iamcal.com

2023 Reading List

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 10:31:34 +0000

I've updated my 2023 reading list with the 105 books I read over the course of the year.

Highlights were The Future, by Naomi Alderman, Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty and Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

2nd January, 3:17 pm

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 2 Jan 2024 15:17:00 +0000

A history of early Lego and the first sets they produced. The first Lego I played with was 725-3 LEGO Samsonite Town Plan, which my grandparents had bought in 1961. This was from the era when Samsonite distributed Lego in the Americas and when bricks were still made from cellulose acetate, before the switch to ABS.

2nd January, 3:02 pm

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 2 Jan 2024 15:02:45 +0000

WikiNav does some really nice visualizations of wiki navigation that I might adapt for WikiCamp

2nd January, 2:58 pm

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 2 Jan 2024 14:58:04 +0000

A lovely dive into the least popular content on Wikipedia

2nd January, 2:56 pm

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 2 Jan 2024 14:56:56 +0000

The story of the creation of the Tesco Clubcard, the first supermarket loyalty program, built in a time when the technology to do it didn't really exist.

8th November, 8:45 am

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Wed, 8 Nov 2023 08:45:41 +0000

It’s really incredible what’s now possible with pure CSS.

26th October, 9:26 am

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 09:26:15 +0000

I haven't tried building anything real in it yet, but as a 90s web developer, HTMX really appeals to me

mod_rewrite breakage

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 21:50:01 +0000

If you use mod_rewrite and you've started getting random errors in your logs that look like "rewritten query string contains control characters or spaces", it's because of a security patch that breaks using backrefs as query params if they contain spaces (and certain other special characters). For example:

RewriteRule ^foo/([^/]+)$ foo.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]

This will still work for foo/bar but break for foo/bar%3Abaz. You need to add the B flag as follows:

RewriteRule ^foo/([^/]+)$ foo.php?page=$1 [L,QSA,B]

2022 Reading List

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Mon, 9 Jan 2023 13:18:09 +0000

I've updated my 2022 reading list with all the 112 books I read in the year.

Highlights were Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.

19th August, 10:14 am

nobody@domain.com (Cal Henderson) — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 10:14:18 +0000

Some generous soul has re-traced a bunch of the Apple emoji to provide much higher res versions of them for use in presentations.