Finally managed to have both my black sharpies in the same place at the same time, which means I can take action to reduce the likelihood of them wandering off independently again.

Given the expense of a power meter—and a bike you'd put a power meter on—4iii making theirs be Apple Find My compatible for finding location makes total sense. (Just a special bluetooth advert after all.) Hadn't occurred to me, but now slightly judging competitors that don't include the feature.

Sometimes I now leave accidental typos in my work, just to show its hand-typed and not clanked out.

Heading to #BrightonRuby in a heatwave 😅

Bank of England are putting native animals on new notes, public vote on what to include https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/help-us-design-our-next-series-of-banknotes

Lovely day at the inaugural RubyConf AT. Really enjoyed the talks and the musical arts being woven between them. Good venue for hallway track too and so many drinks and snacks.

This little nugget of code felt a bit too realistic. If you work with Ruby on Rails, the community survey is open again. Curious to see where things actually stand in 2026.

I still can’t believe this Great Blue Heron let me witness this tonight. Those wild feathers are breeding plumes, and seeing them lit softly in the evening shadows felt almost unreal.

Whenever I've screwed up and created a folder called ~ inside my local directory, I always jump across to the Finder to delete it from there. Totally bypasses any issue trying to run `rm -r \~` and fucking up the escaping.

Rubyists! I am reviving Ruby Inside after 12 years of hiatus. I have too many Ruby things I want to blog about :-) So far I've got the archive up and running at rubyinside.com/archives/ - it's a bit of a Ruby time capsule..

I got curious to query the monthly word count of Lobsters comments. Average is 618k, or roughly 10 nonfiction books per month.

OH: “I wouldn’t put the ice cream in the pizza oven, obviously”

Apparently I've read one too many, "I think this is AI slop" comments against a useful/thought provoking post recently and can't bite my tongue anymore. What's the point in nitpicking everything you ever read now? Given slop is based on averages, won't the average writing sound like it? Tiresome.

Apparently somebody just built us a new marketing site... 🙏 justfuckingusetailscale.com

Modern hell is other people watching short form videos loudly without headphones in public settings.

Trying out Apple Vision Pro travel mode in the car for the first time (from the passenger seat). 30 seconds in was rather disconcerting to see a bus appearing from behind Safari. Brain can't handle the disconnect of immersive environment but otherwise seems fine.

This is were it went from a read that is S-Tier to whatever is past S-Tier

Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I wrote about Kat.

Back in Cracow 🇵🇱 after 8 years away, wandering through the city to get to my apartment very much felt like catching up with an old friend. Looking forward to exploring and then https://www.rubycommunityconference.com/ later in the week.

Ruby Community Conference - Winter 2026

Get ready for Ruby Community Conference. Join our amazing speakers for awesome portion of Ruby

rubycommunityconference.com

Left my coat on the chair in the pub to keep my table whilst I went to the bar, only to realised I’d left my AirPods in the coat pocket. Trackable, but valuable. Then remembered the coat retails for nearly the cost of the headphones. Gotta love an eBay bargain.

Crossing the Welsh border hardly registers as an event in my head, yet crossing the Scottish border is worth pointing at the sign and shouting SCOTLAND every time. (with a terrible impression of an accent of course.)

When installing a hardwired dashcam (Garmin in this case), it's worth opening the control box on the cable and moving the jumper from 12v to 12.3v. Stops the dashcam potentially draining the battery too low.

Dropped the BMW Z4 into Birds Auto this week to get a Quaife LSD fitted, replacing the factory open diff. Lovely group of people, well looked after and proper car nuts. Wish I'd replaced the diff earlier if anything, makes such a nice difference to the drivability of the car. Love it.

If you're looking to put Solid Queue into your Rails app, you **really** want to put it in a separate database from the start. Even if that database is on the same database server to start with so it doesn't cost you more. Moving it to another database later without downtime/dataloss is _tedious_

Just sticking Lord of the Rings on and notice it’s a “Wingnut Production” The chances that Beatles obsessive Peter Jackson named his film company that because he’s a Wings nut isn’t zero

I do love it when I have an idea or annoyance about a piece of software, go to open a ticket about it and discover someone had the same idea *and* fixed it last week. Perfecto.

I like this take on how to get promoted. My experience has been that promotions come from finding and doing important work. Being spoon-fed is fine for juniors but a negative signal for those seeking e.g. staff+ promotions.

Today’s trip from the West Midlands to Essex bizarrely involves flying to Belfast then on to London City to catch a lift. Obviously driving would be simplest, but I can’t take a car.

Realised I've been wearing headphones for some time, listening to music playing. Playing from the HomePod on my desk it turns out. Transparency mode on the headphones is good enough I didn't immediately notice, which is both impressive and irritating.

Given a class object `klass`, it is not uncommon to see klass.to_s to get its name. However, that is unnecessarily indirect. If you want the class name, just ask for it! klass.name That is more concise/intentional.

If you've ever run `jj jj …` by accident, do I have the alias for you. https://caiustheory.com/jj-jj-jj-jj-jj/ #jj #jujutsu