Hi, I’m Alex. Welcome to my website!
I’m a software developer, writer, and a hand crafter, and I live in the UK. In my day job I build software for digital preservation, and I think a lot about archiving and long-term systems.
This website is where I share stuff I find interesting or fun. That includes notes on technical problems I’ve solved, personal reflections or thoughts, and fun toys that I’ve built.
I’m queer and trans, and my pronouns are “they” or “she”.
I hope you like it!
My writing
My life
My archives
Recent articles
Abusing ID3 chapters to turn videos into glanceable podcasts
Inserting a chapter with artwork every few seconds turns an MP3 file into an approximation of a video file. I can listen to videos as audio-first, and glance at my lock screen if I need some visual context.
Why can’t you combine
.tar.gzfiles withcat?To combine archives safely, I had to start by understanding the
tarandgzipfile formats. I learnt about tape drives, patent laws, and end-of-file markers.How Tailscale tracked down a 16-year-old SQLite bug
We had repeated database corruption until we fixed a rare SQLite corruption bug. What does it take to find such an error?
Preventing line breaks in
<code>elementsTo avoid awkward line breaks, I’m adding CSS to inline code snippets that contain hyphens or spaces.
Fixing a bug with byte order marks
I didn’t know to check for UTF‑8 byte order marks, so I made a mistake when converting text files. I was meant to use
encoding="utf-8-sig".