\n
\n![\"Screenshot](\"/uploads/2026-03-25-pages.png\")
When did everyone decide to stop calling email addresses email addresses? I feel like everything I look at and everyone I talk to at the moment has started referring to the address as just “email”. “What’s your email?” “Enter your email.”
\nNo. An email is an email, and you send an email to an email address. If we start calling the address an email, then we don’t have any words left to refer to an actual email.
", "date_published": "2026-04-08T09:14:18Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/4/6/time-zone-abbreviations-suck/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/4/6/time-zone-abbreviations-suck/", "title": "Time zone abbreviations suck", "content_html": "Yesterday morning a huge chunk of the east coast of Australia changed from AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time) to AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) thanks to DST (Daylight Saving Time) ending.
\nWe went from %DT when %ST was in effect, to %ST where %ST is not in effect.
These names and acronyms are crap. The whole concept of daylight saving time is crap. We, like every other household in the country, have a few things with clocks that need to be manually changed. It takes me 5 minutes.
\n5 minutes \u00d7 twice a year \u00d7 10 million Australian households = 100,000,000 minutes = 69,444 human days. Every year.
\nWhat exactly does it save?
", "date_published": "2026-04-06T05:00:29Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/4/5/log-database-queries-in-django/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/4/5/log-database-queries-in-django/", "title": "Log database queries in Django", "content_html": "While I’m on the topic of logging in Django, it makes me sad and a little bit grumpy that when you take Django out of the box, it doesn’t default to showing you what it’s doing with your database.
\nHere’s a LOGGING configuration that takes care of that, and sends everything from django.db.backends to a file in the project’s root directory during development:
LOGGING = {\n "version": 1,\n "disable_existing_loggers": False,\n "handlers": {\n "db_backends_file": {\n "class": "logging.FileHandler",\n "filename": BASE_DIR / "db_backends.log"\n }\n },\n "loggers": {\n "django.db.backends": {\n "level": "DEBUG",\n "handlers": ["db_backends_file"]\n }\n }\n}\nIt’s important to note that django.db.backends only generates output when the DEBUG setting is True.
By default, in a production environment where setting DEBUG is false, Django sends log messages with ERROR or CRITICAL levels to AdminEmailHandler. This includes HTTP 5xx responses, which are handled by the django.request logger.
If you don’t have outbound email configured you lose these errors.
\nPython’s logging.StreamHandler defaults to sending output to stderr, and most of the time my Django applications are managed by systemd service units which default to passing stdout and stderr to systemd’s journal.
Put all of that knowledge together and here’s the delightfully simple LOGGING configuration I usually add to my production settings:
LOGGING = {\n "version": 1,\n "disable_existing_loggers": False,\n "handlers": {\n "stderr": {\n "class": "logging.StreamHandler"\n }\n },\n "loggers": {\n "django.request": {\n "level": "ERROR",\n "handlers": ["stderr"]\n }\n }\n}\nI can then fumble about with journald as required.
", "date_published": "2026-04-04T10:55:00Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/4/3/marco-arments-letter-to-john-ternus/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/4/3/marco-arments-letter-to-john-ternus/", "title": "Marco Arment's letter to John Ternus", "content_html": "From Marco Arment’s letter to John Ternus:
\n\n\nWe are customers and owners \u2014 not resources to be harvested, annoyed, or badgered into ever more services and upsells.
\n
And:
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T21:32:21Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/3/26/dogfooding/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/3/26/dogfooding/", "title": "Dogfooding", "content_html": "Making great computers must remain Apple\u2019s top responsibility, because if you don\u2019t do it, nobody will.
\n
Terence Eden in a post titled “Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts!”:
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T01:41:14Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/3/25/apple-continues-their-mission-to-drive-me-away/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/3/25/apple-continues-their-mission-to-drive-me-away/", "title": "Apple continues their mission to drive me away", "content_html": "“Dogfooding” is a sacred practice in the tech industry. Use your own products. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
\n
I used Pages to create a document a couple of weeks ago - something I very rarely do - and was presented with this advertisement for Apple Creator Studio when I selected a template:
\n
Then at the weekend I got this advertisement on my iPhone’s lock screen after paying for breakfast:
\n![\"Screenshot](\"/uploads/2026-03-25-notification.jpg\")
No idea how I turn that kind of crap off, because “Offers & Promotions” is already disabled in my Apple Wallet notification settings:
\n![\"Screenshot](\"/uploads/2026-03-25-notification-settings.jpg\")
Then a load of sloppiness this morning after updating my iPhone to iOS 26.4 when I was asked to double-click the side button to let stuff verify my age via Apple Wallet. That was the gist of it anyway. I don’t want that shit so I dismissed the prompt without thinking too much about it.
\nBut then it threw up a dialogue with this content (I couldn’t take screenshots):
\n\n\nParental Consent
\nTo provide parental consent to create this child account, you will need to verify your identity by confirming the password for your account.
\n
I’m not creating a child account! I’m not creating any account!
\nI played the game, then got this message. I haven’t replaced my actual email address - this is exactly what the message said, bold text and all:
\n\n\nVerification Code
\nTo provide parental consent to create this child account, enter the verification code sent to this email address: email
\n
Wealthiest company in the world. Thousands of employees. The premium Apple experience is a thing of the past.
", "date_published": "2026-03-24T23:34:36Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/3/23/the-weight-of-online-advertising/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/3/23/the-weight-of-online-advertising/", "title": "The weight of online advertising", "content_html": "A couple of articles have been doing the rounds inside my circles over the last couple of weeks: the first is titled “The 49MB Web Page” by Shubham Bose and the other is by Stuart Breckenridge about PC Gamer pages which download gigabytes of data if left alone.
\nI’ve never had to get really dirty with advertising, but on the few occasions that I have been in meetings with marketing departments, I’ve never gotten the impression that online marketing/advertising people know whether their “campaigns” actually do anything. They just do the things they do because that’s what they’ve always done.
\nI have testimony! (Kind of.) The application I work with generates and encrypts all URLs for all authenticated users (it was born before cookies were invented). Every link/button/form destination/GET/POST etc. has a unique URL, and a different URL every time a user loads the same page. Anything that attempts to count page visits by URL therefore fails miserably - all you end up with is an infinite list of URLs, all of which have exactly one page visit.
\nI explained this to the marketing department at one of the larger universities I’ve worked at, and they just didn’t care. They “needed” the tracking code added to the application anyway. It gave them utterly useless data and a lot of it. But they were delighted because, I don’t know, there was a number on a dashboard somewhere that kept going up?
\nIt wasn’t to advertise to customers inside the application but I assume they wanted to track users to try and work out which “campaigns” had led to certain outcomes. It doesn’t take a huge amount of creativity to imagine how that kind of desperation and cluelessness leads to pages that make hundreds of slimy network requests.
", "date_published": "2026-03-23T06:45:07Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/3/21/astral-to-join-openai/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/3/21/astral-to-join-openai/", "title": "Astral to join OpenAI", "content_html": "Yikes. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this.
\nI went all-in on uv a few months ago after watching the hype around it grow. It is indeed rather excellent, but it’s not excellent enough that I couldn’t/wouldn’t dump it if OpenAI start taking it in a creepy direction.
\nPython has always received a lot of shit for environment management, but I’ve never really had a problem with it. In fact, pre-uv I appreciated the explicitness of building and invoking the required version of Python, then using built-in tools and modules to create virtual environments and going from there.
", "date_published": "2026-03-20T23:24:28Z"}, {"id": "/blog/2026/3/20/background/", "url": "https://zerosleeps.com/blog/2026/3/20/background/", "title": "\"Background\"", "content_html": "What the feckity feck is this?
\n![\"Screenshot](\"/uploads/2026-03-20-background-security-improvements.png\")
What’s “background” about it if I have to restart? And why is it in “Privacy & Security”? Why is it not just a regular software update? It might be “enhanced in a future software update” anyway?
", "date_published": "2026-03-19T23:59:37Z"}]}