Micros

The Road Traffic Code 2000 outlines rules and regulations for road users in Western Australia. This is an abridged compilation of the parts most relevant for unicyclists and does not constitute legal advice. Sourced from the version as at 14 May 2026.

Notably, a unicycle is considered a ‘wheeled recreational device’, not a bicycle. This means that bicycle-specific restrictions are irrelevant. ‘Bicyclists must dismount’ signs and similar don’t apply, nor are helmets required. Drug restrictions do not apply either. Per the legislation:

wheeled recreational device means a wheeled device, built to transport a person, propelled only by human power, gravity, or both, and ordinarily used for recreation or play —
[…]
(iii) a unicycle,

pedestrian means any person on foot or in a perambulator, or a physically disabled person in an unmotorised wheelchair or in a motorised wheelchair, and includes —
[…]
(c) a person in or on a wheeled recreational device or a motorised scooter; and

Regulation 206:

(1) A person must not travel in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy —
(a) on a carriageway with a dividing line or median strip; or
(b) on a one‑way carriageway with more than one marked lane; or
(c) on a carriageway with a speed limit exceeding 50 km/h.
[…]
(3) A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy on a road must not travel past a “no wheeled devices” sign.
(4) Subregulation (1) does not apply to a person who is crossing a carriageway in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy, if the person —
(a) crosses the carriageway by the shortest safe route; and
(b) does not stay on the carriageway longer than necessary to cross the carriageway safely.
(5) Subregulation (1) does not apply to a person who is travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy on a carriageway if —
(a) it is necessary to travel on the carriageway to avoid an obstruction; and
(b) the person does not travel on the carriageway for longer than necessary to avoid the obstruction.

Regulation 207:

A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy on a carriageway —
(a) must keep as far to the left side of the carriageway as is practicable; and
(b) must not travel alongside more than one other pedestrian or vehicle travelling on the carriageway in the same direction as the person, unless the person is overtaking other pedestrians.

Regulation 208:

A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy on a footpath or shared path must —
(a) keep to the left of the footpath or shared path unless it is impracticable to do so; and
(b) give way to any pedestrian (except a person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy) who is on the footpath or shared path.

Regulation 209:

(1) A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device or motorised scooter must not be on a part of a separated footpath designated for the use of pedestrians unless the person —
(a) is crossing the separated footpath by the shortest safe route; and
(b) does not stay on the separated footpath for longer than necessary to cross the separated footpath safely.
(2) A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device or motorised scooter on a bicycle path, or a part of a separated footpath designated for the use of bicycles, must keep out of the path of any rider of a bicycle, EPT or electric rideable device.

Regulation 209B:

(1) A person must not travel in or on a wheeled recreational device or wheeled toy on a road during the hours of darkness or in hazardous weather conditions causing reduced visibility.

Regulation 210:

(1) A person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy must not attach himself or herself to, or permit himself or herself to be drawn by, any other vehicle.
(2) A person must not travel in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy within 2 m of the rear of a motor vehicle, over a distance of more than 200 m.
(3) The driver of a vehicle must not permit a person travelling in or on a wheeled recreational device, motorised scooter or wheeled toy to attach himself or herself to, or be drawn by, the vehicle.

With passion, and with anger, and with pain, and with grief, and with sadness: fuck motor neurone diseases.

This is, genuinely, one of the funniest memes I have ever come across. I wish to make an attempt at explaining why.

Firstly, this is a picture from an out of character interview with Freddie Prinze Jr, and yet he refers to Shaggy – not Matthew Lillard, who is the actor who played Shaggy. This implies, on some level, that Shaggy isn’t being played by an actor, or that Matthew Lillard himself is Shaggy.

Secondly, Fred is, to an extent, the straight man in Scooby Doo. For him to be recounting this event implies it actually happened.

Thirdly, ‘killed god’? Shaggy, the scaredy stoner who is first to run away from whatever foes the gang face, killed god? Then, he walked onto set to announce it? ‘Announced’ implies there was some gravitas to his proclamation that god is dead by his hands, but announcing it walking onto set implies that killing god was done casually.

What was his motive for killing God? Also, how did he kill god? These questions aren’t answered or addressed at all by the meme. Freddie Prinze Jr is also mentioning this as a casual aside during an interview?

Combine the sheer absurdity with the fact that I have seen the live action Scooby Doo films an unhealthy number of times as a child, and it all comes together to be extremely humorous to me.

Do you hear that? That’s the simultaneous exasperated sighs of thousands of users.

Saturday night activities.

Shout out to the guy who lives near me and leaves his bong on a small niche outside his bedroom window where he thinks nobody can see it.

When I go around dropping tabs from different dealers to compare, people say I’ve got a problem, but browsers used to go around doing so-called ‘Acid Tests’ with impunity. Times have changed, I suppose. Either that or double standards.

Am I correct in my understanding that it still used in Opera Mini for extreme data saving mode? It seems it is. Is it updated at all for use in such cases?

Here is my site rendered with extreme data saving mode in the latest version of Opera Mini. I’m pretty sure this is Presto in 2026, which feels an odd thing to say.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but users will not hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bo…

We were somewhere around line 23,494 on the edge of the framework when the caffeine began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should code…’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the screen was full of compilation errors.

Happy AusAlert test warning to all who celebrate.

Even though I knew it was a test during the alert that ran today, I wasn’t checking the time, and it did genuinely surprise me. The alert sound sounds severe, and the follow-up narration of the warning, even as it said it was a warning, felt dire.

Hopefully there will be minimal reason to use it.

When I was new to VR and still getting my ‘VR legs’, I just full sent it into a port of Quake. Let me tell you, running, gunning, and jumping about with reckless abandon in virtual reality Quake makes your body adapt real quick.

Fashion peaked with Haysi Fantayzee in the early ’80s and has been going downhill since.

I’m afraid that one day someone will discover I don’t actually know how to write HTML or CSS and that I’ve been using Microsoft FrontPage 97 this whole time.

There is a common idea that our devices are using their microphones to spy upon us. I’m certain that some devices do, but most don’t.

Under wiretapping and recording consent laws in many jurisdictions, such listening is forbidden. Many platforms, devices, and operating systems also indicate to the user when the camera or microphone is in use. Instead of listening in via a microphone, tracking is handled by more subtle means.

Thinking about travelling to France? While on your phone, you might stop for a moment longer on adverts or posts about travel or about French cuisine. You might linger on a post by a French speaker. Perhaps you research travel plans online on a site that has a partnership with an advertising network or which has social widgets tied to social media. Eventually, you’ll see more and more posts about France and travelling there.

Every little interaction you have across the web – no matter how seemingly inconsequential – can be collated to build a profile on you and target content towards you. It is the entire strategy and purpose of many billion-dollar companies.

Take the story of retailer Target identifying a teen girl as pregnant before even her father knew. There was no recording there; it was careful identification of patterns of behaviour.

There is some great discussion on the topic of devices tracking without listening from Simon Willison in his post, I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone, and from Jonathan Zeller in McSweeney’s with Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World.

Whenever people attempt to test microphone listening, they often end up scrolling around trying to find the thing they were testing for anyway, thus tailoring what they’re served and playing into confirmation bias.

Thinking a microphone is listening to what you say is simple and easy to comprehend. The idea that everything you do is being tracked and analysed by systems so complex you can barely conceptualise them is much more abstract.

I personally find this sort of ever-present and inescapable tracking much more insidious than any microphone listening in.

Personally extremely disappointed to see Mozilla proudly and cheerfully announcing that Firefox is active again on X (formerly Twitter).

https://xcancel.com/firefox/status/2079317211152564724

Always confused by people/organisations who measure productivity or effort with Git commits.

There are so many different approaches to committing that it seems a completely meaningless metric. Certainly nothing to brag about.

Those tormented screams? Believe it or not, from the damned.

I’ve been asked what framework I used to make the dashboard for my Stoat bot AutoMod so fast and snappy.

It is genuinely just slick HTML/CSS/JS that communicates with an API layer I developed. The dashboard itself doesn’t depend on even a single external library.

The framework-addled mind simply can’t comprehend not reaching for a bloated framework and a handful of libraries for everything.

Squeezing code and prose out of myself like a toothpaste tube on its last legs.

Can’t wait to see AI-driven dementia become a big thing with people offloading all their thinking and their brains thusly deteriorating.

A confession: sometimes I’m too lazy to type </div> so I just copy the closing tag from elsewhere.

One day Google will release the one hundred and eighty second version of Blink, and I’ll be ready with the jokes.

~15 months away if my maths are correct and I’ve got the releases cadences correct. Around October 2027.

I find the period where television was transitioning from 4:3 to 16:9 an interesting one. When broadcasting began in 16:9, but people were still actively using 4:3 televisions, broadcasters would commonly either letterbox the content or expect the left and right edges to be cropped. This led to a period where television series direction avoided putting anything too important at the horizontal edges of the frame. Cinema faced similar challenges, and either embraced pan-and-scan, letterboxing, or careful reframing from a wider image.

Content made exclusively for television broadcast, such as news shows, often had all interface elements centred in the image with nothing of substance in the 16:9 exclusive portions:

You can see this effect in action with The Onion’s morning show, Today Now!. Compare Disney Geneticists Debut New Child Stars, which is in 4:3, to Missing Teen’s Friends Go On TV To Plead For Her Release, Gossip About Ugly Classmates, which is in 16:9 but includes all important information within a 4:3 safe zone.

To mitigate the complexities of working with two aspect ratios, broadcasters (mainly in Europe) opted for an aspect ratio of 14:9 as a compromise. It wasn’t optimal on 16:9 displays or 4:3 displays and was pillarboxed or letterboxed, respectively.

The cropping of a wider image reminds me of open mattes, which is where film is captured at a larger size and then matted down to a specific aspect ratio, such as by applying bars on the tops (letterboxing) or sides (pillarboxing). Take the 35mm open matte of Spider-Man (2002). Extra content is there; it is just hidden by the aspect ratio. It is by this method that more full frames can be achieved by merging various source mediums.

The embrace of 16:9 from 4:3 is also tied up in the switch from standard definition to high definition and analogue to digital, meaning that content is large on the screen – especially text, which can be blurred by low-resolution displays and fuzzy CRTs. It is an interesting period of transition, and as a front-end developer I can’t help but think of it in terms of progressive enhancement.

For people without widescreen displays, content functioned and continued as normal without interruption. For people with capable television sets, however, they got an improved experience. As time progressed and 4:3 became less common, it switched from progressive enhancement to graceful degradation on displays still using the old aspect ratio, as we often see as newer technology reaches wider adoption.

Currently voting on conference talks based entirely on which talk is less about AI.

I know that the conference I’m voting for had guidelines when submitting papers, so I’m also voting against the talks which blatantly ignored these guidelines and are full of AI tells.

Colon split title, verbose, too long, tricolons, not X but Y, and an unreasonable number of em dashes.

Why submit a talk if you can’t be bothered to even think up or describe the premise of it yourself?

The use of ‘he/she’ really annoys me.

‘They’ is much more inclusive than ‘he/she’ and is also quicker to both say and write. Anyone using ‘he/she’ today is either forced to by some obtuse requirements, or is purposefully being bigoted.

‘(s)he’ is no better and is just as needlessly difficult. Also, it is always ‘he/she’, never ‘she/he’. ‘(s)he’ literally demotes the feminine pronoun with parenthesis.

Don’t get me started on cases where an entire document is written with masculine pronouns as ‘default’.

I just saw a marketing page refer to a product as the ‘final solution’.

I didn’t think it needed saying, but don’t go around advertising the ‘final solution’. There are some connotations there…

Information architecture? More like, ‘Blimey, I’m 90% through organising this crap, and now I’ve just found a stupid edge case that means I’ve got to reorganise the entire hierarchy and structure.’

The sudden sinking feeling when you’re given a codebase to work on, then you notice the HTML tags are all written in uppercase, that there is no document declaration, and that there are conditional comments for Internet Explorer.

‘Hi. Yeah, it’s me. I couldn’t help but notice when I opened the folder you sent me that boss music started playing, and in the distance I heard what I think might be the eternal screams of the damned. Can you just confirm this is expected behaviour?’

With Xbox struggling and the PlayStation physical media fiasco, Sega has the chance to do the funniest thing.

I’m not quite sure where to go or what to do. I’m watching my peers slowly burn out, go quiet, quit the industry, or struggle on hoping it’ll get better in time. Even if the storm is weathered, what comes out the other side?

Businesses seem wary of investing in people or just spending money at all. I feel I have to sell the very basic concept of doing ‘good work’, rather than ‘good enough work’. Accessibility feels like something I discuss but don’t get to see through.

Things are stagnating for genuine professionals.

Many conferences are coming to their end, seeing lower attendance, and are dominated by AI talks. Of those that are surviving, many are cutting budgets or catering to smaller, focussed audiences. Most publications are seeing declining readership, and many are turning to AI for their content.

This is a clear result of education by humans being in a struggling place, with people turning to generative AI for quick solutions (and notably not to comprehensively learn). Speaking to many folks with courses, their sales have plummeted – dropped completely to nil in a disturbing number of cases.

It is gutting to feel I’d see greater success if I didn’t care who I worked for, gave up on my morals, and embraced the latest harmful fad. Grifting has long been a thing, but at present it seems there aren’t any consequences beyond one’s own conscience and that it is the optimal way to make a buck.

Pair all those issues with the dire state of everything. Computers and their components’ costs continue to inflate, the USA has a fascist government, there are major ongoing wars (and new ones being started), and everything is increasingly morally ambiguous – especially in tech.

Couple all that with the erosion of rights and companies being increasingly anti-consumer. Forcing features unwanted, removing features wanted, taking away physical media, making all a subscription, taking away our control of our devices and what software we can run on them, and eroding privacy.

Things are dire, and I’m thinking I need to pivot, because front-end developer is a job that companies are happy to have AI complete, regardless of if it is on par with a professional’s work. My work is better than sloppy AI output, but that can be hard to distinguish if one doesn’t investigate.

Perhaps a freelancer collective is needed? A distributed agency. Different people with different specialisations sharing resources and referring work to each other based on their capabilities. Every freelancer I know is reporting difficulty finding work, and they’re long established in the industry.

I don’t know how to feel or what to do. Things are bad, and while I’m sure they’ll get better to a degree eventually, I’m not sure how much better they’ll get. What does ‘better’ look like when the greatest minds in the industry have left and don’t come back? So much lost skill and knowledge.