2026-04-14 02:21:05
Over the weekend I was attempting to setup my garden hose ready for the summer and my dad had helpfully given me a big bag of tap connectors he had spare but none of them fit my outdoor tap despite one of them being, to my eye, a perfect match.
This page from Hozelock explains threads on a tap are "sized according to the standard British Standard Pipe, also known as BSP". Yay standards. Looking into it more there seemed to be three options: 1/2″ BSP, 3/4″ BSP, and 1″ BSP which correspond to an outer thread measurement of 21mm, 26.5mm, and 33mm. I measured my tap with my tape measure and it looked to be 21mm or 1/2″ BSP. I found the correct adaptor I would need based on this but I already had that exact thing in my hand and it was the aforementioned one that didn't fit. The 1/2 was a tiny bit too small, the 3/4 was too big. I grabbed my calipers to get a more accurate measurement and it was actually 22mm which according to maths is larger than 21mm.
At this point I didn't really know what to search for because "like a 1/2 BSP but a bit bigger please" wasn't going to cut it. Hozelock didn't have anything on their website beyond the three standards. I still don't know how I found it (perhaps I should have used Horse) but I eventually stumbled upon this Reddit thread about tap threads where someone had included images of the exact same problem I was facing. There were a bunch of comments that linked to dead pages but the top comment was someone who had summarised everything in the thread:
For anyone else coming to this thread years later, who also had the same issue of the tap falling exactly between the 1/2" and 3/4" connectors [...] I found that my outside tap is a non-standard 5/8" thread, BUT there are connectors available for it!
I ordered a 5/8 adaptor (this Spear & Jackson BWF10 Female Threaded Brass) from Amazon, it arrived the next day, and it fit perfectly. Great success. I did see some references to another size of adaptor, 7/8", which seems to be called a "farmer's tap" but thankfully I didn't need to hunt one of those down.
As I am want to do, I posted a note about it a bit later in the day. Like many posts on my site it was as a record for myself but also on the off chance it helps someone else. To my surprise Ana replied that she had the exact same problem and had been putting it off so it helped at least one person and I have a garden hose ready for summer.
2026-04-09 19:50:01
I'm not saying I'm obsessed with Mildliners but this review of the new fine versions will be my fourth post about them so make of that what you will.
These new fine versions have two tips: a fine 0.7 and an extra fine 0.5. They're longer than the standard Mildliners presumably to accommodate the fine tips and the top of the cap is embossed with an F. There are ten of these in total reusing existing colours across two sets: the calmer, darker "Set A" and the brighter "Set B". I've updated the Mildliner site to have the new sets but for the sake of completeness the available colours are:
I think gray is probably a little too light to be useful at the extra fine size but overall this is a decent selection of colours. Two grays though? Come on. If Art from the Heart are to be believed these have limited availability although I can't verify that because Zebra don't seem to know these exist based on their website.
The extra fine tip doesn't give the kind of resistance I like from a fineliner usually but I doubt I'll be using these to write with; much more likely they get used for cover pages and general decoration. It's notable that there is now multiple definitions of "fine" across the range - the standard fine, the new fine, and the brush tipped ones mark the non-brush end as "super fine".
One other oddity when comparing them is that all the cap colours match with the exception of dark grey where the cap is much darker on the fine one than it's standard counterpart.
I paid £10 for each set of these which is about right for Mildliners and I'm impressed with them. As of right now I've only seen them on Art from the Heart but I'd imagine other retailers will get some soon.
2026-03-29 03:53:01
Today I was met with error code 73 when trying to login to Disney Plus on my Apple TV. Their help article says you're either on a VPN or "Attempting to access Disney+ from a country/region where service is currently unavailable" which I obviously was not.
Despite lots of articles on the web saying to trying rebooting, reinstalling, and the like, none of that worked (although I did try it anyway) because what had actually happened was Disney had blocked my IP address. I know this because when I got on live chat, explained the situation, they asked for my IP (by sending me to this ad-riddled website) then they "refreshed my IP" for me which magically fixed it. Yep, refresh the IP address, thats a thing.
No amount of rebooting was going to fix that. Next time, I'll just go straight to the live chat.
2026-03-06 16:41:23
As I mentioned in this post I set up Forgejo recently to move away from GitHub but one of the things that worried me was backups. I know I shouldn't blindly trust GitHub to not lose my data but it seems an unlikely situation so I've never done anything about it really. I trust myself less than that.
Of course I have backups of the server, which backs up the repositories, but I wanted a solution that meant I also had the code locally to then send to my offsite backup.
I currently have code in three code forges: GitHub, Source Tube (which is Forgejo), and my Forgejo instance. My first instinct was to make a script that goes into every folder in my developer directory on my computer and fetches the changes but that wouldn't work if I made a new repository on one of the services. The ideal solution is to go through every repository on each of those services and fetch the latest changes to my machine. So I built Ash Fetchum and this logo that I'm very proud of (along with the name).
Ash Fetchum works by connecting to the GitHub or Forgejo API, fetches every repository, then cloning or fetching that repository to the defined location on your local machine, in my case /repo-backups. The readme has instructions on how to set it up and it should be relatively straight forward as long as you get the token permissions correct.
It also has a "manual" mode where you can give it an array of repository remotes to keep up to date. I'm using this as bodge-job replacement for some GitHub pages deployments that I want to move away from GitHub but it could easily be used for a more defined set of repositories to backup.
2026-03-06 03:36:21
In 2024 I switched to Raycast from Alfred. I'd been a long time Alfred user but I was tempted by Raycast's shiny UI and better integration with things like Reminders. Turns out I never used the reminders integration or most of the other features Raycast has that are unique.
I had spent time converting some of my workflows to Alfred extensions to varying success. The stricter nature of how Raycast extensions are built is good for Raycast but doesn't help me, a person who just wants to write a script or two and make things do other things. It was far too much effort to make new extensions or fix broken ones (like my Safari one that broke very quickly and I never fixed).
Raycast has always been pushing their AI stuff but it's mostly been out of the way and was basically "plug in your API key to chat to your ai girlfriend favourite model". Except now they're getting into the slop game so I'm out.
I had to write a script to convert my Raycast snippets to Alfreds format which you can find here.
So I'm back on Alfred. It has it's own problems, like aging workflows that don't work scattered around the internet but the gallery does help somewhat with that. I wish it there was a better submission process instead of "post in the forum" and to be honest I'm not in a rush to add more of my own plugins to the gallery, I'll just keep them on my own repo for now. Which is the last thing to do: I need to get setup again with my workflows, get my backup scripts working, and move them over to KnightForge. They'll still be on this page going forward though.
2026-03-03 05:57:29
It's been 10 years since Tim Holman made GitHub corners, the little triangle with the waving Octocat you see on some open source projects, including many of mine.
When he made those it had been eight years since GitHub posted the ribbons on their blog. GitHub is synonymous with online code but I have code that isn't on GitHub and so do lots of other people. Even if it is on GitHub, it doesn't mean we have to also have their mascot on our pages.
We're overdue a platform-agnostic alternative so I made one: Code Corners. A triangle with the classic </> in the middle.
There's no fancy animation like the GitHub one but it does fix a bugbear[1] of mine from that one — there is no secondary colour. It's transparent so it matches whatever background you have instead of having to set that yourself.
The site is basically the same as Tim's so it should be familiar to anyone who's used GitHub corners in the past.
Forgejo Corners, Gitea Corners, SourceHut Corners, random-page-on-your-website corners. You can link to literally anything. Even GitHub.
Yep, that really is how it's spelt, TIL ⤾
