remy sharp's b:log

As I continue occasionally tinker on the redesign I've started (and often think "what's the point, current design is fine"), I wanted to share some of the problems I've run in to.

Around June this year I decided that I wanted to spruce up my blog.

I'm in the process of (attempting) to redesign this blog, and in doing so, I'm using a few of the new bits (to me) of CSS to make things fancy.

The boy is 14 and regularly does long outdoor runs.

Tia would have turned 16 this year.

Lately I've had the opportunity to travel by train and coach, during which time I also tend to work.

I saw recently saw a blog post (which annoyingly I can't find any more, but I'll link it if I do), showing off a web component that if I recall correctly, would show (or hide) it's contents depending on a browser feature (I'd guess using the @supports que…

Just a brainfart here, but it's odd that even though we have wildcard selectors throughout CSS, and even partial selectors (I'll explain in a bit) we don't have partial wildcard selectors on top level elements.

In my RSS reader, I stumbled upon this code-golfed (i.e. minimised to death) snippet that's fairly clever, but from the code, utterly opaque.

As with each year for the FFConf web site, I have a distinct idea of the visual style I want.

Today is the anniversary of the first blog post on this website from two decades ago.

For the second year running, as part of our "stay sane" strategy for FFConf, Julie and I write and send a weekly newsletter.

Today I'm releasing my Game Boy game called Marbles² (or Marbles Squared).

After attending recent conferences and learning that I can swap out buckets of JavaScript for the HTML native popover property, I've been using it liberally throughout my own projects.

This is a literal TIL but was so handy I had to put it my blog so that I wouldn't forget it later.

This is a cheap post to share some of the apps (macos, sorry Windows users) that I use on a fairly regular basis and think some of you might not have heard of before (whilst still being useful).

For a while now both my desktop Mac (running Sonoma) and my laptop (running Tahoe - do not recommend) have had sub-optimal network speeds.

Okay, that's a stupidly obscure title.

Mega short blog post, mostly for me to remember, but also might be useful to you.

January 27th I got an email notification saying that JS Bin had become unavailable.

For the last few years my work-work has mostly focused on back end software (particularly around APIs).

This post is mostly data driven (from my own web site's data) to give me a sense of the quality of the books I've read, otherwise individual reviews are all linked in this post or available on my books page.

I've been doing these posts ending my years, aiming to publish on the 31st, so I'm pleased that I've managed to get this post out the door.

I've written about Advent of Code in the past, but that was 5 years ago, so this warrants a new post, and there's an extra opportunity, I think.

Context: back in March 2025 I decided to put aside my scepticism and try AI driven development for the day.

I've been wanting to write and share my experience of this year's event but a number of things have slowed me down - not least of all that it was Julie's birthday the following Tuesday (the first year her birthday was entirely swallowed by the event).

A simple but effective fix to working with web components and VS Code.

Besides the name, the entire core foundation has changed.

Very recently I was forced to sign up to Meta due to a product purchase (don't at-me!)

I'd been waiting for the grief to find me.

It's not an intuitive process and requires a few speciality commands to work, so it made sense that I write up the process so I can duck myself later on.

I've been immersing myself in the AI news for the last few months, trying to get understanding of the landscape, what and why there's excitement, whether the ethics (both from a copyright and climate change perspective) are being considered, and what's the

Over the years we, as a family, have been moving our purchases away from Amazon, except in one single place: Kindle ebooks.

There's no denying that the web industry, as with many others, has AI and LLMs as a ubiquitous presence.

After jailbreaking my Kindle and seeing how simple it was and how all existing functionality was retained, I spotted that there was a My Clippings.txt file on the Kindle when mounted (I'm sure it's always there, I just hadn't mounted before).

…by just a little.

This question has been asked before and discussed before and I've always looked on from the sidelines, even though, as a conference organiser, I do in fact have fairly strong opinions about this.

It certainly wasn't today.

This post is for my developers out there, web and otherwise.

For a small home project, my son suggested adding some under lights to a plant stand we recently added to our kitchen.

I remember seeing something very similar doing the rounds on that site we used to use called "Twitter", possibly back in 2007.

There's a number of ways to get real-time electricity readings into Home Assistant.

My son, aged 13, was given this question for his homework recently.

As part of the ZX Spectrum community I wrote a tool that can download content over HTTP from a ZX Spectrum Next, but one prerequisite is that the content-length header is present (so it operate properly).

This year zipped past for me, mostly because I had my eye on an event in November for most of the year, but here we are: the close of '24 and on the doorstep of '25.

Our 16th year, 17th outing (it's complicated with doubles for 3 years and skipping the pandemic years…) completed two weeks ago, and it is high time I post my thoughts.

I don't like waking up on this particular day.

And no, I didn't just pop a bow tie on my doorbell!

In a recent (personal) audit of accessibility and continued struggle to get my head around Voice Over (for macos), I remembered that the spoken sound of "ffconf" (as I'll usually display it) is "ef-conf" all sounded out in two syllables (it's hard to expl…

Over the last year+ I've seen AI quickly increase its dominance in the social feeds I follow.