Kinda meta, but this is the first time in a long time where I've put only the first half of my postcode in expecting it not to work and been surprised. Most of these "find your nearest XYZ" site require the full postcode which is just unnecessary unless you're looking for a fairly precise location. A full postcode can narrow your location down to an individual street, so its nice not to give too much away if you can.
For anyone not in the know, UK postcodes are made up of two parts: a general area (the outward code) and then a more specific one (the inward code.) Generally speaking a postcode + house number will be good enough to get a letter delivered to the right place, though the sorting office might not be too happy with you...
The format [0] is roughly: AB12 3CD, though the number of letters/numbers on the left side can vary a bit. As far as I know the second set of numbers is always 1 digit though, so that's how you can easily split the two sides of it to format it nicely. There's a couple of special ones that break the rules though.
I agree with the bit about the having to enter a full postcode on some sites, I often use one nearby or, if they make me select a specific address for no valid reason I make sure I use a random address nearby. Apologies to some of my neighbours who might be bombarded with junk mail for services I’ve once been half interested in.
A full postcode is often much less than a single street.
Picking something at random stick “SW15 6DZ” into Google maps and you’ll see it only covers 6 buildings (most are individual houses but some are split into flats). According to the Royal Mail address finder site there are only 12 unique delivery addresses that share that postcode. The Western half of that road has 12 or so full postcodes for only 100 houses.
A full postcode and one other bit of information can often be enough to uniquely identify someone.
If a US 5 digit zipcode is roughly equivalent to the “general area” part of a UK postcode (94107 <=> SW15) then the full UK postcode is like the 9 digit US Zip+4 format where the extra 4 digits narrow location down to a block, part of a block or even a specific building.
A friend of mine who lived in a tent in a park got his own postcode. True story.
Details: election time. He went to the election folks and asked for his election papers. They said "sure, where do you live?" he said "the Bender, Eastville Park, Bristol", they said "that's not a valid address", he said "that's where I live, so that's where I'd like my registration to be, please". There was some back and forth. They caved, and duly entered his address on the electoral roll as such. Then he went to the Post Office and said "this is my address, as entered on the electoral roll, can I have my postcode please?". The Post Office kinda had no option, since this was now his official address. So they gave him a postcode and the postie had to walk through the park to drop off his mail.
The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
There is guy living off grid in I believe Dorset on YouTube called "Maximus Ironthumper". The post office told him to try sending himself letters, eventually they started turning up. Then that became the address.
He has a whole series of videos about how he kinda managed to setup his off grid living situation, there is everything from how to avoid planning permission, to how he setup his solar power.
>The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
I still find it fascinating that we developed this human system, with expectations that are still in play, even if some aspects become less and less relevant, it's still an important tool beyond being dependent on technology. Same with lending libraries. A few things we should cherish that have real ethics in this lets-monetize-everything world.
I believe similar has happened, whereby a seller of the Big Issue (a magazine sold by the homeless to raise money) had a postcode issued to a bench where they could pick up deliveries of the magazine.
"A full postcode is often much less than a single street."
My business has its own unique postcode and so does next door! Between us we cover roughly three acres. Our place is one building with parking and a fair bit of greenery.
How is that different from a mail from a local church asking me to donate, or a local bingo club opening a new location - it's all junk. If I didn't ask for it to be sent to my address, it's all junk.
One person's junk is another person's fuel for heating.
Throughout the year a friend of mine would collect any junk mail, but mostly many copies of the free daily newspapers (Metro, Evening Standard, etc) that litter the trains/underground in the evenings, soak them with water than use a briquette maker to press the paper into blocks. Once dried they provide an ample supply of fuel to heat his home for the 6-10 months of the year (depending on how poorly your home is insulated) that heating is required in the UK.
He definitely didn't have a "No junk mail" sticker on his letterbox.
Any communication received without explicit consent, after providing details, is junk, and would fall under GDPR as using that info for a different purpose than what was described.
Yep, locally where I am there’s one postcode for all the houses on one side of the street (all the even numbered houses) and another for the opposite side (all the odd numbers.)
Presumably it helps a lot with validating the address is correct, kinda like a checksum, and also probably helps with how deliveries are organised by the local office before the postie is sent out with them all.
In Ireland we were very late to the postcode game and when we introduced them a few years back they actually uniquely identifies a single address. We also continued our "interesting" habit of renaming everything to make them sound more Irish so they are called Eircodes. In theory you could just put the single 7 character Eircode on a letter and it would be enough although our postal service has said we can't do that.
By being late to computerized sorting, the postal service (An Post) never actually needed postcodes the way others did, as by the time they got computerized, fuzzy address lookups in the full address database was something that was available. It's mostly the third party couriers and marketing people pushed for post codes so they could apply techniques from other countries here.
Now asking An Post to overhaul their system to work on postcodes only is a bit like asking a postal service which requires postcodes to make them optional. It's technically possible, sure, but they're not going to want to spend the money.
_That said_, An Post's last resort routing department is pretty famous for getting the right address from pretty fragmentary information like "Mary down by the church, formerly of Kilnowhere", so I'm sure if a letter with just a eircode arrived there they'd sort it, but I imagine that An Post don't want to encourage people doing things that increases load on the labour intensive sorting.
This is delightfully referenced as the Blind Letter Office in Terry Pratchett's book "Making Money":
<Moist ran downstairs and Lord Vetinari was indeed sitting in the Blind Letter Office with his boots on a desk, a sheaf of letters in his hand and a smile on his face.
'Ah, Lipwig,' he said, waving the grubby envelopes. 'Wonderful stuff! Better than the crossword! I like this one: "Duzbuns Hopsit pfarmerrsc". I've put the correct address underneath.' He passed the letter over to Moist.
He had written: K. Whistler, Baker, 3 Pigsty Hill.
'There are three bakeries in the city that could be said to be opposite a pharmacy,' said Vetinari, 'but Whistler does those rather good curly buns that regrettably look as though a dog has just done his business on your plate and somehow managed to add a blob of icing.'>
There used to be a site "postcodeine" which would overlay the prefixes onto a map as you typed, so you could enter "SW" or "KY" etc and watch it narrow down the area by keystroke.
Fun fact: apart from the main office SW1 they're alphabetised by area, from SW2 Brixton to SW19 Wimbledon. All of the London postcode areas are like this.
SW2 to SW9 are in alphabetical order: Brixton, Chelsea, Clapham, Earls Court, Fulham, South Ken, South Lambeth, Stockwell.
But then it starts again and you have to squint a bit for SW10-SW20: Brompton, Battersea, Balham, Barnes, Mortlake, Putney, Streatham, Tooting, Wandsworth, Wimbledon, West Wimbledon.
Looking at a few others (SE, etc) I see that the first chunk of them are in alphabetical order, but then they've added some extra ones later that break the ordering (e.g. SE19 onwards) but they have tried to add the extra ones in mostly alphabetical order too.
Yeah, they've become a bit muddled over the years but generally alphabetical in the batches they're added. E was nice and clean before the Olympics, then they added E20 for Stratford after E18 Woodford.
Most people assume it's relative to how far out the area is from the centre
And a bit further to SW20 in Raynes Park (a.k.a. “West Wimbledon” in Estate Agent vernacular).
I’ve lived somewhere in SW18/SW15/SW19 for the last 30 years. Having not grown up in London I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Apparently many other bits of London (North, East, central, etc) are good too but I’m not ready for change.
A long while ago I wrote a very simple static site generator for personal site, mainly just to play around with using GitHub/Cloudflare pages to host my personal site.
Then a couple of months ago I started comparing the big SSG tools after wanting something a bit less held together with duct tape... after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.
So over Christmas holiday I been playing around with NextJS SSG, and while it does basically everything I want (with some complicated caveats) I also can't help feel like I'm trying to use a oil rig to make a pilot hole when a drill would do just fine...
Anyone got any recommendations on something somewhere in between 11ty and NextJS? I'd love something that's structured similar to 11ty, but using JSX with SSG that then gets hydrated into full blown client side components.
The other thing I've been meaning to try is going back to something custom again, but built on top of something like Tempest [1] to do most the heavy lifting of generating static pages, but obviously that wouldn't help at all with client side components.
> after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.
Doesn't Eleventy support most of the common old-school templating languages? I once converted a site using Mustache from Punch [1] to Eleventy.
Eleventy is great, and in some ways I prefer it to Hugo if build time isn't an issue. At least templates don't break, like most of the comments here say.
I eventually redid the site from scratch (with a bit of vibecoding magic back when v0 got me into it) with Astro.
I moved my startup’s marketing site and blog from NextJS to Astro, and I’m happy with it. It’s in that middle ground—focused on primarily static sites but with the ability to still write bits of backend logic as needed.
I found it hard to get next to reliably treat static content as actually static (and thus cacheable), and it felt like a huge bundle of complexity for such a simple use case.
My two favourite bits of git add -p that aren't mentioned here:
the / (search) command to search unstaged hunks for a specific keyword rather than having to jump through all the individual changes you've made when there's lots.
and the e (edit) command to manually split out two changes that end up in one hunk that I'd rather have in individual commits.
It's not exactly the same, but I definitely remember Microsoft releasing some kind of conversion tool around the start of Office 2007's life that could convert the newer XML based files into the older '03 compatible files. Or maybe it was the other way around... No idea if that tools still kicking around somewhere.
From that diff it looks to me that if ~/.mozilla exists OR if MOZ_LEGACY_HOME is set it uses ~/.mozilla, otherwise it uses the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.mozilla directory instead.
So no migration to the XDG directory, but also no throwing away your existing data either.
I know a few apps that did the same (mpv for example). If you still have it in home root it uses that, when you move it to .config it uses that instead. Auto migrating could and would create issues.
It seems Firefox doesn't really rely on these. My profile directory has been around for more than a decade, went through three computers and even between Windows and Linux and from plain Firefox to Firefox Developer Edition and pretty much everything transferred just by copying the files around (however i didn't copy the full Mozilla directory, first i let Firefox make a new empty profile by itself and copy/pasted the files in it, overwriting whatever was already there).
It even had the original XUL-based DownThemAll version, got disabled after XUL addons were disabled and some time one or two years later it got re-enabled again after the dev released a webextensions compatible version (sadly with several limitations, but still useful for bulk downloads).
Amusingly, there are a couple Windows absolute paths in there even though this profile has been on Linux for a few years now :-P
Interesting. I have had extensions lose their storage when the profile directory path changed, and at the time it seemed to be because of the pathnames within the files.
This is very important to know if this is really the case. And if it is, then what is the best way to migrate? Is there an official, supported method if "mv" is not it?
There is an answer in the comment to the original bug:
> there is no migration path supported at this point: only new profiles are expected to use the new setup. Migrating manually is at your own risk, make a backup before.
I'll try to do it manually, replacing paths in the couple of files mentioned above first.
I hate to say it, but if there's no migration path, this improvement may not have been the best use of Mozilla's resources. Because who's creating new Firefox accounts in 2025? I mean I guess the folder will be in the right place the next time I do a fresh install, but I'd rather see them investing in stuff that grows their user base.
I believe that was part of the original plan for Proton, but with the success of the Steam Deck that got shelved and it moved to a focus purely on Linux.
I don't think it's ever likely to return any time soon, but it'd be cool if it did. Valve seemingly have very little interest in macOS at the moment.
CodeWeavers work closely with Valve and the Wine project to improve compatibility with games, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers work on Wine too. So all the pieces are there in theory.
Maybe this is a lack of understanding on my part, but this bit of the explanation sets off alarm bells for me:
> Under the hood, we're building a client-sourced RAG for the DOM. An agent's first move on a page is to check a vector DB for a known "map." ... This creates a wild side-effect: the system is self-healing for everyone. One person's failed automation accidentally fixes it for the next hundred users.
I think I'd like to know exactly what kind of data is extracted from the DOM to build that shared map.
Agent4 is going to store "stable selectors" that worked (when it performs a task first time most of the time is spent in identifying these css/xpath selectors). Memories are pretty straighforward at this point, they are stored locally in your browser's IndexedDB (you can inspect from chrome inspector).
How are you mapping from "click this element" (presumably obtained via a VLM) to the actual DOM locator that refers to it?
I guess Playwright can do it in "record" mode; I'm curious how you do it from a Chrome extension.
Spitballing here, you inject an event filter on the page and when the click happens, grab the element and run some code to synthesize a selector that just refers to that element? (Presumably you could just reuse Playwright's element-to-locator code at this point.)
So when you go into the "selector" mode, the plugin will add event listeners to all the DOM nodes. Based on your click it will try to generate a bunch of selectors statically first (multiple, css and xpath based), and then based on your guidance its the job of agent4 to make stable selectors.
Yeah I had an official silicone iPhone case that was being used for about 8 months, replaced it with a third party leather one about a month ago and already within that time I noticed that the original one has gone all slimy just like those old plastics. There must be something about using it day to day that keeps it from breaking down.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.formats.php#datetime....
reply