💾 Download this page! What's going on behind the scenes? Here's the code. Note - it doesn't require thousands of imported NPM libraries, a complex Docker set-up, or any AI-on-the-blockchain. <a href="" download="this.html">Download this page</a> HTML 5 introduced a new attribute for the anchor element - download. Rather than having to set your server up…
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Legacy websites are a constant source of vulnerabilities. In a fit of excitement, a team commissions a service and then never bothers updating it. Quite often the original owners leave the business and there's no-one left who remembers that the service exists. So it sits there, vulnerable, for years. The [REDACTED] website had a subdomain…
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Two years ago, I gave my first blood donation. Due to a combination of moving house, and the whole pandemic thing, I've not been able to donate again until now. It was quick - in and out in 90 minutes. And didn't hurt a bit. Well, OK, a bit. But they give you as much…
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I'm not a big fan of Virtual Reality. I find it claustrophobic and impractical for most uses. There are some areas which it does impress though. Scale. Half-a-dozen years ago - during one of VR's periodic hype-phases - an employer asked me and my team to "do something interesting" with all the expensive VR kit…
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This is a slow, and very silly, way to experience an ancient browser. I'm aware that you could spin up a virtual machine, or pay for a browser testing service. But there's something nice about running a browser in a browser. Like wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Using Copy's v86 it's possible to…
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Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to…
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Regular readers know, I'm Creating an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. I've already had some success using an existing NZ Centric, Equal Earth Map. And I've programmatically created a correctly projected map with R. But is it possible to do this with Satellite imagery? YES! Install gdal For this to work, you'll need…
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(Written mostly to settle a good-natured disagreement.) One of the great advantages of HTML is that it can call on external resources. Your index.html can load a style.css and display a picture.jpg. But... it doesn't have to use external resources. (I know this isn't news to some of you - but everyone has to start…
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Yet more MSc yak-shaving. I'm currently reading Melissa Schilling's book "Strategic management of technological innovation". In a passage talking about customers' resistance to new inventions and the destruction of domain knowledge, it talks about the invention of the Dvorak keyboard. Supposedly better than the QWERTY keyboard - but ignored by the majority of customers. August…
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10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Is there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing. — Terence Eden (@edent) July 21, 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later:…
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