Matthew Pennell

Preparing for a CodeIgniter upgrade tomorrow so I can switch to a more recent version of PHP on my hand-rolled platform. Not that I'm all that worried that the world's hackers are going to want to steal my draft blog posts. #indieweb

Finally completed my Frank Conroy collection, after ordering "The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop" all the way from the US.

#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

The Fusion Retro Books Annuals (specifically the CRASH! one) are always an instant buy as soon as they go up on Kickstarter. Every Christmas I get to feel like I'm 11 years old again for a little while. #retro #zxspectrum www.kickstarter.com/projects/zza...

Seven months later, I've finally finished watching all six seasons of the show and reading all ten books of The Expanse. Don't plan to pick up the comics, but I do have the Telltale game to play. Then I think I'm done with it. Until the RPG comes out next year, anyway.

My collection of 2000s-era tech conference t-shirts are starting to show their age. The ExpressionEngine ones have almost completely fallen apart; the MailChimp shirts are also starting to look a bit tatty. The exception is my two Dribbble t-shirts, which are still pristine and comfortable.

One year I will actually remember to find out when the London #NFL games are scheduled before they actually happen. Not this year though.

Sat down to watch the #F1 race start. Wife went for a run, came back, had a shower, went into town for coffee, walked the dog, came home. Race still hasn't started.

Fixed some outstanding bugs and issues with my blog post publishing flow. Now my biggest problem is having to squint at the tiny text in my IDE. #indieweb

Might check out hughhowey.com/neo/ later. It's unlikely to replace Scrivener @scrivenerapp.bsky.social as my writing tool of choice, but free and open-source will always be one hell of a selling point. #BookSky

Well, balls. www.vice.com/en/article/m...

It's weird that, despite all of the progress in SEO and AI, it's still possible to write a little blog article comparing email clients that is apparently important enough that startups will keep emailing to beg to be included on your list. #indieweb

First game of the NFL season airing at a reasonable time of day. Not super optimistic @wshcommanders.bsky.social can beat the defending champions though.

Spotify have added a "Turn on mixing" button to their Radio-variant playlists, and it's the most godawful thing ever. Presumably there's an AI deciding how and when to mix songs into one another, but it's doing it with the finesse of a two-year-old mashing food into their hair.

Finally did what I've been promising myself I would do since we moved here, and cycled out to the coast.

Just bought The Expense: A Telltale Series game, because after watching all six seasons and reading all 10 books this year apparently I haven't had enough Expanse.

Gave the demo for the upcoming Hellraiser: Revival game a try. The graphics are certainly impressive, spot-on character models for some of the creatures from the earlier movies. Plus Doug Bradley is back voicing Pinhead, so that helps.

I'm partway through watching Mile End Kicks, and last night we went to see Stars, Broken Social Scene and Metric. Kind of want to move to Canada now.

Initially I was frustrated with the rise of self-checkout but I appreciated how stores passed the savings on to me rather than pocket the money, fire armies of workers & make me do a job I suck at. It’s also why I’m optimistic about AI! I have been kicked in the head by several horses.

Cal Newport's latest newsletter contains this fascinating snippet: "Research has shown that referencing the fact that an LLM is an AI system in a prompt increases the chances that the LLM’s output will reflect sci-fi style narratives about AI running amok..."

Thinking a lot about inspiration today. Remembered I had saved a bunch of blog RSS feeds in Inoreader. Found a new post by Rob Weychert reviewing the new Andrew WK album, in which he made a passing reference to Steve Reich. So that's why I'm listening to Music for 18 Musicians this afternoon.

Must be a thousand people up on this hill waiting for the Harry Potter steam train to go past on the iconic viaduct.

This new Johnny Marr single sounds like a Foo Fighters album track, just with less overdriven guitars.

I don't think there can possibly be a company with a worse account management website than EE. I don't remember it ever actually working properly at any point in the last 10+ years.

Now that I finally finished watching all six seasons of The Expanse, I can get back to my movie backlog. Top of the pile right now: I Like Movies, Pilgrimage, Clockers, Bird, and the rest of the Dollars trilogy that weren't on Prime.

Dug through the decaying cardboard box in the shed that contains our abandoned CD collection, looking for albums that aren't on Spotify. So today I'm listening to Imperial Teen's excellent first album, the full Pi and Magnolia soundtracks, and English Dogs' punk classic Bow To None. #music

Terrible user signup experience on TfL - enter your email, choose a password, but then it asks you to sign in using a Customer ID that they haven't supplied to you.

Been getting W Social ads in my Facebook feed this week. Based on this deep-dive they sound more than a little hinky: blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-unc...

Thought I'd have a play with the ATproto/standard.site stuff. Wasn't as straightforward as I originally thought, but I think I got it working in the end. matthewpennell.com/blog/standar... #indieweb

Accomplished all of today's goals early by successfully buying tickets for a gig in December when they went on sale at 10am.

Just heard that John Blanche died earlier this week. His art brought so much of Warhammer to life.

I was just looking up who wrote the Velvet Underground song, "I'm Sticking With You," but thanks Gemini. #ai

This is really cool and I need to find an excuse to use it: franktisellano.github.io/datatype/

First day back at work after two entirely AI-free weeks. I'd almost forgotten what it was like, before.

How is it that the Mortal Kombat movie looks terrible, but somehow the Street Fighter movie looks AMAZING?

The Vueling members club ad hits different when you watched Weapons last night.

If you visit Rob Weychert's website on a Sunday, it just has a sign saying, "This site is closed on Sundays." robweychert.com

Reinstalled Microsoft Flight Simulator to see if I could get it to play nicely across all three of my monitors. It did, and looks pretty cool. Still not interesting enough to play for any length of time though.

File under Cloud > Silver lining: www.theregister.com/2026/04/30/m...

Been out on the bike this weekend, for the first time this year. #Norfolk #cycling

Amazing results at the London marathon, new world records in both the women's and men's races.

"This is just like my record collection ... except mine is CDs." Is there anyone who feels more like old Woody Allen than Noah Baumbach?

Classic car show in town this morning. Seems to be very much a baby boomer hobby; I have no interest in cars as long as they get me from A to B.

Started an audit of every little #UX annoyance on our site that I want to fix. So far I've covered the top 25 pages by average monthly traffic, and written ten pages of bullet points.

A month's worth of weekend #RaspberryPi projects:

Added Webmentions to my blog, with a little help from Claude Code. Next up on the roadmap, I want to see whether I can do what @nathanpitman.com has done, and scrape 20+ years of historical blog posts from archive.org. #indieweb