Recently, I wanted to embed an photograph of a book page. I thought it would be nifty if the text from the page could be selected. If you hover your mouse over this image, you should be able to select part of the text. Ideally, it will look something like this... It even works on Android (tried on Chrome, Opera, FireFox) and iOS 7. So, how did I do it? Originally, I was pointed to Project Naptha - it seems to do everything I want but is very JavaScript heavy and requires modern…
Continue reading →
In 1987 MI5's former Assistant Director, Peter Wright, released his autobiography. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. It was immediately banned by the British Government. Although the Internet wasn't around to facilitate its distribution, it was trivial to obtain copies imported from Australia. As a boy, I remember seeing the publicity about it on the news and being very upset that my parents had a copy! In light of the recent revelations by Edward…
Continue reading →
Imagine, just for a moment, you suspect that a friend of yours is a criminal. Perhaps they are running an illegal proxy, or hosting a search engine, or maybe criticising a dangerous cult, or even taking suspicious photographs. These are all - apparently - within the remit of The City Of London Police. Better report such heinous crimes to them. As a high-tech policing unit, they encourage you to report crimes online. The more astute of you will have noticed that the form is insecure. …
Continue reading →
These are mostly notes to myself. These all comply with the UK's new copyright laws. Check your local laws, kiddies! DVD-Audio (called DVD-A or DVDA) never really took off. It's hard to find the discs and compatible hardware. Nevertheless, I want to listen to these high-resolution audio tracks under Linux. In these examples, I'm using Ubuntu - but any modern system should cope. Ripping DVD-A In theory, DVD Audio Tools should work. In practice, I found no guide to compiling the software …
Continue reading →
Running a website is hard. Let me clarify - setting up a website is dead simple - keeping it running and updated is tricky. Now, for some of us, it doesn't really matter whether our sites live or die. But for big companies like McAfee it's not simple to switch off a site - especially when they've promised to keep it running in perpetuity. For some reason, the world's largest computer security company decided that what the world really needed was a brand new Link Shortner. Yup, to add to…
Continue reading →
