Regular nonsense about tech and its effects 🙃
A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not
Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for
Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very
I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC"
The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to
As part of my quest to try new things I decided to dig for treasure in my local park. The wonderful folks at DigVentures allow members of the public to assist with archaeology projects in their
Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from
The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There
Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base. So should you close all your
I'm grateful that my blog posts attract lots of engaged, funny, and challenging comments. But any popular post also attracts spammers. I use Antispam Bee to automatically eradicate a couple of
Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! I was sent this thought-provoking blog post called "The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved
The venerable eSpeak is a mainstay of Linux distributions. It is a clever Text-To-Speech (TTS) program which will read aloud the written word using a phenomenally wide variety of languages and
My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a
I still use my obsolete LG 360 Camera. When copying MP4 videos from its SD card, they come out in "Dual Fisheye" format - which looks like this: VLC and YouTube will only play "Equirectangular"
After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the
What if I told you there was a secret social network, hidden in plain sight? If you're reading this message, you're now a member of RSS Club! RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to
I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an
My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so
I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case
This post is exclusive to feed subscribers. Enjoy! This whole experiment is called RSS Club - but perhaps it should be called "XML-based distributed feed club"? I've been playing about with