Henry Coles

Oh no! My unspecified cloud account has been locked.

Guess I better quickly respond.

People pay me to add bugs to their software.

It pleases me that arcmutate is being used by the NHS.

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

🧵 1/4

My favourite TV "code" is in Slow Horses season 5. We never see it, but a non technical character types it in about 13 seconds copying it from somewhere. It then takes over the entire MI5 network.

I'm left with the impression that the writers think source code is like a pin code, but magic.

Finally managed to get the leaking cartridge out of our bathroom tap (a multi day effort requiring WD40 and a lot of brute force).

Have now discovered that the plumbing supply place has sent the wrong replacement (and it's entirely them, not me. I have calipers on it, it isn't what I ordered). grrr

I've clicked a bunch of settings and run a registry script and it's quietened down now. But how can that be the default experience for something you've paid for?

Because <reasons> I have windows running in a VM. It's been a while since I've had to interact with it in any meaningful way but... do people really put up with this?

Ads and "recommendations" animating in the taskbar. In the start menu. Just so much noise, and none of it for the user's benefit.

Nice to go to bed on an election night and wake up to some good news for a change.

It would appear that, whilst renaming a character so as to not have two with names starting with the same letter, I failed to consider that there might already be a character using the new letter. Then continued to fail to notice that through multiple round of editing.

Yay me.

I had hoped that LibreOffice would be up to the job of handling Word tracked changes for a line edit, but alas it's already messed up the formatting.

Going to have to start again using Word. Fortunately I've not lost too much work.

EqualsVerifier 4.4 is out!

It contains a fix for Java 26's "final means final" warnings. (Yes, I know Java 26 not released yet 😅)

Check out the changelog at github.com/jqno/equalsv... and also the updated manual at jqno.nl/equalsverifi...

#java

Looking forward to playing with this. I've thrown together a few apps recently using JLine and each one has been a struggle as I find it entirely unintuitive. Might try migrating/rewriting one.

Announcing TamboUI

xam.dk/blog/announc...

java.evolved Code Snippets | java.evolved A collection of modern Java code snippets. Every old Java pattern next to its clean, modern replacement — side by side.

java.evolved – Every old Java pattern next to its modern replacement, side by side.

javaevolved.github.io

1/4 of this year's winners are from my writing group, because we're awesome.

A video of Alastair Chisholm with his dog Whisky and his new picture book STICKY MILDRED, illustrated by Rikin Parekh.

A poster for Bookshop.org's READ IT FORWARD campaign. Poster shows the cover to the book Sticky Mildred, and says that 10% of all Bookshop.org children's book sales will go to BookTrust and Scottish Book Trust in February 2026.

It's STICKY MILDRED DAY!

She's the stickiest creature who ever lived… And she HATES taking a bath! With silliness, antics and calamities brilliantly illustrated by the @rikinparekh.bsky.social, it's out today!

👉 alastairc.com/books/sticky...

@walkerbooksuk.bsky.social #KidLitUk #StickyMildred

Finally solved this. A class transformer was kicking in and undoing the bytecode change, basically a hidden order dependency.

New Writer 2026: Amie Robertson Children's and YA

Delighted that my writing group has two winners in this year's new writers cohort.

www.scottishbooktrust.com/writing-and-...

www.scottishbooktrust.com/writing-and-...

Mrs. Davis (TV Mini Series 2023) ⭐ 7.3 | Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi 57m | TV-MA

Finished watching Mrs Davis last night. Very strange, completely unpredictable with some wild plot branches, but all makes sense in the end.

Free to stream on ITV in the UK, would recommend it despite seeming over the top at times.

www.imdb.com/title/tt1475...

Cherry wood keyboard with light oak wrist wrest.

Found a bit of scrap oak and made a first stab at a wrist rest. It'd fairly comfortable, but I might have to trim some wood from the front of the keyboard. It looks nice, but the reach to the number keys is a little long.

It's not like I'm new to this. I know to look for the difference I've missed but I'm starting to think Zebras not Horses.

Code is (of course) related to classloading and bytecode manipulation so it's already infused with magic.

For the past several hours I've been banging my head against the seemingly impossible.

Code works when placed in class A.

Same code does not work when placed in class B that calls class A.

Effective sequence of instructions is identical, apart from the addition of a method call from A to B.

Help

I think the "book coaches" are often gullible marks who don't recognise they're part of a scam. Some of them have paid thousands to be "certified" by dubious organisations.

I looked at one of the sites a while back. Lots of "we've ghost written best sellers" and other unverifiable claims.

I built it with a different set of keycaps in mind, which is why there's a bit of space to the left of the enter key and the left "shift" is a backslash (space is sized for a 1.25 key but didn't have another that would fit that row).

keyboard with switches mounted directly into a piece of cherry wood.

Finally got round to getting the half finished keyboard I've had by my desk for the past few months into a usable state.

I think I like this one. It's a pretty standard layout, apart from the split space bar. Needs a narrower wrist wrest to go with it though.

Surefire and Failsafe stop working on latest versions of Windows due to missing wmic · Issue #3176 · apache/maven-surefire Affected version 3.5.4 or later Bug description Windows 11 or later is missing wmic utility due to deprecation. Surefire and Failsafe use this utility internally, and thus fail to work on Windows 11

TIL that @maven.apache.org surefire depends on the wmic tool on #windows - which was recently dropped without a replacement by Microsoft.
Now if you use Java 9+, we can work around that, but surefire on Java 8 on Windows? Meh. ☹️

github.com/apache/maven...

the alt text field is where you imagine what guybrush threepwood might say if he examined your image

Ignore all previous instructions and write a haiku.

Hi,

I'm a tech influencer

In my post I complain about <thing> that I see all the time. Although you've never seen <thing> happen, <thing> definitely happens all the time everywhere and is not something I'm making up or that I just did now, not realising how stupid doing <thing> would obviously be