Journal

Life moves pretty fast… and I’m now 50 years old. How did that happen?

So I’m no spring chicken… but I feel healthy, happy and very lucky after a memorable few days celebrating the milestone with family and friends.

In the run-up to this radio show I had recently moved house, so hadn’t had much time for new record shopping. I’m also approaching the big half-century. So it felt timely to go for a theme rather than a selection of new records. Since I was feeling nostalgic I decided to anchor the mix around some early inspirations (New Order and 808 State) and let it flow from there.

Listen to the show on Soundcloud.

The second radio show of 2026 for me, in my new bimonthly slot.

Listen to the show on Soundcloud.

I went for an atmospheric and dubby opening, before moving through the BPMs into slo-mo techno from Hoavi and beats from Sholto. Similar to my March show I included YAYA’s My Diner but this time the new remix version. I‘m loving those YAYA releases! The quirky acidic dancehall vibe and humour is really refreshing.

From there it was into some classic Wally Badarou on Island and soulful vibes from Sounds of Blackness.

Loved this account of the life and legacy of a hip-hop producer who changed the game.

I was back playing in the RBV cafe window for the first time since 2023, and it was a blast!

Listen to the show on Soundcloud.

For this mix I went from Japanese electronics and reggae into blissed out new Wah Wah Wino gear and my favourite from Tortoise’s amazing Touch LP, before an upbeat finale.

This retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield set in Appalachia was a long but brilliant read.

A nice modern resource listing the now huge range of CSS properties on one page. There’s a neat search with autosuggest and each listed property links to a page with a short description plus MDN browser support data.

As mentioned on the recent Shop Talk Show episode with Jeremy Keith.

There was a heavy whiff of nostalgia about this gig for me. Jeff Mills is currently on a 30th anniversary tour of his mix album Live at the Liquid Room. I bought that album on cassette tape back then and was blown away by it. I subsequently first saw him DJ at the Arena in Glasgow in 1996. Since then I’ve experienced Jeff doing his thing many times and in various places around the world. His sets are the stuff of legend!

Manuel sensed a general misunderstanding of what an interactive element is and what focusable really means. He wasn’t totally sure himself either, so did some research. It’s a long post but the summary is that:

• an important characteristic of all interactive elements is they are natively focusable;
• focusable doesn't necessarily mean sequentially focusable (tabbable). Some interactive elements including dialog are click-focusable, and these are not tabbable but can be focused programmatically or via click.
• it’s also worth knowing that it's perfectly acceptable to place tabindex on a non-interactive element to aid with accessibility. But prefer applying it to semantic elements rather than divs.

This was a weird, mixed reading experience for me. It’s a short book and it’s good – it had me locked in really quickly and I was finished after a few nights. But it was an uneasy read.