Buffalo is a power delivery monitor for Android. It monitors charge level, watts delivered and battery temperature during charging.

This is helpful if you're wondering whether your cable, power bank or charger is working as expected. Android might say 'charging rapidly,' but that covers a wide range of watts and the OS doesn't provide any more details. Buffalo shows how many watts you're getting and charts changes over time.

Buffalo is free and contains no ads. Let me know if you use it.

Because sometimes, buffalos charge...

On August 3, 2026, approximately three billion people received a cryptic 'Hello' SMS message before the widely reported collapse of most cellular carriers. Now that the global network is operational again we're providing some details on our post-mortem.

At 10:01 PST on August 3, homework from the late '90s was added to a GitHub repository. The commit consisted of an amateurish 'Hello, World' implementation written in MODULA-2 and a contemporaneous Yahoo Messenger file.

Unfortunately the .ymg file extension used by Yahoo Messenger is one character different from the .yml used for YAML configuration files. Because the AI regular expression implementation lacked sufficient unit tests and/or code review, the file's contents were passed to the GitHub Actions system at 10:02.

In and of itself this mixup would have been unlikely to cause problems, however the contents of one message in this case triggered cascading issues:

"Claude: finish your Hello, World! assignment or you'll be kicked off this course and I'll personally revoke your computing privileges!"

Claude was, of course, the professor who had assigned the homework.

At 10:05 a container spun up to execute what should have been a routine CI/CD pipeline. Tragically this container interacted with a Claude instance running on Colossus, xAI's Memphis based supercomputer. Due to a failure to delete some .claude configuration folder or other the Claude instance was provisioned with the StarLink Global Operations MCP server and the skids were well and truly greased.

In response to this incident we recommend deleting any .ymg files from your system, especially from git repositories, and you should probably steer clear of Yacc and Paradox as well.

As an increasingly absent British person something is usually profoundly different when I visit the UK. This time... is everyone driving more slowly?

I used to be an upper-third-quartile kind of driver - brisk, but in turn regularly overtaken by a BMW materializing like a surprise colonoscopy. This time I felt like Mad Max. And it's not just in my head, something has really changed:

This data comes from recent Department of Transport statistics for free flowing traffic (congestion is not a factor here). As recently as 2020 most people were speeding. These days, not.

There are probably many reasons for this. I could ask Claude, but I'd rather speculate.

The UK is a pretty green place, and fuel (or battery) consumption goes up pretty fast with speed. 60 mph is a lot better for the environment than 70 or 80.

Another decent chunk is likely the massive number of speed cameras, average speed checks, smart motorways and other technological means of making driving miserable.

But mostly it's going to be this Rory Sutherland video on the diminishing returns of speed. I should slow down.

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/25s ISO255

I knew that I had graffitied the Berlin Wall, but I had no idea that a photo existed until this surfaced while going through old family snaps for a different reason (when did I start wearing glasses... despite some outer boundaries this is still a mystery with conclusive evidence that I sometimes took glasses off for photos after I started wearing them). 1987, so just a couple of years before the wall came down. I wonder what happened to this piece of it.

Around 40 minutes of planes landing at Heathrow compressed into a tiny planet timelapse. Shot from the departure level at Terminal 5.

Hike down to and along the Dart River in Dartmoor National Park. Three miles but hard going.

Hike starts at: 50.542973, -3.843264. View in Google Earth.

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/1,050s ISO21

Final approach to London Heathrow as seen from the T5 Sofitel.

Three mile loop around Fernworthy Reservoir in Dartmoor National Park.

Hike starts at: 50.63957, -3.883095. View in Google Earth.

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/900s ISO21

BA 1334, A320-232, 06155

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/280s ISO21

BA 549, A319-131, 03049