This is neither a serious proposal, nor an official proposal. This is just me thinking in public. Governments are a monopoly. There is only one institution which can grant you a passport - Her Majesty's Passport Office. That's not quite true, of course. You are free to seek citizenship in other countries. And some countries will sell you a passport. In business studies terms, other countries…
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Inspired by this conversation on Mastodon YouTube hosts 360 videos. Here's one of mine, wandering through the Houses of Parliament. You can drag the video to see all around. If you let YouTube-DL download the "best" version, you'll end up with a video which looks like this: Each lens' view has been horizontally stretched, and then stitched into an over/under view. This is in Google's…
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Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. Tess Rinearson@_tessrIs this a phishing attempt? Goes to "githubverification.com" and asks for username and pw (if so, it nearly got me!) /cc @github pic.x.com/jgt4oNvjF2❤️ 2,243💬 111🔁 016:12 - Sat 16 January 2021 In the replies, you’ll see lots of techbros saying “this is why you should switch on 2FA people!!!” Except, an…
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Back in 2011, I sold all of my shares in my former employer and used the money to buy solar panels. I closed my account at the same time. Or so I thought Fast-forward 9 years, and I was surprised to receive an unwanted email from the corporate shareholding service. It was some nonsense about their corporate rebranding. I dropped them a note saying that I hadn't been a customer for many years…
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The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story! This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works. There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots. There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image. I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the…
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There's nothing wrong with this movie. It's just so... ordinary. Partly, that's a failure of the superhero genre. They're all identical movies. I am strong enough to defeat common thieves! Here is a baddie who is somehow stronger than you! I will defeat you due to really believing in myself! Fan service post-credits scene. WW1984 hits all the tropes in all the right places. Superhero fans…
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How should we live: how should we care for one another; grow our capabilities to work, to learn, to love and fully realise our potential? This exciting and ambitious book shows how we can re-design the welfare state for this century. A challenging read for civil servants and policy makers. When old institutions and systems don't produce the results needed, just how radical are we prepared to…
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I like quoting people's Tweets in my blog posts. But, sometimes, people delete their Tweets. This blog post examines two questions. How to preserve Tweets in blog posts that they are still readable even after the user deletes them. Whether this is morally acceptable behaviour. Let's tackle the easy question first. Preserving Tweets Using the WordPress OEmbed feature, I can just paste in a…
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A literary fantasy about love, music and sorcery, set against the background of Mexico City, finalist for the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst and Aurora awards. The only way I can describe this book is that it's the movie "The Craft" crossed with Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity". At times it gets bogged down in the name dropping of musicians and their albums. I get that - for a certain…
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I'm doing an MSc Apprenticeship! As part of my desire to work in the open, these are (semi-regular) weeknotes about what I've done / learned / achieved. I tend to be grumpy and curmudgeonly when faced with something I don't understand - or when I suspect I won't be good at an activity. So read the following with that in mind. I've spent the last few weeks working through the pre-course…
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(For the new reader, there is a famous essay called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. It has since spawned a long list of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About....) Everyone has fingerprints! The BBC has a grim tale of a family with a genetic mutation which means they have no fingerprints. It details the issues they have getting official ID. In 2010, fingerprints became mandatory for…
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What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? Billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? A building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. A lightweight and charming book looking at the mathematical mistakes which have…
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