Matt K (Timberwolf)

Petition to relabel all "Remember this device for 30 days" checkboxes with the actual truth, "remember this device for 9 femtoseconds".

Whenever I make jelly, I pour in the boiling water and get the urge to just drink it there and then, like a fruity Bovril.

I would attempt to participate in that music thing but I fear you already know my music taste and would be looking at that thinking, "how do I permanently unlike a post? how can I give this negative likes? how can I prevent this ever getting as far as 1 like?"

computinghistory.org.ukRetro Computer Festival 2026 (Space Edition) - Saturday 14th November - Event Ticket - Computing HistoryRetro Computer Festival 2026 is Go for landing! This year well boldly go to a galaxy far far away.Retro Computer Festival 2026 is Go for landing! This year we'll boldly go to a galaxy far far away....

I will be at Cambridge Centre for Computing History on Sunday 15th November with a couple of big-box space games and a PC to run them on. There's a chance I might even remember to buy a mouse so it's not a miserable experience playing them. www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/77371/Re...

(ignore the URL, it's a two day event over the weekend)

People keep saying we're one small step away from AGI and yet my spell checker doesn't recognise either "Dogtanian" or "Muskehounds" as valid words.

(We are of course only one small step away from AGI. You can run any of the classic Sierra adventures in DOSBox, ScummVM, Sarien, or a whole host of other emulators.)

I did it just to see how quickly it went off the rails. www.my9albums.com/s/61v4M69mWb (At least 65% subject to change based on day, mood, weather, and how long since my last caffeinated beverage.)

Also they didn't have album artwork for Robespierre's Velvet Basement. Boo.

The same way Stymie Bold Italic is redolent of 1950s public architecture and Dom Casual screams 1990s small business, one day in the future people are going to pass long-faded signs and go, "oh, Pissfilter Brushstroke, must be from the mid-2020s".

Ad Lib was also quite popular at around the same time Dom Casual was gracing shopfronts, and I still don't quite know what impulse circa 1994 made people go, "you know what I want in my typography? Things that remind you of the 1960s Batman TV show."

New law is that all flyers for local community events must be made with an ancient copy of Micrografx Draw using only the built-in clip art and NO OTHER TOOLS WHATSOEVER.

On consideration, I will also accept Print Shop Deluxe but you have to use the cool crab on every output.

15 Sept

22 minutes ago I decided to make a cup of tea. I still don't have a cup of tea, although I now don't know where I put my mug during that process.

@blackhorsepike.bsky.social

15 Sept

Discovered this morning at work that if I leave my Outlook window focused but don't do anything, it will open a Copilot tab, give itself a summarisation task unprompted, and then set off to hallucinate about my email. This is not at all the action of a company which is completely desperate, honest!

Matt K (Timberwolf) reposted

blackhorse pike

14 Sept

@timberwolf.club big updates to webqb over the past few weeks! Much better general compatibility, performance improvements, etc webqb.org/GAMES/RACE20...

webqb.orgRACE20.BAS — WebQB

5 Sept

I haven't commuted by South West Trains / South Western Railway for a whole decade but when I'm on it I still get to Clapham Junction and glare across at the Southern lines thinking "enemy trains".

30 Aug

Detective fiction so hardboiled it's served with toasted soldiers.

30 Aug

I glanced at a bag of bagels and now my brain has come up with the character "Nyc Bagels", presumably some bakery-themed adventurist who was christened Nicholas.

The Microsoft "showing paid Office users a non-dismissible, permanent advert in their title bar thing" has made me realise I'm paying £100 a year for a spreadsheet which now works just fine in Google Sheets and 3-4 things with macros that would probably be doable in something else.

The support team response on most reports seems to be "send negative feedback to the Office team via the provided tool" which brings to mind that old XKCD comic rendering Microsoft's org chart as a series of guns pointed at each other.

This seems to be pretty common; the amount of times I look at an absolute roast of a comment on an open issue on a Microsoft GitHub repo then realise the person making the roast is also a Microsoft employee! None of this gives a great sense of long-term platform stability...

The crazy thing is Microsoft themselves don't seem to be able to consistently state whether it's deliberate, a bug with something that's only supposed to show to unregistered users, or some LLM slop attempt at a one-time-only midge that they now can't prompt out of constantly appearing.

There is much other people will say more eloquently than me, but I would suggest listening to Dolly Parton's original 1973 recording of "I Will Always Love You" to realise how beautiful it is rendered simply and with the occasional imperfection.

But hell, if only more people would strive to leave an obituary like that.

20 Aug

When starting a fight in a music room, it is important to angle any keyboard used as an improvised weapon such that it strikes your opponent(s) directly on the key which makes it go "DJ!"

18 Aug

It does amuse me looking back on all my blog posts about it that my three eras of YouTube are: I so desperately want this to be a success. Actually, let's make stuff just for me Well FINE if you won't stop WATCHING it I guess I'll have to make an EFFORT then.

YouTube's announcement of moving the partner requirements from 4,000 watch hours to 8,000 interests me because they're openly stating that it's about reducing the number of people who hit monetised status. Their official statement is "changing habits have made this [in their view] too easy to hit".

So it looks like they're setting two paths here. Either you get a load of views and your revenue is mostly ads and Premium viewers. Or you have a smaller, more dedicated community to which you offer memberships and merchandise.

You might even see this as a nudge to creators in that circa 1k sub, 3k-4k watch hour segment that rather than hanging on for ad revenue monetisation, YouTube wants you exploring memberships and shopping *now*.

I've also noticed something else - it seems to be possible to apply for a lower tier of Partner at 500 subscribers / 3,000 hours which doesn't give you access to ad revenue, but *does* allow you to enable Memberships, Shopping and Super Chat/Thanks.

This makes more sense to me, because it did feel a bit odd that YouTube would be saying, "well, if you're doing a niche thing, you're better off on Patreon or something like that". They've not historically been non-expansionist in that way. Quite the opposite.

This makes sense to me. Netflix revenue and viewing habits without *any* of the production costs? Who wouldn't want that? The problem is it's much harder to hit the "to prevent your box turning off please press any button" point on YouTube, which is where they need to be for that experience.

So in moving the goalpost they're effectively saying, "we're not giving you any money until you've figured out how to appeal to the casual audience beyond your immediate core". (This being the big difference of 8,000 over 4,000 for a small channel - you need that casual audience)

The likelihood is of course that someone who has figured out YouTube enough to have hit the 8,000 hour target is probably going to be comfortably above 1,000 hours releasing something on average every 45 days, so it's an odd one to put in there. I'd keep an eye on it to see if it stays optional.

The surrounding narrative suggests they're trying to create a more Netflix-like model, where people pay a monthly subscription and watch series of videos in full. There's a strong implication creators should target Premium subscribers actively watching on a large-screen device.

i.e. it's not uncommon for a 4,000 hour per year channel to be gently reaching an asymptotic point of 5-6k hours. An 8,000 hour per year channel is usually on its way to 20+k per year. Although I think it's more complex than just "cut out the channels which scrape along the lower threshold"...

... because they've *lowered* the requirements for staying in the partner program! Previously you needed to hit 1,000 watch hours in a single year. Now you don't even need to do that. Just upload 2 videos every 90 days.

Running a few numbers on percentiles and the like suggests it does represent a halving of channels which will become eligible - I was expecting more, but it looks like the typical channel which achieves the 1000 subs/4000 hours mark was already past the abandonment/giving-up threshold.

@uk-resistant.bsky.social

The difference is while it was with work and dedication to achieve 4,000 with a small niche, almost everyone I know who hit the 8,000 mark did it during that "I thing I've figured the game out now" exponential growth phase.

Matt K (Timberwolf) reposted

Jamie D

7 Aug

I regret to inform you that The Grange Hill theme matches perfectly with Sonic the Hedgehog

6 Aug

I'm becoming frustrated by the increase in assumptions that releasing a hobby project as open source confers upon the author the responsibility to provide dedicated individual support for that project. This, people, is how you end up with no open source hobby projects any more.

6 Aug

I think particularly because so much of this is tied with the expectation such things should take place in private settings. If every question I've answered over the years in PMs, DMs and emails had been in a public space, there would be a fantastic quantity of documentation for my stuff by now!

3 July

Developing in the Microsoft ecosystem after years with Go, I can't believe how much time is wasted on random things unrelated to what you're currently doing breaking because some magic black box intended to hide a detail from you has broken in magic, black box ways with the detail as to why hidden.

3 July

It's become massively worse in Microsoft's slop era, where AI is happily regressing 2-3yo Visual Studio bugs, or doing stupid things like updating the credential chain for the "I'm running stuff locally" method to have its first source be Azure's internal network. (The source of today's problem)

20 June

For various reasons I have mostly listening to music streamed to Bluetooth speakers over the past couple of weeks. It's nice to be back to the good shit.

Nature is healing.

Doctor The Who, in which a 1960s rock band stumble around time slightly wasted, getting embroiled in various science fiction mysteries when all they want to do is play a gig and smash up their instruments.