I was speaking to the absolute epitome of a pub bore. Flapping his jaws about how the problem with the NHS was too many admin staff doing absolutely nothing. "Quite right!" I said, feverishly agreeing with his red-faced ranting, "Nurses should spend less time helping patients and … | Continue reading
We recently upgraded our home solar storage to 4.8kWh. The battery has sensors to detect how much solar power we're generating, and how much electricity we're buying from (or selling to) the grid. That means... GRAPHS AND STATISTICS! Our battery was commissioned just after midday … | Continue reading
I have upgradeitis. If something newer and shinier comes out, my stupid monkey-brain compels me to buy it. Seven years ago, we installed a solar battery. It was part of an experimental project which looked at creating a community power-grid, so it came at a subsidised price. As I … | Continue reading
This is ridiculously niche. If this is of help to anyone other than to me... please shout! The IntenseDebate comment system is slowly dying. It hasn't received any updates from Automattic for years. Recently it stopped being able to let users submit new comments. So I've switched … | Continue reading
I'm a little behind on my reading - I've been busy, OK! This is a collection of tales from 2014. Which means it isn't in the shadow of a damned pandemic, lunatic president, or any of the other modern horrors which have caused shockwaves to authors' psyches. I love short stories. … | Continue reading
I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs! You see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. … | Continue reading
My good friend Jess wrote this a little while ago: The function of a system is its output. If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business. If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enab … | Continue reading
Many gallons of digital ink spilled at Google's plans for "Web Environment Integrity" which - depending on who you believe - is either an entirely reasonable proposal to protect users or a devious plan to add DRM to the entire web. (It's the latter, obviously.) We'll never know e … | Continue reading
Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again!1 That's a rallying cry I can get behind. Willy wrote for the groundlings - plenty of sex and violence, interspersed with fart jokes and casual xenophobia. When your audience are drunk and violent, you really need to bring your best rhyming couplets … | Continue reading
Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off … | Continue reading
Not everyone can see the images you post online. They may have vision problems, they may have a slow connection, or they might be using a text-only browser. How can we let them know what the image shows? The answer is alt text. In HTML we can add a snippet of text to aid accessib … | Continue reading
Numbers are hard. I don't mean that in a snarky way. It's easy to visualise a bunch of bananas, but it's almost impossible for most people to comprehend how many bananas are shipped around the world each year. It's easy to understand your pay-cheque, but understanding a national … | Continue reading
Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six … | Continue reading
I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching t … | Continue reading
This is an interesting - although frustrating at times - book. It asks a pretty big question - how do we embed justice in to the ways we designs apps and services? I couldn't find much to disagree with (although I have the odd quibble) but some of the language it uses is very exc … | Continue reading
My CDN just asked me for all my Twitter API keys... WTF? This would give them complete access to my app's Twitter account, the ability to send and receive messages, and anything else that my API key allows. Giving them - or anyone - the entire set of credentials would be a very b … | Continue reading
I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well … | Continue reading
The other day, my HP M140w printer stopped working. The day before, it printed fine. This time, nothing. I rebooted, reset, updated, and performed all the modern rituals associated with uncooperative hardware. I logged into to the printer's webserver and clicked around the admin … | Continue reading
My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and t … | Continue reading
One of the many great things about the Fediverse (Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc) is that your account is portable. Let's say you're bob@social.boring and, one day, you decide to move your account to foxyfun@furryextreme.yif. Well, with a few clicks of a button, all of your old f … | Continue reading
There's a link, right here ➡️⬅️ but, if you're on a touchscreen, you can't tap on it. Using a mouse? Nope, that won't work either. The only way to navigate to it is via keyboard navigation. Hit your Tab ⭾ button! There's a little bit of me wants to build an entire website which c … | Continue reading
Much hullabaloo out of America. Apparently elite universities can no long engage in "Affirmative Action". How can they now admit a balanced and fair selection of the population1? My suggestion is, as always, sortition. Let me explain. Most top flight universities around the world … | Continue reading
The Who are LOUD. Even from the nose-bleed seats at the unfashionable end of the O2 arena, my ears were ringing and my throat was raw from screaming. The "Hits Back" tour pairs The Who with... The Heart of England Orchestra. Now, obviously, The Who are your classic 4-piece rock ' … | Continue reading
I'm sure I remembered there once being a clock app for Linux which was deliberately vague. It would declare the time as "Nearly tea-time" or "A little after elevenses" or "Quite late" or "Gosh, that's early". But I can find no evidence that it ever existed and am beginning to won … | Continue reading
I blog. A lot. Too much really. One of the things I like to do is see what I was rambling on about this time last year. And the year before that. And so on. So, here's my On This Day page and here's how I built it. WARNING Extremely quick and dirty code ahead! […] | Continue reading
Cartographers occasionally sneak deliberate mistakes into their maps. Known as trap streets they are a simple "copyright trap". If someone copies their map without permission, the fake street shows evidence of the source of plagiarism. Google do this sometimes. They once proclaim … | Continue reading
A group of authors are suing various vendors of Large Language Model AIs. The authors claim that the AIs are trained on material which infringes their copyright. Is that likely? Well, let's take a quick look at the evidence presented. First up, Meta's LLaMA Paper. It describes ho … | Continue reading
I am enjoying playing with the eInk Watchy. It is a cute package and is everything I want in a Smart-Watch; geeky, long battery life, and not obnoxious. But - fuck me! - the documentation is atrocious! Well, that's a lie. There is no documentation. I has the "Chat to us on Discor … | Continue reading
Behold! Thanks to the power of the Watchy development platform, I now have all my 2FA codes available at the flick of my wrist! HOWTO This uses Luca Dentella's TOTP-Arduino library. You will need a pre-shared secret which is then converted into a Hex array. Use the OTP Tool for A … | Continue reading
I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200x200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there? A typical watch face looks like this: My new watch face is far superior and looks like this: That's using the GNU Unifont - which works brilliant … | Continue reading
Last year, I blogged about how I turned an old eReader into an Information Screen. I've since updated the display to show me three different sets of transport information. At a glance, I can see the next bus, whether there are delays on the Elizabeth Line, and if my regular train … | Continue reading
This play is exhausting. It is an absolutely relentless comedy. I don't mean a few scattered laughs, I mean a full-on assault on your comedy nerves. It starts as a high-energy farce and escalates and escalates and escalates until you can't trust your senses any more. If you're un … | Continue reading
Way back in the 1990s, my family visited the USA. It seemed at every single large shop there was a person stood inside whose sole job was to say "Welcome to STORENAME! How are you doing today? We're so pleased to have you shop with us!" - their face plastered with an enormous gri … | Continue reading
This was a cheap Kindle deal, so I took a punt. It's a collection of stories whose titles mirror the tracks of Please Please Me. Except... They kinda don't? A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the st … | Continue reading
With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his ban … | Continue reading
The last smartwatch that I tried was some awful early Sony device with a locked-down ROM. The battery died after a day and I couldn't find the proprietary charger. It slurped up all my data. It was garish to look at. And it was expensive. The Watchy is the opposite in every singl … | Continue reading
I'm obsessed with the idea that human progress could be accelerated - if only we realised how to properly combine existing technology. I don't want to go "Ancient Aliens" here - but even a cursory reading of scientific history will show you were humanity's progress could have bee … | Continue reading
There was an interesting discussion at UKGovCamp a few months ago. UKGC is an unofficial yearly gathering of public sector people, who chat informally about thorny issues at work. Suppose a digital design team has to support a policy which charges people money every time they do … | Continue reading
Perhaps you are aware of the Mandela Effect - a psychological phenomenon where you are convinced you remember something which never actually happened. This, combined with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon - where you suddenly start noticing something unusual - can cause extreme cogni … | Continue reading
One of the (many) problems with AI is that training data usually needs to come from "natural" sources. If you want to emulate human-written text, you need to train something on human-written text. But with the proliferation of cheap and fast AI tools, it is likely that training d … | Continue reading
This is a modern Arabian Nights. Eight Middle Eastern tales of adventure and magic, infused with a startling modernity. I loved the world-building in this. The creeping horror in some of the tales was offset by the delicious exploration of what it means to inhabit a world with Dj … | Continue reading
I recently read Darek Kay's excellent post about styling RSS feeds and wanted to do something similar. So, here's my simple guide to styling your WordPress blog's RSS / Atom theme. The end result is that if someone clicks on a link to your feed, they see something nicely formatte … | Continue reading
I'm a big fan of machine-readable metadata. It's useful for programs which need to extract information from messy and complicated websites. It's always surprising where it turns up. For example, take this post of mine on LinkedIn. If you view the source, you'll see this scrap of … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, someone uploaded this memorial bench to our site: It is a perfectly pleasant little memorial poem. I wondered about its origins. A quick search shows that the opening couplet was used on war graves from 1916. But are its origins any earlier than that? One of the … | Continue reading
I know they say you should never read the bottom half of the web. This blog has existed in one form or other since 2004. Since then, I've approved TWELVE-THOUSAND comments. Most comments - but by no means all - are delightful. People wanting to share their own stories, add someth … | Continue reading
I'm not sure how many people know this, but I thought I'd share something I learned a few years ago when I worked for a mobile phone seller. Most modern smartphones are too expensive for people to purchase outright. At the most extreme end, the iPhone 14 Pro Max costs £1,2001. So … | Continue reading
Someone recently complained that using JetPack's Akismet anti-spam plugin wasn't very privacy friendly. So, because I take every minor complaint as a personal rebuke, I decided to switch to AntiSpam Bee - an open source and local antispam solution. And... it's pretty good! There … | Continue reading
Last week, this strange mention appeared on my Mastodon feed. After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even … | Continue reading