it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time… Winston Churchill I read this wonderful post from ThreeBallot voting. I've read it through twice, and I only think I understand how it works. For all its flaws, First Past The Post is really easy to describe. You can explain how it works in a sentence. "The person with the largest number of votes for them is the winner." I reckon you can do it in two w…
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As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team of brilliant individuals who are all committed to trying to make AMP better, and I'm sorry to leave them. I've been a member of the AC for a little over two years and now is the time to step away and let a wider variety of people work on the committee. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am…
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Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" is one of the defining texts of the 20th century. In it, he correctly predicts the insanity of living in the 21st century with its constant bombardment of the shock of the new. I thoroughly recommend you read it. But there's no official eBook copy. Why? If you trawl the Dark Web™ (2nd page of Google) you're sure to find hundreds of samizdat copies. Some laboriously typed up by hand, others scanned and OCR'd by machines. All of them filled with i…
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Claire North's new book is only £1.99 on Kindle, and I highly recommend it. This is a perfect novella. It is the sort of Sci-Fi which adds only one new thing to our world, then plays out the unintended consequences. What if you had nano-bots keeping you healthy? And what if you paid for upgrades? And then - what if you couldn't keep up with your payments and your health was repossessed? Obviously it invites comparisons to Black Mirror. As a study in human weakness and gentle dystopian …
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This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothing to produce, supply, and market. Yet people would pay through the nose for them. I say people. I mean kids. We saw a huge spike in purchases just as schools finished for the day. While we didn't exactly market directly to kids, we knew that they were buying. Way back then, marketing…
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Back in 2017, I noticed that the UK Post Office was doing very dodgy things with their alt text. Lots of their pages had this snippet of code: Rather than add properly accessible alt text, a developer added placeholder Latin text. Being a good webizen, I tried to report this. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentHi @PostOffice,Why is your website's alt text written in Latin? I don't think that is very accessible.shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/n… pic.x.com/9fQYq92P9g❤️ 8💬 0🔁 212:00 - Mon 13 November …
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There's an HTML element called <time>. It is a semantic element. That means robots can read and understand it. For example, if my code says: <p> The concert is <time datetime="2020-12-24">tomorrow</time> </p> Then the computer knows the specific date I'm talking about. A browser could offer to add the event to your calendar, or a search engine could find events which are happening on a specific date. Nifty! Problems in the wild The problem comes when people use abbreviations which may…
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Mary Seacole left her native Jamaica to travel through the Caribbean, The Bahamas, Central America and to England. Keen to offer her services to English troops in the Crimea War, she was at first refused official support. Undaunted she went anyway and set up her famous hotel catering for British soldiers. Despite her invaluable contribution, she returned to England penniless and in ill health. Thankfully her astonishing achievements were acknowledged and she became the toast of London…
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Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn't even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you ever wondered just how slow modern web development has made the web - Lynx will show you the meaning of haste. I use Lynx most days. Not as my exclusive browser - I'm not a masochist - but as a handy tool. If I'm on a bandwidth constrained connection, or a site is overloaded, or I just want to browse…
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(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.) My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options: Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44) Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55) Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49) Go to GIGABIT for a lot more (£60) Mmmmmm GIGABIT...! Obviously it's classic anchor pricing. And obviously …
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I've been thinking about better ways to display footnotes in eBooks. So this is my horrible and hacky way to display inline footnotes in pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript. Here's how it works: The most cited work in history, for example, is a 1951 paper <details> <summary>1</summary> Lowry, O. H., Rosebrough, N. J., Farr, A. L. Randall, R. J. J. Biol. Chem. 193, 265–275 (1951). </details> describing an assay to determine the amount of protein in a solution. I've use <…
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It's possible to encode QR images as text. In this case, Emoji! (more…) …
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