliar and wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on what, until I realised…
…I’d gotten so-used to seeing the “descaling needed” light illuminated that I’d subconsciously forgotten that it wasn’t supposed to be always-lit! Turns out that a warning left long
enough becomes not just invisible but normalised!
(Next, maybe I should do something about the ‘check engine’ light in the car. It’s been on for a while too…)
I have such an admiration for those who post so much without fear of reprisal; posting purely for the sake of loving writing and sharing their opinions and thoughts with the world,
not because they’re trying to manipulate search engines or grift some ad revenue from whatever happens to be popular that week. Pure and simple posting for the love of the game.
Take my Three Rings colleague Dan Q, whose
blog spans multiple decades across countless topics. I’m sure he would shy away from such an accolade, but I think it’s truly a fantastic example of using the Internet as it was
intended: having your own little corner of it and filling it with the things that interest you, regardless of whether anybody else particularly cares.
…
Aww.
I first met Oli shortly before a nonprofit I founded – Three Rings – took the necessary technical steps
to formally adopt/rescued a piece of software he’d been working
on – Portal – in order to continue to make it available to the voluntary organisations that depended upon it (and perhaps, hopefully, along the way make it suitable for use by a
wider range of charitable enterprises to boot).
I’ve long known that Oli blogs well and his writings are worth seeing… but he does so at what one might call a “normal person” cadance. This is perhaps unlike my pace,
which might be generously described as somewhere between “breakneck” and “obsessive”.
How do people blog for this long without running out of things to say, asks Oli. And then, over the course of his post and via a glimpse at a post-ideas spreadsheet (as well as a
conversation with an LLM), he comes to a conclusion:
…
As for the question I started with – how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? I think I was approaching it from the wrong direction. Nobody sits
down with thirty years’ worth of material ready to go. They just keep finding things interesting for thirty years.
…
And that’s it: that’s it exactly. You don’t start a blog with three decades’ worth of ideas. Hell, if I could only write about things that I’ve got notes or drafts about, and at my
current cadence, I’d be dry before the end of the year (and I have a lot of half-written ideas just waiting for polishing!).
If there is a secret to blogging for thirty straight years, I think it’s this. Stay curious. Never stop asking questions. Never stop learning. Try to look
at your world as if you’re seeing it for the first time, and remember that what’s mundane to you could be fascinating to somebody else, or in the right light. And, crucially, the
single-most important thing of all: find a motivation to keep writing for yourself. When you’re writing for yourself, first and foremost, you’ve always got a reason to
keep going.
That’s what I think, anyway. You don’t have to blog like me, of course, but if you want to… the paragraph above represents all I
know about how to do so!
Today I’m introducing the next generation of code editor. A modern app to satiate the needs of the discerning coder. We’re talkin’ blazing fast collaboration
between man and machine.
…
Yeah so um… have you noticed that all modern software is teetering on the enshitty cliff? Everything in my dock is an Electron-ified enshittybomb one update from disaster. There used to be alternatives. Now those suck too.
…
You probably saw this one already; I forgot to share it in July, but it’s done the rounds a-plenty. It’s worth experiencing on David’s website where the “Modern Editor”
is interactive (kinda: it’s still about as much use as it looks like it’s gonna be… and that’s kind-of the point).
The enshittification of modern apps is very real. Simple tools that ought to work offline don’t start without an Internet connection (or, worse yet, a slow Internet
connection means that they stall during their self-update check or phone-home analytics). AI “features” get stitched in to everything, whether you want them or not. Desktop applications
are constructed using the same super-heavyweight React + Tailwind + whatever else stacks under which the Web creaks, but because they’re now long-running system tray/notification area
processes their gradual memory leaks make them painfully slow. Updates change the UI without warning and you need to work to find where your favourite features have gone, if they even
still exist. You’re nagged to “create an account” and “log in” even if you have no use for the connectivity “features”. Kebab menus everywhere make for a whole new level of mystery meat
navigation, once you eventually find the right to click out of the three that are typically visible at any given time. And every application acts like it’s the single-most
important thing on your screen, competing for real estate and attention.
So yeah, I feel David’s pain.
Anyway: go play with his interactive modern editor.
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but
therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: “Safari. A browser that’s actually private.” and “Privacy. That’s iPhone.“
It’s accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private,
but not people in general, especially not the people the users point these devices at.
Privacy, as it is commonly practiced and advertised, is for the person inflicting the damage onto their surroundings, not their surroundings.
…
A wonderful take on big tech privacy culture that’s better-expressed than I could have ever put it. That Apple poster shows a particularly ironic lack of self-awareness!
Techbros seem to want to sell individual privacy while simultaneously undermining society‘s privacy: you get “privacy settings”, but we’re still
tracking-by-default everybody else. They deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that the latter – in our age of big data processing – undermines the former: there are countless
examples now of people finding new ways to interpret leaked corporate datasets in order to extract personally-identifiable information, and it’s a problem that only seems to get worse.
“Privacy settings” are important, but wouldn’t it be nicer if privacy was the default?
And yeah: smart glasses can get fucked. I don’t want a world in which having a conversation with somebody in specs requires that I allow Facebook to watch and listen-in as well.
Just wear some Normal Fucking Sunglasses, ‘k?
Despite immediately honing in on exactly the right host, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to find this cache. This, despite having found – and even hidden – cache contsibers
of exactly this type before!
My usual technique for lazily finding them, which involves swooping my phone through likely hiding spots with the camera in ‘selfie’ mode, as a mirror, somehow didn’t help me spot this
one and it took until I bothered to crouch down (in the rain, in my already-wet trousers) and felt around free host before I reached it!
Found the grave, but this is now the second offset I’ve found here that’s asked me to double-back on my walk.
Nope! I’m just going to save the calculated coordinates for the next time I’m in the area! Looking forward to returning!
Found the clues and solved the coordinates, but I’ve JUST walked past the final location a while ago and don’t feel like doubling back today!
A=How many letters in the word underneath Knoxville?
B=A*2
C=Number of letters in place where “Beckett” came from.
D=C+1
E=F Number of letters in the word underneath Knoxville divided by 2
I should have worked out the likely location before I set out. Given that A must be a single digit number that can be doubled (B) to get a single digit number and halved (E, F) to get a
second, there’s only one possible value for those four clues! The other two C and D are related to one another as well, resulting in a grand total of only 9 possible pairs of
coordinates at which this cache could live (of which I’ll bet the “right” one stands out as the most-likely, even without making assumptions about the length of place names!). So yeah,
I’m kicking myself slightly for not solving this before I visited.
But I’m glad I visited anyway. The historical connection is interesting and I enjoyed learning about it.
Maybe I’ll come find the actual cache next time I’m in the area!
Like many before me, from the looks of things, I didn’t find the cache at the published coordinates but about 11 metres away at N 51° 34.086′, W 001° 26.441′. Possibly worth the CO
checking if those coordinates work better for them, too, during their next maintenance visit. TFTC!
A challenging but worthwhile find during a walk along and around the Ridgeway.
My initial attempt to collect the coordinates was way off because I misinterpreted some of the instructions and it yielded a point almost 2km away! My second attempt looked better,
giving a likely-looking spot… but the checksum was out by one!
I triple-checked all the sources and was still out! I was most-confident in my calculated latitude, so I permuted all possible one-point longitude changes that would satisfy the
checksum. This yielded two candidates: one a tenth of a minute out from my original calculation, and one a thousandth of a minute out.
The one that was a tenth of a minute out from my calculation “felt wrong”, being way off the path, so I merely glanced its way as I walked past to the other. The one that was a
thousandth of a minute – which equates to only around a metre! – looked better, and sure enough when I got there I found a multitude of likely hiding spots.
The hide itself was sneaky too: I had to go further from the path than I expected in order to “look back” and spot the cache – very tricky in the thickening undergrowth! But find it I
did, and duly signed the log before returning it to its snug little spot.
This morning I came up to explore the Ridgeway and escape from thinking about Life Stuff for a bit. (Although escaping from the rain wasn’t a possibility! It was real wet up here
today!)
I was wandering this path in a bit of a reverie when I spotted something unusual and thought it a good candidate for a geocache to hide, having momentarily forgotten that this was in
fact the reason I was on this particular footpath in the first place! But my geosense was solid, because when I took my phone out to check I discovered that, sure enough, I’d
stopped right alongside the hiding area.
The cache was an easy find and I appreciated the proper-sized container! The lid is slightly damaged and no longer makes a complete seal but so long as it’s properly returned to its
hiding place it doesn’t need any urgent attention.
