All about Ken Hawkins

allaboutken.com · English

Digital Platforms & Audience Engagement Lead helping complex organizations build coherent, measurable public-facing systems, with content and data structured to serve both human and machine audiences.

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From the roof, eclipse day 2026
Aug 12, 2026 · original
From the roof of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. The cones are its skylights, lighting the galleries underneath. Behind them, the wide block is the Bundesnetzagentur , and the tower at left is the Langer Eugen , part of the UN campus where I work. That Wednesday evening, much of Europe got an eclipse : total across Iceland and northern Spain, partial from here. Bonn's share was a good one: 88% of the sun covered at 20:13 . This was taken at 19:03, sixteen minutes before it began. The roof of the Bundeskunsthalle is open to anyone who walks up, and something like four hundred people did. A nice evening. For the eclipse itself, someone a few bends up the Rhine in Königswinter caught an excellent time lapse .
NewSheep: forking SheepShaver to boot New World Mac OS 9.2 on Apple Silicon + JIT
Aug 10, 2026 · original
Six weeks ago I wrote a note about going down the stack : SheepShaver booted Mac OS 9.0.4 on Apple Silicon with a native JIT , and 9.2 was the thing I still could not do. That post ended with "I think I could crack 9.2, too." It boots. tl;dr A fork of SheepShaver, not QEMU, reaches a settled Mac OS 9.2.1 Finder desktop through the genuine New World ROM boot path with the ARM64 JIT on, against one verified baseline and three accepted ROM identities The project has a name, NewSheep, and a launcher, SiliconSheep, that can install 9.2.2 from its own installer media and boot the result Boot is 28.3 seconds on the verified baseline, and sub-10 with a newer technique I am still validating; no measured comparison against UTM exists yet Photoshop 7.0.1, Ultra Pinball and AppleWorks are driven under automation, not just launched It only gets exercised on my machine and my use case, so if this is y
A fresh coat of paint and making information actionable for 24 years
Aug 8, 2026 · original
Over the last months, I've been reflecting on my career, how I position what it is I do and how I use this site to communicate it. ("Person who is good at translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders" is a useful skill, but not what I do, nor a marketable term.) I decided to scratch that itch by looking through some of my old online presences, the websites and the photo archives, expecting mostly nostalgia. But I found new clarity on the same question I work on now: how should information be arranged so someone can find it, understand it and connect it to something else? The record I can recover runs from 2002 to 2026. The tools changed from static HTML and Flash to content models, semantic embeddings and server-rendered SVG. Reading it back gave this blog a structure it has always needed. Brace yourself for some meditative navel gazing # My first website was a GeoCities
Field notes on Mac OS 9.2, New World ROMs, and Apple Silicon
Jun 26, 2026 · original
SheepShaver is a legendary Mac OS emulator (fast, compatible, beloved), but it cannot boot Mac OS 9.2. Iirc, you can coax it to run 9.2 through hacks , but you still won't get all the features. I really wanted SheepShaver + 9.2 back in the early 2000s. Twenty-five years on, it is still a nope. You can use QEMU (on Apple Silicon, UTM is the best practical option for 9.2.2 today), but that is not SheepShaver, and you can feel it when using it. What I still want is SheepShaver's particular trick running classic Mac OS: a thin emulation layer with a JIT . The JIT was only part of why it is fast, translating PowerPC instructions to native at runtime, but the bigger idea SheepShaver offered was what it declines to emulate. Rather than simulating a whole Macintosh, SheepShaver emulates the PowerPC CPU and patches the Mac ROM to route everything else (I/O, memory, threads) straight to the host.
CADI: a prescriptive path for slop-free AI in content work
Jun 9, 2026 · original
Recently I was in a meeting with colleagues talking about how people across the organisation are using AI in their writing. What I heard: "I just prompt it and ship. We don't have time to fuss." "I use it for ideas, but I still write the piece myself." "I rewrite every line. I'm honestly not sure I'm saving any time." "It's infuriating." "I see other people using it and I see the same repetitive AI tells bleeding through." "I'm not convinced any of this is worth it. The old way was quieter and probably better." "Other organisations are using it. We can't be the only ones not." — "Should I just get better at prompting?" "Should I write a style guide?" "Should I build an agent?" "Should I document my preferences somewhere?" "Should I upload my existing content?" The honest answer is always some version of "yes, but in a specific order, and most of the value comes from the combination." Hel
A data font, from the inside out
May 12, 2026 · original
Datatype , by Frank Tisellano, is a variable font that renders inline bar charts, sparklines, and pie charts straight out of OpenType ligatures. Write {b:30,70,50,90} and get {b:30,70,50,90} ; no JavaScript, no SVG, no charting library involved. It's also a total inversion of a 2018 piece of mine, A web font for data . tl;dr Datatype turns text like {b:30,70,50,90} into inline charts via OpenType ligatures: bar, sparkline, and pie, with weight and width axes. It rhymes with a 2018 piece of mine, What if: A web font for data , but inverts it: my version was a font for reading dense data, this is a font that is the data. The upstream project ships zero accessibility guidance; for any serious use, pair each chart with aria-hidden on the glyph span and a visually-hidden data table. There's a copyable pattern below. A data font and font for data # Back in 2018, while at EMBL-EBI, I wrote a lo
Building a virtual garage for hobby projects
May 9, 2026 · original
I've been building hobby projects for years. Normally I'll give the better ones a write-up here and a link to GitHub Pages, but the project itself lives at khawkins98.github.io/project-name/ . I wanted to bring them on-domain without the obvious headaches: dozens of subdomains is more infrastructure than any of these deserve, subdomains still confuse people, and copying build output into the main repo defeats the point of keeping them separate. Could I just have my site do what GitHub Pages already does: proxy /repo-name/ to whatever GitHub is already serving? Before: khawkins98.github.io/PDF-A-go-go After: AllAboutKen.com/PDF-A-go-go Same project, same deploy pipeline, better home. See the garage Keep reading if you want to see exactly how I wired it up. tl;dr # Vercel rewrites proxy /project-name/:path* to the GitHub Pages origin — no deploy changes required A naive rewrite 404s on the
Eye-tracking heatmaps in your browser, no lab needed
May 3, 2026 · original
At some point in most design or content reviews you find yourself trying to answer a question you can't answer cleanly: not "is it pretty?" but "will users actually notice the call to action, or are they going to get distracted by the hero image first?" The honest answer is usually "Based off my knowledge and experience: I think so." That only holds until a stakeholder who disagrees says the same thing. Foveacast gives both of you something to look at instead. Drop a screenshot of a UI — a web page, an app screen, a mockup — and it produces a predicted attention heatmap: a color overlay showing where a typical user is likely to look, and how that attention evolves over time. Nothing leaves your machine; the model runs entirely in your browser. Try Foveacast View on GitHub tl;dr Drop a UI screenshot, get a predicted attention heatmap with fixation sequence, attention zones, and centroid t
Stop converting SVG text to outlines
Apr 29, 2026 · original
Check out SVGOMG-Font Every so often I need to put an SVG with text on a website: an infographic, a diagram, a data visualisation with labels. Each time, I end up staring at the same bad choice. Option A: Convert the text to outlines. The SVG renders identically everywhere. No font loading, no layout surprises. Done. But now the text is a pile of path data. Screen readers see nothing. Search engines see nothing. Language models see nothing. Translation is impossible. Option B: Leave the text as text. Clean, accessible, editable. But on any device that doesn't have the font installed, the browser falls back to whatever comes first in the system stack, and your carefully spaced infographic turns into a broken layout that looks like someone used Times New Roman on a web 1.0 site. I've been choosing Option A for years and feeling bad about it. Despite plenty of searching, nothing combined wh
Designing analytics infrastructure that measures audience quality, not just traffic
Apr 22, 2026 · original
Clarity | Audience Quality | Strategic Alignment Context The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) is the UN's focal point for disaster risk reduction, coordinating global policy and supporting Member States to reduce disaster risk and losses. Traditional web analytics answers "how many people visited?" For a UN organization producing policy guidance, technical resources, and knowledge products, that's the wrong question. The right question: did the people who need this content actually find it? I led the design and implementation of analytics infrastructure across UNDRR's web ecosystem (15+ domains spanning Drupal sites, Java applications, and static microsites) to answer that. The challenge wasn't primarily technical. It was conceptual: what does success mean for content where impact happens outside your analytics? What was the actual problem? # No analytics benchma

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