Welcome to acronym city! I recently published my Master's Dissertation. I say "published" - I just shoved it up on a website. But real academic publications should have a DOI - it's an identifier which is supposed to make it easier for people to find and cite paper. You know how … | Continue reading
This blog has a calendar showing my yearly archives. It was in a table layout - which made sense when I first designed it - but had a few spacing niggles and was hard to make responsive. Now, it behaves like this: The code is relatively straightforward. The HTML for the calendar … | Continue reading
Today is a day of mixed emotions for me. The UK's COVID tracing app is finally closing. The app was, by any reasonable measure, a success. A team of experts at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford and Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick es … | Continue reading
I think the computer programming industry is about to reach a reckoning. No, not because ChatGPT can poorly plagiarise buggy code - but because a whole generation of kids have grown up with Scratch. And they'll want professional tools which have Scratch's level of usability. Hand … | Continue reading
I was in one of those interminably dull video-conferences a few weeks ago. The presenter was pitching their grand vision of what our next steps should be. "So!" They said, "Any comments before we launch?" No one said anything. After half a minute the presenter said "As there are … | Continue reading
Metawork is so much more fun than real work. Sharpening your pencils. Colour coordinating your filing system. Creating Gantt charts of what you intend to do. Marvellous! In that spirit, here's how I used the venerable pandoc to convert my MSc dissertation from .md into a variety … | Continue reading
Much like "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race" this is a book that's a little tricky for me - a white apathist man - to review. I'll cheerfully admit that I don't get religion - any religion. And I doubly don't get why people tie themselves to a religion which s … | Continue reading
This is a Retropost. I wrote it contemporaneously - but was only allowed to publish it a year later. Today I took part in "A Phase 2/3, Randomized, Observer-blind, Active-controlled, Multicenter Study to Evaluate the Immunogenicity and Safety of Omicron Variant Vaccines in Compar … | Continue reading
Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and f … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I wrote about my perfect ls command. I always want to see the most recent file at the bottom of the screen, with a human readable filesize, and nothing else. I've started using the exa tool to make that happen. Sadly, there's no configuration file to change its d … | Continue reading
After finding the first Expanse book mildly interesting, I was badgered into reading the sequel. It isn't good. The first book made for some interesting "engineering" sci-if. What would it take to travel at excess g-force? What are the practical implications of living on a low-gr … | Continue reading
There's an old, old joke: A man jumps into a taxi and starts chatting to the driver about philosophy. The taxi driver turns to him and says, “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” The man says, “Well, I'm an atheist.” The taxi driver thinks for a moment and says “OK, but is it the … | Continue reading
I needed to copy 3TB of data from my old homeserver to my new one. I decided to spend as much time "sharpening my axe" as possible. I spent ages dicking around with ZFS configs, tweaking BIOS settings, flashing firmware, and all the other yak-shaving necessary for convincing your … | Continue reading
ZFS sometimes benefits from having a logging drive. Usually, you need to assign a whole device or partition to it. Unfortunately, I had already partitioned my SSD and didn't feel like repartitioning it. So, here's how to create a file, mount it as a loopback, and then assign it t … | Continue reading
Zombie films are always social commentary. The original Night of the Living Dead is a story of small-town racism and paranoia. One Cut Of The Dead is - if you'll pardon the pun - a cut above the rest of the zombie flicks. It asks some deep questions about cinema and the role of t … | Continue reading
As part of my never-ending quest to banish this skeuomorph from the world… I was reading a fascinating eBook recently which was, sadly, designed to mimic a legacy / paper book. To the point where the authoring software had hard-coded in page numbers and forced them to be displaye … | Continue reading
I have a headless server - one without a GUI - which I use as a NextCloud client. My laptop, phone, tablet, and server all sync with a cloud-based NextCloud instance. But, sadly, NextCloud don't offer a way for servers to speak to servers. If you try to run apt install nextcloud … | Continue reading
Back in 2011, I bought an HP Proliant Microserver G6 for £250. Last week I upgraded to... A Proliant G8 for £270. Nice! Hurrah for Moore's Law! Of course, setting it up is a bit of a mare. So here's a tangled mess of notes to hopefully remind me what to do... Firmware Download th … | Continue reading
Well gang, I did it! After two years I've finally finished my MSc! My final project was a 10,901 word epic about... The ✨Metaverse✨. Have I gone a little bit peculiar? No. I don't think so. I was advised to pick a project which would sustain my interest for 6 months. So I chose s … | Continue reading
After 3 full years of having solar panels on our London roof, they've generated 11,950kWh of electricity. Nice! Here's how those three years look, according to our smart meter. kWh Solar Generation 11,950 Solar Export 7,346 Grid Import 7,521 Quick maths! The difference between th … | Continue reading
Yes, that Mae West wrote a novel. And it is a corker. Unabashedly sexy, druggy, provocative, and daringly modern. You can read the whole thing in West's voice: “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “I won’t hurt him. I only want to feel his muscles.” Every line just sizzles off th … | Continue reading
At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language. I wondered how true that was. You … | Continue reading
Three years ago, I wrote about how you could add SIP calls to Android for free. Android had a well-integrated system which made VoIP calling a first-class citizen on its handsets. Sadly, Google killed native SIP calling in Android 12. FFS! It's relatively easy to get it set up ag … | Continue reading
Back in November 2020 I started studying for an MSc. And, yesterday, I got this... All done! I've got to say, it has been... an experience. I've relentlessly blogged about the process. The academic content was pretty good, but the administration by QA.com was nothing short of atr … | Continue reading
I've been thinking a lot about footnotes in Markdown. I've contributed a patch to make them slightly better in WordPress. Now I'm wondering how to make them more useful by enhancing their pop-up title text. To that end, I'm writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the … | Continue reading
I recently read a wonderful paper by Mar Hicks called "Hacking the Cis-tem" which is about database design in the 1960s and the nascent digital state's approach to transgender individuals. It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediat … | Continue reading
Much like Tom Phillips' last book this is a fun and well-written look at a peculiar facet of humanity. How conspiracy theories work, and why so many people are attracted to them. The book is very now - and I do wonder how it will date. But there's something invigorating about rea … | Continue reading
This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes. I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a t … | Continue reading
This is a difficult and disturbing book. It is a great read for any hacker - it's all about the way technology abuses people and how it radicalises people into fighting back. The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are th … | Continue reading
A superb book! It traces the origins of 26 facets of modern life so that you can understand the code which underpins them. There's only a smattering of actual code you need to read - most of it is constrained to gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations. Although I got a bit of a shock i … | Continue reading
Wow! What a stunning book. It's a series of short stories - all taking place in a world where gene-editing isn't just legal; it's a sacrament. Each chapter jumps us further into the future. What starts off as an uncertain way to improve the human species gradually becomes more be … | Continue reading
This is a short but interesting look at the way Shakespeare's comedy was understood by his contemporaries - and how his legacy still influences modern comedians. There's a good deal of discussion about the role comedy played in society, and the interplay between actors and playwr … | Continue reading
I was recently interviewed in the BCS Magazine discussing the intersection of AI and Open Source. We're at a weird time with AI and Intellectual Property. Well, IP has been in a weird place since Napster launched at the turn of the century! None of the issues around sharing, remi … | Continue reading
As part of its continuing quest to alienate all its long-time users provide a better user experience to everyone, Reddit recently announced a slew of changes. Buried in amongst all the hullabaloo from whinging ungrateful brats thoughtful comments from people with justifiable conc … | Continue reading
When I was a kid, I "invented" a brilliant new compression format. Rather than sending a digital image of, say, the Mona Lisa a user could just send the ASCII characters "Mona Lisa". The receiving computer could look up the full image in its memory-banks and reproduce the work of … | Continue reading
I'm really late to the party on this one! After people singing the praises of the TV show, and my brother recommending them, I finally cracked and read the first book. It's pretty good! You probably don't need me to tell you that. But, for a book published in 2011, I was surprise … | Continue reading
Who "owns" the English language? Do you cringe when you see "centre" spelled (or spelt) "center" (or vice-versa)? Which Americanisms do you think are super awesome? This book asks us a simple question: What if, instead of worrying about the “ruination” of English by young people, … | Continue reading
I adored Qntm's previous book "There Is No Antimemetics Division". This collection of short stories is just as inventive, and just as thought-provoking. What are the social, moral, and technical implications of uploading a human brain into a computer? Some of the stories are hila … | Continue reading
It's only part-way through the first chapter that you realise that this is all true! There really was a Premonitions Bureau running in the UK (albeit under the auspices of sensationalist reporters). People gave serious study to the idea that some people could foretell specific tr … | Continue reading
I usually don't like reading endless sequels of sci-fi books - but I'll make a gleeful exception for Anne Currie's "Panopticon" series. What if the METAVERSE but IN SPACE! With a MURDER! C'mon, how can you not love that? At its heart is a classic Asimov mystery. Why would a robot … | Continue reading
My wife and I are planning on being DWZ DINK FIRE. That's a lot of letters to say we want to retire early and not leave any money to our non-existent kids. This book is a (slightly shallow) exploration of 26 people on similar journeys. They're all American (or now living in the U … | Continue reading
There's an incredibly distressing story in the BBC about a vulnerable elderly man who was conned out of his life savings. Fraud victim gets surprise £153,000 refund despite rules BBC News In the story, the heartless bank refused to refund the fraud victim due to an absurd technic … | Continue reading
This is a fluffy and breezy wander through some of the oddities thrown up be evolution. It's also well illustrated and, luckily, most of the picture suit eInk very well. Of great interest to me were the tantalising asides - for example, a formerly enslaved man taught Darwin the a … | Continue reading
A few months ago, I had a lovely rambly chat with Harry Keir Hughes about the nature of data, transparency, and how it can tie into the Net Zero agenda. Harry and his team have taken my pontifications and placed them in the very swanky Digital Radar Report. The full report quotes … | Continue reading
The Mozilla VPN service is great, but it doesn't work using the CLI if you have a "headless" server. After a bit of faffing about, I got it working. I suffered so you don't have to. Get an account Sign up and use code MOZILLA20 for a cheeky 20% discount! Get a token in the […] | Continue reading
How would you read this sentence out aloud? "In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ..." Most people with a grasp of the interplay between English and Latin would say "In Hamlet, Act four, scene nine". And they'd be right! But screen-readers - computer programs which convert text into speech - … | Continue reading
I've recently completed my Level 7 Apprenticeship. One of the more onerous tasks was completing the portfolio. This document was the source of much stress and confusion with our cohort. This blog post attempts to demystify it and provides a template to make it easy to complete. M … | Continue reading
I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS. As I've mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it d … | Continue reading