The Zietgiest's newest toy is OpenAI's Chat Platform. So I asked it "Could you write a limerick about a man from Woking?" Sure, here's a limerick about a man from Woking: There once was a man from Woking Whose life was quite dull and uneventful He worked at the bank And like … | Continue reading
You know how it is, you buy one silly domain name and then you get an idea for loads more! A few weeks ago, I got https://⏻.ga/ - I think I'm the first person to get a domain name which uses a glyph from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block. How exciting! And that got me […] | Continue reading
This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: This means readers of my post can see where it has bee … | Continue reading
I do not care for the game of Rugby. After many wet and cold days on the school sports field, I had any latent enthusiasm for it beaten out of me. There is nothing you or anyone else can say which will convince me to take an interest in it. You may feel the same […] | Continue reading
This is a short piece of mostly fiction. It looks at the secret life of data and algorithms. Enjoy! Data Becomes Her I never knew my mother. OK, no one ever really knows their mum. But I never even got to meet mine. She made it clear at the hospital that she'd smother me to […] | Continue reading
Image files are a grid of pixels - each pixel contains colour information1. But they don't just have to contain colour information. Here are some thoughts on other things that a future image format might contain. What exists already? A typical bitmap image looks like this under t … | Continue reading
Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a … | Continue reading
To understand this blog post, you need to know two things. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal. There exists a class of algorithms which will … | Continue reading
There's no way that I could find to report this to the Canadian Government - and I didn't fancy trying to raise a bug report with the first Mountie I met - so here's a blog post. As part of Canada's Electronic Travel Authorisation system, prospective visitors to the country get s … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I had a chance to work with an exciting tech startup. They had just become 5 years old. The day I went for an interview, about a dozen of the founding members announced they were quitting. Including the CEO. Was this a good sign or a bad sign? Over beers, my […] | Continue reading
When I was a kid, our school had one computer per classroom. Luxury! Teachers had long-since given up on the state of my handwriting. So I got special dispensation to write up some of my work on whatever primitive word processor was installed on the PC. With one caveat: no spell … | Continue reading
Back in 2007 - an eternity in web years - the BBC published a document showing their 15 Web Principles. I thought I'd take a look at how they stack up today. And investigate whether the BBC is still living up to them. Here are the slides if you want to play along at home: […] | Continue reading
Mostly notes to myself - I hope you find them useful. So, you want to write your dissertation or thesis in Markdown. But how do you manage all your citations? Install Zotero Install the Better BibTex plugin Restart Zotero. The BBT plugin will launch a configuration screen - use i … | Continue reading
I was at an event a few months ago, where someone from the Bank of England was talking about understanding the user needs for cryptocurrency. One of the things people do when trying to create a new product or service is to write little user stories to illustrate the problem they' … | Continue reading
Hello readers! Way back in 2015, I wrote a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game using Twitter. I think it is fair to say that it is the best computer game I've ever published. And probably the only time I'll ever be reviewed in The Guardian and Kotaku! Anyway, a year ago I was contac … | Continue reading
Electricity demand varies throughout the day. When demand is higher, electricity prices go up. Most UK consumers are insulated from this variability - we pay a fixed price per kWh no matter what the actual wholesale cost. But it doesn't need to be this way. Exposing users to the … | Continue reading
My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules). Last year, I read an astonishing 85 books! That is too many books. This year I was doing lots of reading for my MSc - which was mostly academic papers. I also didn't have any long relaxing breaks. But, nevertheless, I'm happy to … | Continue reading
It's my birthday! Therefore it marks the end of another year of me hurtling around Earth's yellow sun. So, as is customary, here's my year in review. You can read previous years at 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 20131, 2012, 2011, and 2010. If all goes well, at this ve … | Continue reading
The social network service "Mastodon" allows people to publish posts. People can reply to those posts. Other people can reply to those replies - and so on. What does that look like in the API? Here's a quick guide to the concepts you need to know - and some code to help you visua … | Continue reading
1861: "On the one hand, slavery is bad. On the other hand, cheap cotton from the South keeps the UK economy working." 2022: "On the one hand, invading Ukraine is bad. On the other hand, cheap gas from Russia keeps the UK economy working." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose… … | Continue reading
Because I don't trust Alan, the Hyperprat who now runs Twitter, I decided to download my Twitter archive before setting my account to dormant. About a decade ago, I wrote about how the Twitter archive works and where it is deficient. Things have got better, but there are still an … | Continue reading
Two years ago to the day, I built Twistory - a service for seeing what you posted on Twitter on this day in previous years. If you've ever used Facebook, you'll know how it is supposed to work. You see posts which show that exactly 5 years ago you were starting a new job, 6 […] | Continue reading
This is an astoundingly delightful book. It takes Nagel's classic question "What is it like to be a bat?" and takes us in to the heart of the hive. Humans can only understand our own lived reality. So here we have bees' behaviour translated into schemes and intrigues which would … | Continue reading
This was a rare DNF for me. I'm sure there's a brilliant story in there somewhere but it became too much of a chore to read. The prose is excruciatingly complicated. Half a dozen times in one page I had to use my eReader's dictionary to look up an archaic word. Perhaps that's par … | Continue reading
I am weak. I flounced off WhatsApp at the start of the pandemic due to Meta's shitty policies. Many of my friends made the move to Signal and some stuck with Telegram. But lots of them preferred WhatsApp and didn't want yet another inbox - especially one which was only connected … | Continue reading
WordPress's Jetpack plugin allows you to easily syndicate your blog to Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Email, and a few other services. But there's no native way to publish directly to your Mastodon feed. This is a guide to how I got my blog to publish every new post to Mastodon with … | Continue reading
I like beer. I like the Internet. What if I could get beer using the Internet?!?! A few years ago I purchased a mixed crate of beer online. I unticked all the checkboxes for marketing messages - but incautiously allowed them to send me special offers. Every couple of months, they … | Continue reading
Back in June, I noticed a pretty insidious piece of Twitter spam. The “twoo.fun” website was claiming that it could tell you who visited your Twitter profile. That’s pretty entici… | Continue reading
Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I’ve noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them – though by no means… | Continue reading
The other day, a company sent me a 2FA code which was only four digits long. I’ll admit, this weirded me out. Surely 4 is just far too short. Right? I think almost every 2FA code I’ve s… | Continue reading
This chimes with something I’ve been pondering: we anticipate big breakthoughs in software—AI!, blockchain!, metaverse! chatbots!—but in reality the field is relatively stagnant. Meanwhile in areas like biology, there’s been unexpected advances. Or maybe, as Terence indicates, it … | Continue reading
Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster. While yak-shaving for my… | Continue reading
I’m a huge fan of the US Braille Institute’s Atkinson Hyperlegible font. This blog is typeset in it, and I think it looks gorgeous. It’s also specifically designed to be readable … | Continue reading
11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing … | Continue reading
I’ve just finished reviewing a few dozen CVs and Covering Letters. Almost all of them were awful! Candidates – I beg you – make this easy for me! I have been given a fixed set of … | Continue reading
Every so often, an employer asks me to help make a dashboard. Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watchi… | Continue reading
You’ve been on the Internet a long time, right? Of course you know what BIMI is. All the cool kids do. But, for those of you who aren’t hip to the jive of the Infobahn… BIMI (Bran… | Continue reading
As part of my new job, I’m learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query al… | Continue reading
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like “Alice is … | Continue reading
Shamir’s Secret Sharing (henceforth “SSS”) is clever. Far too clever for most people to understand – but let’s give it a go. Suppose you have a super-secure password f… | Continue reading
This is a little story about standards, technology, civilisation, and the modern world. I know it is tempting to only talk about the various ways technology disappoints us, but sometimes it can be … | Continue reading
I speak English. My Amazon account is set to English. My Alexa listens to my English commands and replies in English. Except for new book notifications. I saw a pulsing yellow light on the dot. I&#… | Continue reading
In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won’t have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef’s vision for organic cuisine – instead, they&#… | Continue reading
Imagine… Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A sm… | Continue reading
Introducing Paper Prototype CSS. When I first started designing the OpenBenches website, I wanted to make it look deliberately crappy. I didn’t want the people testing it getting too hung up … | Continue reading
In the last couple of months, I’ve been seeing the ú symbol on British receipts. Why? 1963 – ASCII In the beginning* was ASCII. A standard way for computers to exchange text. ASCII… | Continue reading
Welcome to my descent into a mulberry-induced madness. As I was wandering through the quaint European town of Woodstock, I noticed a most intriguing plaque affixed to one of the houses. This seems … | Continue reading
How I miss the days when phone manufacturers were innovative. Nowadays everything is just a boring black rectangle. I imagine that this (concept) device would probably just put the browser only on … | Continue reading