Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

After years of hosting this site at the apex domain johnsy.com, I’m moving back to www.johnsy.com. Much earlier versions of this site lived at the www subdomain, so this is something of a homecoming. If you’ve bookmarked the site or have links pointing to the old URL, no need to worry; everything will redirect automatically.

A friend commented on my recent accessibility improvements: “Do those tools check for color blindness accessibility too? I’m strongly colorblind and your red headings on a dark background, particularly the smaller ones, are near the edge of readability for me.”

Today, 8 December, is National Crossword Solvers Day (in some nations) and I wanted to mark the occasion.

According to a little progress bar I threw together recently, I am now 42% of the way through my current career break and I find myself reflecting on what I have done and what I have left to do.

I’m not sure who first said “Comparison is the thief of joy” and it doesn’t really matter. It’s a pretty good adage. Often times friends of mine who run will seek to diminish their own achievements by comparing themselves with more accomplished, even elite, runners. And I will wheel out this quote for them because my running friends are all pretty awesome folks who smash their goals.

Last year I was at a parkrun event that had 700 finish tokens and (it turned out) 694 finishers. Volunteers were frantically sorting finish tokens as I crossed the line, not knowing whether they’d have enough to get them through to the Tail Walker. Happily, I had a set of tokens in the boot of the car and lent them a batch (I may get them back someday).

I’ve updated this website to use Atkinson Hyperlegible as the default typeface, with Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono for code blocks. This change was inspired by reading the most recent Better Allies newsletter, which highlighted this free typeface from the Braille Institute.

Last Sunday I ran my seventh Melbourne Marathon and my tenth official marathon. It wasn’t my fastest 42.2 km run, but it wasn’t my slowest. I had plenty of time to think about social media influence as I saw smartphones snapping photos of my fellow marathoners. So what did running ten marathons teach me about being a social media influencer?

I’ve been playing Summle for quite some time. It’s one of those daily puzzles where you share your results with your friends, and it takes the form of the numbers game from Countdown (or Letters and Numbers, if you prefer). For the unfamiliar, you’re given a three-digit target number and six smaller numbers from which to make it using only positive integer arithmetic.

Inspired and encouraged by my good friend Ross, I have signed up for the 2025 Great Cycle Challenge and will be riding this October to fight kids’ cancer! In the same month as running Melbourne Marathon, because I don’t like to do things by halves.