AVIF is the hip new image format. It is born out of video compression technology. Modern video streaming services have a complicated relationship with multiple resolutions. A video is usually encoded several time - for high, medium, and low bandwidths. When you start streaming, your playback device usually picks the lowest quality stream to start with. If it downloads it quickly, then it jumps to the higher resolution. You may have noticed this when the first few seconds of a streaming show…
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Do you like beer? Do you like cider? Would you like to brew your own? Would you like a frustrating experience? Well, gang, do I have a treat for you! This is the Pinter from the Greater Good Fresh Brewing Company. It promises to introduce you to the wonderful world of beer and cider brewing. It is only mildly annoying to use. First up, cost. £75. That's a chunk of change - but it comes with two different brews, each good for 10 pints. That works out at £3.75 per pint - which isn't too s…
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ESPN FC@ESPNFC ESPNFlorentino Perez says we may need to make football matches shorter than 90 minutes 😳 pic.x.com/wvxbifdp5c❤️ 10,860💬 2,676♻️ 009:09 - Tue 20 April 2021 On the face of it, I sort of get it. Viral football clips of sporting prowess (or failures) do Big Numbers™ on social media. Casual fans love them, and even non-fans might watch them. A regular football match is a 2-3 hour commitment to watch - if you include half-time, extra-time, pre- and post-match analysis. True, that's no…
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Maybe it's the weirdness of the weather. Maybe it's another way to pour scorn on politicians. Maybe the steady stream of headlines about fires, floods and droughts is finally starting to get to us. Whatever it is, for more and more of us, climate change is shifting from a shadowy fear in the backs of our minds to something we feel we need to get a handle on. Our exploration of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavour. It…
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From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to…
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As part of my MSc, I'm reading MoneyBall. OK, I just watched the film! Cut me some slack! The basic thesis of the book is this: Our baseball team doesn't have much money to buy new players Which baseball players have the best Statistic X for the lowest price? Buy undervalued players which increase your Stat X The film book is well worth watching reading. What I like about it - and the above scene especially - is that it shows the tension between winning and entertainment. Will anyone…
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This is a two-part blog post about rewriting the rules. I hated playing sports as a teenager quelle surprise. In a vain attempt to get me to love the beautiful game, a PE teacher once made me team captain for a kickabout. My rival? Sporty Dave. Head boy, house captain, and conqueror of puberty. The PE teacher made us pick our teams. I went first and, naturally, chose the weakest of my classmates - Fat Derek. He was overjoyed not to be picked last for once. "You idiot!" whispered Dave. He…
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About a million years ago, my wife's work sent her on a training course optimistically titled "How To Use Excel As A Database." We were both horrified. Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program - but it is categorically not a database! OK, it has rows and columns which sorta look like a database table. And you can put constraints on cells which mimic a schema. And, yes, you can sort and query data. And you can join data across multiple tables. And... you know what...? Excel is a pretty…
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Twitter's trending topics are... inflammatory. Probably deliberately so in order to drive engagement. It's a mix of "who shall we hate today" and lowest-common-denominator "celebrity" gossip. I hate it. There are various ways you can block content on the web - but they usually involve installing a plugin to your browser. Here's a simple hack to remove the sidebar - or, at the very least, make it a lot less annoying. Go to twitter.com/settings/explore Set the location to a city whose…
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(This blog post is going to be UK specific, and biased towards jobs that I've personally done.) How much does it cost to go to work in a physical office? I'm going to try and list all the things I have to pay for just in order to be able to show up. This ignores things I can claim back on expenses (although that's an issue if you don't have sufficient credit access). Commuting is the big one. At one time, I was paying close to £4,000 for a train into work. I've since moved closer to work, …
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(This post written partly to tease my delightful colleague Charles, but also as a way of thinking about user needs.) During a recent Open Data Café, one of the guests made an entirely reasonable point. An API only method of getting data is elitist. Martine Wauben@MHWaubenAlready having my assumptions tested - are APIs elitist? food for thought for me #ODCafe❤️ 3💬 0♻️ 011:44 - Sat 10 April 2021 I'd like to briefly discuss that idea. Downloading a CSV, for example, is simple. CLICK HERE. Done!…
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If you're unfamiliar, security.txt is a proposed Internet standard. The idea is simple, your website hosts a plain text file at /.well-known/security.txt which tells people who your security contacts are, what your vulnerability disclosure policies are, where your PGP key is, etc. Useful! Because it is in draft, people can comment on it to make things better. So I did. I noticed that all the dates in the standard used RFC5322 datetimes. They look like this: Thu, 8 Apr 2021 12:34 +0100 I'm…
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