Ross Gardiner
LightNews LightNews
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Ross Gardiner
@rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
14 followers 0 following 61 posts
Software engineer living in #amsterdam, where I make robots do robot things at Monumental.

I have opinions (and am interested in other people's opinions) about […]

[bridged from https://indieweb.social/@rossng on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Posts Replies Media Videos
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
I'm not sure that listing the feature 'direct access to emergency exit' sends quite the right message here.
Seat selector on the AJet website, advertising emergency exit row seats as having 'Direct access to emergency exit'
August 19, 2025 at 12:20 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Solving unimportant problems with poorly-supported browser APIs.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-08-09-where-should-i-aim/
A screenshot of the 'Where Should I Aim?' web application for analysing the best place to throw a dart depending on the distribution of your throws.
August 9, 2025 at 2:48 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
I couldn't find a nice way to detect AprilTags on my phone. So I built (well, mostly vibecoded) a little app.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-08-03-apriltag-detector/
Screenshot of the AprilTag Detector app, showing a sample uploaded photo.
August 3, 2025 at 12:52 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
My guide to the CEFR levels of language proficiency
A table with three columns. The latter two columns are titled 'how it's described' and 'how it feels'. The rows: A1 - basic phrases - awful A2 - simple communication - terrible B1 - everyday conversation - barely coherent B2 - independent discussion - tolerable C1 - complex expression - decent C2 - native fluency - unattainable
July 16, 2025 at 6:46 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
It's so easy to navigate cities now that most have simple contactless payments for public transport.

Meanwhile, Paris:
The title of a page on the Ile-de-France Mobilités website, claiming that the ticket system is easy. The matrix describing which pass supports which type of ticket, which is almost comically complex.
June 21, 2025 at 1:22 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Law of physics: corporate entities are incapable of writing any text containing the phrase 'we are increasing the price'
Dear Audible member, We're updating the price of your Premium Plus membership
May 6, 2025 at 11:41 AM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
There's something immensely satisfying about putting the washing machine on at exactly the right time.
A screenshot from the Frank Energie app, showing electricity prices by hour throughout today. Prices are significantly cheaper in the middle of the day.
April 26, 2025 at 11:00 AM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Back when I was living in Bristol it was barely conceivable that one day through traffic might be removed from Park Street. And, on top of that, real segregated cycling facilities through the Triangle!

Drivers nearly killed or injured me many, many times on […]

[Original post on indieweb.social]
A schematic of the proposed road changes to the Triangle in Bristol, including a segregated two-way cycle path and the narrowing of roads.
March 21, 2025 at 11:29 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Being able to use Rust in the browser is great, but it comes with some sharp corners. One such corner is passing arrays of Rust objects into Rust code.

In this post I look at some options and the tradeoffs that come with each.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-02-22-wasm-bindgen-vec-parameters/
A screenshot of some Rust code that will emit bindings with wasm-bindgen.
February 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Scratching my own itch. Sometimes I just want to display a single block colour on the whole screen.

https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-02-10-tinted-stream/

https://tinted.stream/
A screenshot of https://tinted.stream showing a light blue colour.
February 9, 2025 at 11:35 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
The create-astro animation is really rather charming.
February 8, 2025 at 1:21 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
This wasn't what I expected.
The aforementioned message in Slack. The character sequence :de: has been converted to a German flag emoji.
February 5, 2025 at 9:41 AM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Discovered today that petrol stations are now putting video adverts on the pump handle 🤮

I love my bicycle even more now.
A man in a blue top trying to sell me something from inside the petrol pump handle.
January 12, 2025 at 10:03 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
I made a little toy for generating brick walls with different bond patterns.

You can really knock out a small webapp with Cursor + off-the-shelf web platform stuff so quickly now. Hopefully I can do this more often.

https://www.rossng.eu/muural/
January 6, 2025 at 11:04 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
What's trending on GitHub? Malware, apparently.
'Interesting' topics suggested by GitHub. All nine of them are some variant of 'craxsrat-source', referring to a piece of Android malware.
December 12, 2024 at 2:45 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
I'm currently listening to the audiobook version of Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

It's surprising how well such a technical book translates to audio. Can anyone recommend similar books that have a great audio version?
The cover of the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
December 2, 2024 at 8:26 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Floating Points is touring with someone making live video art with water and ink (and probably other stuff). It's like a little chemistry lab on the stage. Incredibly cool to watch.
Floating Points performing live in Amsterdam. The stage is full of large LED panels displaying brightly-coloured abstract art that is being created in realtime by an artist and vj on the left of the stage. Sam Shepherd is playing on the right of the stage.
November 15, 2024 at 9:48 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Is there some technical reason why fridge manufacturers always use an inscrutable scale like 'low-high' or '1-8' rather than the seemingly obvious 'colder-warmer'?
The control knob inside a fridge. It is labelled 'Low, Middle, High'.
October 25, 2024 at 7:52 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
Let's be clear, Google. Doing a journey entirely by taxi is _not_ 'public transport'.
A screenshot from Google Maps. It is showing the public transport routing options for a journey. The only listed option is a Bolt taxi.
September 15, 2024 at 7:28 AM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
I'm curious what exactly the fraud is here. Pretty sure that you can use Upwork from Hong Kong.

Are they just trying to score clients using a 'western' name? North Korean government worker earning money for the state?
A spam email. It reads: Hello How are you? Hope to read and reply. I'm James Wang from Hong Kong, a developer who has over 5 years of experience in the web and mobile development field. To speak briefly, I hope that you share the Upwork account with me. And then, I am going to use your Upwork account on your computer via Anydesk. As my artless sincerity, I will share my profit from Upwork with you. Actually I’ve collaborated with a Ukrainian man named Vadym, but he has moved to Ireland, so I can’t use his account for now. So now I am finding a new reliable person who can collaborate with me. This will be a very long term collaboration at least for about 3-4 years. Please let me know your thoughts and let's discuss more details. Skype: <removed> Telegram: <removed> Best regards. James Wang
August 2, 2024 at 3:53 PM
rossng.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy
HP has a line of headsets called 'Blackwire'. They have red wires.

I feel this speaks volumes about HP's product management abilities.
The HP Poly Blackwire 5220 headset. It has a bright red cable.
June 28, 2024 at 4:05 PM