After my rant a few weeks ago, I finally found a cheap WiFi smoke alarm. A few disclaimers before I get into this review: It was shipped from China, not from the UK as stated. The device doesn̵… | Continue reading
I blog about my solar panels – probably a bit too much! Recently, a reader asked me if I’d heard of Rowan Energy’s solar payback scheme – so I took a look into it. Here̵… | Continue reading
One of those things that organisations love to do is issue identifiers. My credit card provider issues me with a Customer ID, a Billing ID, a Reference Number, and an online login ID. All of which … | Continue reading
This is a two-part blog post about rewriting the rules. I hated playing sports as a teenager quelle surprise. In a vain attempt to get me to love the beautiful game, a PE teacher once made me team … | Continue reading
(This post written partly to tease my delightful colleague Charles, but also as a way of thinking about user needs.) During a recent Open Data Café, one of the guests made an entirely reasonable po… | Continue reading
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I’m reading a book about Data Analytics. So I’ve been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (… | Continue reading
I’ve had a Nest smoke alarm for about 7 years. It connects to my WiFi network and occasionally pings a message to my phone that I’ve burnt my toast. Nifty! But, due to planned obsolesce… | Continue reading
Messaging app Signal is launching a payment service in the UK. This will allow users to send each other money cryptocurrency. Many people have written about why this is a daft idea. But they’… | Continue reading
Let me start by saying that Emoji Passwords are probably a really daft idea. I want to use emoji in my passwords. They’re easy to type on a mobile keyboard, easy to remember, and a lot more f… | Continue reading
Whenever you buy a second-hand book, you are stealing revenue from the author and publisher. It makes no difference whether you buy from a charity shop or a for-profit store. All the money goes to … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently. I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: When I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convince… | Continue reading
If you have a bank account, you probably have an IBAN – an International Bank Account Number. It is a well-structured text string which unambiguously identifies your account. A typical UK IBA… | Continue reading
Nine years later and I’m still bitter – and that’s an unhealthy emotion. So I’m blogging as a form of catharsis. Back in 2012, I was taking the fledgling “QRpedia̶… | Continue reading
Matt Webb has a whimsical blog about buying unused TV advertising space. There are a bunch of shows on streaming services which have ad-breaks unfilled. Mostly, I assume, because everyone hates adv… | Continue reading
I don’t have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don’t remember them. I’ve had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I’ve d… | Continue reading
(A hastily written and grumpy post.) Another day, another Blockchain Bullshit project. Someone “claimed” one of my Tweets and added it to the Blockchain. I’m not particularly happ… | Continue reading
Once in a while, big companies suggest that the answer to abuse is to ban anonymity and institute a Real Names policy. This time, it is Google’s turn. They think that critical software should… | Continue reading
I’m a weirdo – I fully admit that. As part of my home working set up, I use a vertical monitor. I read and write a lot of long documents – and this form factor suits me perfectly.… | Continue reading
I’ve told this story at conferences – but due to the general situation I thought I’d retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in Lo… | Continue reading
This is probably me being a bit dense. I’m on a video call with two other people. Alice is on the left of my screen, Bob is on the right. Why isn’t the audio in stereo? (Zoom lets you s… | Continue reading
One of my lovely colleagues made an small speech during a recent meeting. She was delighted to announce that she was heading off on maternity leave next month and looked forward to seeing us all ne… | Continue reading
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. In the replies, you’ll see lots of techbros saying “this is why you should switch on 2FA people!!!” Except, and I hate to brin… | Continue reading
… as our money becomes completely electronic, new crimes will undoubtedly be committed which take advantage of the technology itself. Perhaps if we could imagine what crimes might happen, we … | Continue reading
(For the new reader, there is a famous essay called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. It has since spawned a long list of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About….) Everyone has finger… | Continue reading
I once drove my company car to my company’s office and then drove around the company car park for 20 minutes looking in vain for a parking space. Whereupon I double-parked across a couple of … | Continue reading
There are lots of celelbrities and famous academics on Twitter. Then there’s Professor Richard Feynman. Who died in 1988. Every so often, one of “his” pearls of wisdom is regurgit… | Continue reading
Lots of pixels have been spilled recently on whether you should build your own stuff, or buy stuff and then configure it. Wardley Mapping (which I still don’t understand) seems to say that yo… | Continue reading
This pre-release whitepaper is a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges associated with using Quantum BlockChain technology to improve the performance of 6th Generation data networks for thei… | Continue reading
As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team … | Continue reading
Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock” is one of the defining texts of the 20th century. In it, he correctly predicts the insanity of living in the 21st century with its constant bom… | Continue reading
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothin… | Continue reading
There’s an HTML element called
Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn’t even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you … | Continue reading
(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.) My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. T… | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about better ways to display footnotes in eBooks. So this is my horrible and hacky way to display inline footnotes in pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript. Here’s how it … | Continue reading
It’s possible to encode QR images as text. In this case, Emoji! | Continue reading
Apple’s HEIC format is… annoying. At the moment, Apple’s products are the only mainstream cameras which use it. Forums are littered with people trying to upload HEIC files to web … | Continue reading
The horror of the quantified audience The cinema is on the deserted outskirts of Pinewood Studios. It’s a wet and windy day — not unusual for England in late summer — and I’m here to ta… | Continue reading
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was “A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?”… | Continue reading
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 – with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was bas… | Continue reading
Recently, I bought an eBook which has a bug. I’d like to explain what the bug is, why it is a problem, and how I’m trying to get it corrected. Amazon sells eBooks in KF8 format. That is… | Continue reading
One of the things I loved about Facebook was its “On This Day” feature. There’s something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Tw… | Continue reading
/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user’s local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (Englis… | Continue reading
I’d like to propose that web designers around the world spend one day this year browsing the web with JavaScript disabled. I’m tentatively calling this “International No Javascrip… | Continue reading
I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network li… | Continue reading
Last week, I gave a talk at the Maps for the Web workshop. As part of the discussion, I talked about how some HTML elements are really easy for developers to use and understand, and others are hard… | Continue reading
It has been over a year since I cancelled my Cloudflare account. They keep emailing me and haven’t taken me off their marketing lists despite repeated requests. Their CTO told me he would inv… | Continue reading
I get a lot of random Twitter DMs from attractive women who are desperate to make friends with me. I usually report the obvious spammers. But a few weeks ago, one nearly slipped through the net. Th… | Continue reading