Ric

https://mastodon.qweb.co.uk/@ric

Proprietor of QWeb Ltd, an award winning #design and #development agency in #Yorkshire since 2013. I've been a software and game #programmer since 1996, and a #web #developer since 2001.

#Linux user, server tech, and advocate since 2003. #FOSS contributor and advocate for even longer.

I love #whisky , #food , and #gameDev , though sadly rarely get time for the latter.

I'm also a fine flavour #beanToBar #chocolate maker and have been known to send free samples out occasionally!

Web and game development: https://www.qweb.co.uk
FOSS stuff on Github: https://github.com/qwebltd/
FOSS stuff on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/qwebltd/
Data APIs: https://apis.qweb.co.uk

Public Key

npub135sc20pj3vfch9jcq2ajqqdr23ye076ztc5xgj6rylqwrcphue0qat8wax

NIP-05 Address

ric_at_mastodon.qweb.co.uk@momostr.pink

Profile Code

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Publishing to

nostr.wine

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub135sc20pj3vfch9jcq2ajqqdr23ye076ztc5xgj6rylqwrcphue0qat8wax

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Published at

2026-10-11T19:19:58Z

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0 Metadata

Event JSON

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Last Notes

2026-09-20 00:05:11 UTC

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Our next cars will hopefully be electric, but it'll depend on where we live. Currently we rent, and this place is a very historic grade 2* listed building so home charging wouldn't be an option plus we do way too many miles for an EV to be feasible without a home charger. I think I average about 25,000 miles a year. Hybrids are pretty brilliant sounding these days mind.

2026-09-20 00:04:06 UTC

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not here, no. There isn't a single shop in our village - the closest is a tiny post office in the next village over, which is a 30 minute walk away and involves walking under a motorway via a tunnel that's also a beck which sometimes overflows, so you can't even always get to it. And summer here basically ended a month ago. It's been constant rain for as long as I can remember!

2026-09-19 23:40:20 UTC

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yeah, we're basically affected by the exact same political tensions, but I guess it costs more to transport it to us so the increase is by a bigger factor.

2026-09-19 23:32:01 UTC

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I paid £1.90 per litre the last time I filled up. That's $2.55 USD per litre. $11.59 per gallon apparently.
😵

2026-08-19 16:15:55 UTC

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Ah, I feel slightly less bad about the 2 cheesecakes I've already eaten today then! 😆

2026-08-19 15:11:11 UTC

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you only snack in the evening? 😅

2026-07-23 06:43:50 UTC

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being able to just whip out a dock from the car, plug a phone in, and suddenly have a proper terminal to SSH in through would actually be very useful. I could cope with a beta windowing engine for that.
Whether it'd be useful enough times to warrant buying one though, I'm not yet sure. When we go anywhere over night I always have my laptop with me anyway. It'd only really be for the few times I'm like, out shopping or something and a server starts alerting.
Hmmmmm.

2026-07-22 23:21:57 UTC

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I didn't know either Android Desktop or Lapdocks were a thing, but this does admittedly sound very cool!
Now lightly considering getting one just to keep in the car for emergencies. There's a lot that I can technically do from the phone in terms of server admin and such, but hooking up to a proper keyboard and screen would definitely make things easier.
I'm often frustrated by how little it seems Android innovates these days. Why aren't they raving about features like this???

2026-07-08 07:08:31 UTC

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technically ChromeOS is Linux ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS ), just not GNU.
That is an interesting point though - the high street does stock ChromeOS pretty much exclusively as their Linux option, yet I don't know anybody who uses it. It's purposefully very restrictive too, which in my view probably works against Linux as a marketing tool. I wonder how many people stumble across them and just think yuk, Linux doesn't do much. 😬

2026-06-22 22:42:54 UTC

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I don't use it at all, no. Just poked around with it recently and knew that it's goal is essentially what you'd described wanting.
I've been using https://news.google.com for years but I hate that it's Google, and also that half the times you click through to an article that sounds interesting it's just a paywall these days. I'd love to replace it with a proper aggregator and I'd love to like Ground, but nothing seems quite right for me 😞

2026-06-22 22:26:54 UTC

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you might like https://ground.news , that's basically exactly what it is - AI summaries of what differently leaning news sources say about each news item.
I like the idea of it, but I can't trust that the summaries aren't just hallucinations. I'd have to read the individual articles myself which totally defeats the point really, so it's no good for me. If the summaries were by humans it'd be perfect.

2026-06-12 07:37:52 UTC

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oh that sucks, sorry Kev.
She'll be feeding pups this time of year so more brazen, and won't be far away. Make sure the others are as secure as possible 'cos she'll be back regularly after a successful grab.

2026-05-29 06:53:57 UTC

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our accountants are genuinely the loveliest people. We met them while they worked for another firm and followed when they left to set up their own, because they'd already been so excellent. Been with them for over 13 years now and they've 100% saved us more than we've paid them. We're web dev primarily, but I know that they have game devs on their books too.
Tell them Ric from QWeb sent you. They'll arrange a quick video call and just see what you think. 👍
https://www.tlcaccountants.com

2026-05-21 18:05:20 UTC

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it's because if you see somebody doing a terrible job of it, it triggers your "omg I can do so much better than that, give it here" response. Where if you see somebody doing an impressive job of it, you think "oh wow, I'd never be able to do that, I won't even try".
Basically they get more downloads. It's a frustratingly good tactic.

2026-05-19 20:33:27 UTC

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I've seen a few clips of big tech people getting booed at university talks for mentioning AI recently. It's quite lovely to watch the next generation workforce so blatently telling today's CEOs that they don't want an AI world. But also quite sad to see how terrified our youth is that AI is killing their career before it's even begun.

2026-05-19 19:22:58 UTC

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oh Jesus... What? Why??
No. No no no no no!
Who gave them keys to the Linux cupboard?
Legitimately can't think of anything worse except... wait... Meta aren't working on one too are they? 😬

2026-05-05 20:51:39 UTC

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oh lame. Why would anyone even need 15 addresses to a single mailbox? 🤨

2026-05-05 20:42:37 UTC

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more likely the latter. It doesn't make any difference from a host's perspective how many addresses they give you, it only matters how much space you're using up with them.
We always quote hosting on whole account size and effectively offer an unlimited number of mailboxes.

2026-04-28 21:39:59 UTC

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"The Blender developers have created an MCP connector"
Ah, I think I've found the problem. 😩
Cite: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-creative-work

2026-04-18 08:19:41 UTC

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sorry Kev, that really is crap. I've spilled countless teas and coffees over keyboards and laptops in my career, but thankfully never managed to blow a whole motherboard. Tracks and pins are so horribly close together these days! 😬

2026-03-25 09:23:50 UTC

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the best I've managed is 93. As soon as I get to the mid 80s I start to panic and just eat through the lives 😆
Who knew a 1-button game could invoke actual panic?

2026-03-25 09:01:41 UTC

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I've been trying to beat this damned thing for 9 days now. Nine! 😫
I mean... Not continuously, of course. That would be mad. 😬👀

2025-11-24 16:41:45 UTC

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full disclosure, I'm not a photographer mind! Just used to enjoy these kinds of shots when I had a DSLR. Traffic, water, and lightning are all good subjects for slow shutters!

2025-11-24 16:38:59 UTC

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oh the long shutter is for the blur, not for the light. With day-time shots you'd want to stick an ND filter on to compensate for the additional light intake. I've never tried a multiple exposure approach.
At night though, if you stick with slow but not ridiculous delays, you catch the head/tail lights as they move but the rest of the shot is unlit enough to not really show much obvious motion blur from your actual camera movement, and there isn't much of that in ~.5 seconds anyway.

2025-11-24 08:14:17 UTC

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yeah you really need a tripod for long exposure shots. You should still be able to get good night time shots with even just 500ms ish shutter delays though, and not necessarily need a tripod for those.

2025-11-17 21:36:57 UTC

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yeah, it's absolutely absurd. Being open access with free unrestricted APIs and easily embeddable JS widgets etc, literally gave these platforms their user base. Ok they weren't directly profiting from that base, but it's what made the platforms valuable to advertisers. Somehow* they seemed to forget this and just see the operational expense, of course leading to today's closed doors.
*Elon. It was Elon. He didn't** understand the model. 🤦‍♂️
**(he probably did understand it though 😔)

2025-11-17 21:09:47 UTC

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ah, cheers. I've absolutely no idea whether anybody will want to join up, but I wrote https://www.qweb.co.uk/blog/join-us-on-the-fediverse today and emailed our current clients, and tomorrow I'll work through emailing some of our former clients too. So we'll see. 🤞

2025-11-14 20:51:17 UTC

Sooo, QWeb has it's own Mastodon server now, hence my migration from #fosstodon - sorry @npub1z3w…c039 and co! I know how big of a loss this must be for everyone 😆
I've been on Fosstodon since I first joined Mastodon, but it just doesn't make any sense for me to admin a server and not migrate my own account to it really. End of a chapter I suppose. 😢