By @edent · Book Review · 600 words
The problem with autobiographies is that every anecdote ends with "needless to say, I had the last laugh!" This corporate-autobiography is no different - as it details the rise and impact of Bellingcat - a team of investigators and journalists. I am in awe of Bellingcat - and have seen them give talks on a […]
Continue reading →By @edent · accessibility security usability · 3 comments · 400 words · read ~141 times.
Sometimes a client asks me a question and I'm a little stunned by their mental model of the world. A few weeks ago, we were discussing the need for better cybersecurity in their architecture. We spoke about several aspects of security, then they asked an outstanding question. "What should I buy to be secure?" It […]
Continue reading →By @edent · election general election politics uk · 7 comments · 450 words
The UK is almost certain to have a General Election this year1. The Boundary Commission for England2 has reworked the existing Parliamentary constituencies to make them more fair3. As such, constituencies are generally more equal in terms of electorate. But, of course, geography trumps geometry. So the Isle of Wight now has two constituencies of […]
Continue reading →By @edent · dhsc meta nhsx retropost work · 350 words · read ~129 times.
This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in February 2019, but published much later. My life is weird. Again. Looking out over London from the top floor. The Eye is glittering and the Palace of Westminster is glowing. Someone pours me a glass of (very expensive1) champagne, as the Secretary of State laughs at my witty […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub mastodon php · 7 comments · 2,200 words · read ~1,769 times.
Any computer program can be designed to run from a single file if you architect it wrong enough! I wanted to create the simplest possible Fediverse server which can be used as an educational tool to show how ActivityPub / Mastodon works. The design goals were: Upload a single PHP file to the server. No […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse i18n mastodon unicode · 37 comments · 650 words · read ~196 times.
We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere. It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Apps gov.uk · 14 comments · 750 words · read ~589 times.
Shortly before I left the Civil Service in 2023, I made a complete fool of myself. Someone on Slack was discussing their department's app and I (rather snidely) asked why it was an app rather than a website. After all, one of the seminal blog posts of GDS was about not building apps. In response, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Climate Crisis electricity near future · 3 comments · 350 words · read ~2,163 times.
An interesting snippet about the future of computation: Starting with this build, we are introducing the Power Grid Forecast API. This API empowers app developers to optimize app behavior, minimizing environmental impact by shifting background tasks to times when more renewable energy is available in the local electrical grid. Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bitwarden HowTo json linux · 3 comments · 250 words
I highly recommend BitWarden as a password manager. It is free, open source, and has a great range of apps and APIs. The one thing it doesn't have is a way to sort your accounts by creation date. I now have over a thousand accounts that I've added - so I wanted to prune away […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Game Review oculus vr · 1 comment · 350 words
It is impossible to describe just how cute this game is. Most VR games take place at "human scale" - you play as a human inside a building, or other human-sized space. But Moss lets you play as a mouse named Quill with you (the player) towering over her. You are a human literally peering […]
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