This book demonstrates how popular culture can be successfully incorporated into medical and health science curriculums, capitalising on the opportunity fictional media presents to humanise case studies. Studies show that the vast majority of medical and nursing students watch popular medical television dramas and comedies such as Grey’s Anatomy, ER, House M.D. and Scrubs. This book is currently free on the Springer website - and it's a brilliant read. I thought this was going to be an "…
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I wanted to see what I was Tweeting on this exact day last year. And all the years before. So I built a website! It's a disgusting hack, and I'm truly sorry for unleashing it on you. Using the API You can't. The Twitter search API only goes back 7 days. This whole idea would be much easier if I had access to the Premium API. But! The Twitter website has no such restrictions. Advanced Search Twitter's Advanced Search allows you to pick specific dates to search for. Here's the string which …
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When we moved house, we found the previous owners had installed under-cupboard lighting in the kitchen. It uses basic and cheap 12V LED strips. The strips are flexible and have glue on the back. We didn't like them in the kitchen. So we tried them on the stairs. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentTrying to work out where I want LED strips.The "aeroplane emergency lighting" look on the stairs isn't great.Suggestions? pic.x.com/ctvppeuytk❤️ 7💬 13♻️ 014:24 - Sun 09 February 2020 Meh! Our mate S…
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One of the problems with buying a house, is that you're inevitably stuck with someone else's taste in decor. Our new place isn't too bad - it's just a little dull. With lockdown in full-force, some of the boring bits of the house have been annoying me more than is reasonable. I'm not a big fan of net curtains. They always look a bit ratty, and are a dust trap. So we decided to get some "stained glass" privacy film. We found this beautiful Mondrian-style sticker It brings me joy every…
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There was a "situation" at work. We were publishing a high-profile project (take a wild guess) on GitHub. We had received abuse and were worried that someone might target the programmers who worked on the project. Obviously, we take cyber-security seriously, but how do we deal with personal-security? Here are the options we considered: Get everyone to sign up for a secondary GitHub account to use for this project. Redact the history so no-one could see personal information. Use the same…
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I'm not sure if I'm the first person to do this - but I'm going to claim credit anyway! Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentHello! This Tweet has been signed with my PGP Key. pic.x.com/ed4rcldlvw❤️ 41💬 7♻️ 008:03 - Thu 14 May 2020 You can verify by pasting the alt text into keybase.io/verify - or by using your favourite command line tool. Back in 2017, I wondered if Twitter's alt text could be (ab)used to store message metadata like a PGP signature. Sadly, the limit was 420 characters per image.…
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Twitter's search interface has all sorts of lovely and obscure options. My three favourites are "min_retweets:", "min_replies:", and "min_faves:" Using those filters, you can create a search for Tweets which meet a certain threshold. For example, here are my Tweets which have been liked more than 500 times: twitter.com/search?q=from:edent min_faves:500 Here are the ones which have been retweeted 300 times with at least 100 replies: twitter.com/search?q=from%:edent min_replies:100…
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Winner of the 1989 Children's Book of the Year Award for older readers. I rarely re-read books. I just don't like revisiting the past. But I remember reading this repeatedly during adolescence. And something called me to re-reading it as an adult. I'm glad I did. Parts of this book were buried deep in my brain. I call on them from time-to-time. But long sections of it were completely alien to me - so much went over my head as a teenager. And yet... the core messages about sexism, racism, …
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Food is delicious and exercise is boring. This is a problem. I'm not going to cut back on delicious treats, and I don't want to get out of breath climbing stairs - so I need to get a bit fitter. I'm a grumpy old sod, so these are all the things I dislike about this frickin' weird game. Grade Inflation The very first level nets you 900 XP. What? The numbers are meaningless from the beginning. What happens when you reach different levels? WHAT ARE ALL THESE NUMBERS FOR? What do I do with all…
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In order to provide a video playback UI, WordPress uses the excellent MediaElement library. Recently, I discovered a slightly annoying flaw - I couldn't see the play button! Here's a screenshot of the video UI. In the middle of this screenshot is a white play button. I have trouble seeing it, because the video's background colour is predominantly white. The issue is with the mejs-controls.svg - the graphic which contains the interface controls. I think it could be made more accessible…
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The UK register of businesses - Companies House - has an online record of every company in the UK. It contains articles of incorporation, statement of accounts, and all sorts of legal documents. Everything which has been digitised is freely available. Yay for public records! Famous and important people have companies. Lots of them use lawyers and accountants to handle their business affairs. But occasionally they have to sign their own paperwork. I've spent a bit of lockdown sperlunking…
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I've got a new laptop which runs Linux! These are mostly notes to myself. Fonts First, from the console, install Gnome Tweaks sudo apt install gnome-tweaks Run Tweaks and select "Fonts". You can swap fonts, boost them, and generally have a good fiddle. Increasing the scaling factor is a good way to boost the size of all desktop elements. Bluetooth - rename By default the Bluetooth name is pop_os. sudo nano /etc/hostname Replace it with whatever you like. Keyboard Lights You will…
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