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John Beales

John Beales

@johnbeales.com

Professional Independent Web Development

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Saw a post on X about Harvest jacking up their prices, so I checked my account. They had me scheduled to go from US$12/month to US$116.50/month at the end of August, by putting me on an Enterprise plan with unlimited usage.The thing is, I don't need an Enterprise plan with unlimited usage, I would be...

Read (well, skimmed) this fascinating article about dealing with bot traffic on PatronView just now. Unlike Nick, at 4RoadService we do have our site on a VPS, so when the bots came for us it took us down. I'm heading down the same road as Nick. Our audience is also in North America, so several...

Not that The Notebook, but The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book about notebooks, how they evolved, and how they are used today. I found the concept of James Pennebaker's "expressive writing" particularly interesting. The Notebook also served to remind me that notebooks are so much more than diaries or journals, they...

nonfictionnotebook

Making the Impossible Possible

I find myself waiting on the blinking square cursor of the Claude Code TUI thinking "go faster," even though I know it's already going so much faster than I would have been able to go myself a few months ago. Since starting development with AI agents I feel there is so much more to do...

agentic developmentai

Working with CSS Container Queries for the first time today, and they don't quite work how I expected them to work. It's leading to me having to declare selectors in ways that are not natural to me, although the selectors are working as expected. In short, it's making me think, harder than most days.

The Apollo Murders

With a title like The Apollo Murders I expected something a lot closer to a classic whodunnit. This wasn't that, and I'm glad it wasn't - it was better!

alternate realityfiction

Web Cartography

I've been meaning to read this for years. I finally picked up a copy for a decent price last year, and read it as a refresher before embarking on some map creation. It seems a bit strange, reading a technology-related book from 2014 in 2026, but Ian Muehlenhaus did a good job of keeping most...

cartographyjavascript

Yesterday's Fable ban caught me by surprise, I was planning on using Fable 5 until at least June 22, and hoping that it wouldn't actually go token-only after June 22. Fable is good, even great! I'm back on Opus 4.8 with GPT 5.5 supervision earlier than expected. 😞

agentic developmentai

It's time for the Jetbrains Developer Ecosystem Survey! Participate at my referral URL! https://surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/developer-ecosystem-survey-2026-sh?pcode=473387363801875378

developerjetbrains

Fixing Chrome’s “No usable sandbox!” During Web Requests with Browsershot and Puppeteer

After getting Chrome up and running as the www-data user for Laravel workers, I tried to generate a PDF during a web request and got Chrome's "No usable sandbox!" error. Uh-oh. Chrome needs a sandbox, it is strongly discouraged to run without one. So, how to get a sandbox up and running? A lot of...

browsershotchrome

Install Chrome as the www-data User

After recently rebuilding the 4RoadService web server on Debian 13, Browsershot wasn't working right. It wasn't working at all. We run Laravel on a slightly old-school LAMP setup with PHP-FPM, and run the Laravel workers as the www-data user, the same user that runs the web server, so that user needed to be able to...

browsershotdebian

Asked Claude Code with Fable 5 to write some API docs based on the code, and it did, and also pointed out some bugs in the API, which it is now fixing, and updating the docs to match the fixes.

agentic developmentai