Book Review: The Cabinet - Un-su Kim / 캐비닛 - 김언수


A digital chameleon.

The Cabinet is a story about the documents that record these symptomers and the man who manages the documents in Cabinet 13. This seemingly ordinary, old cabinet is filled with stories that are peculiar, strange, eye-pop- ping, disgusting, enraging, and touching. However, the fast changing world is also full of all sorts of unbelievable things. […]

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Best Bulk Data PAYG SIMs in the UK


The Doctor on the phone.

I want to buy a big chunk of data and use it until it runs out. I'm not interested in a contract. I don't want a bundle of phone calls, SMS, or ringtones. Just give me DATA that lasts for as long as possible. Here's the best data deals that I could find. Stick them […]

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Book Review: The Art of Statistics - Learning from Data by David Spiegelhalter


Book cover with many dots on it.

Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science. Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the […]

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To download this page, click here


The HTML5 Logo.

💾 Download this page! What's going on behind the scenes? Here's the code. Note - it doesn't require thousands of imported NPM libraries, a complex Docker set-up, or any AI-on-the-blockchain. <a href="" download="this.html">Download this page</a> HTML 5 introduced a new attribute for the anchor element - download. Rather than having to set your server up […]

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Responsible Disclosure: [REDACTED] XSS


A pop-up on a website. The HTML code shows the data has been injected.

Legacy websites are a constant source of vulnerabilities. In a fit of excitement, a team commissions a service and then never bothers updating it. Quite often the original owners leave the business and there's no-one left who remembers that the service exists. So it sits there, vulnerable, for years. The [REDACTED] website had a subdomain […]

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Giving Blood - Part Deux


Me giving blood.

Two years ago, I gave my first blood donation. Due to a combination of moving house, and the whole pandemic thing, I've not been able to donate again until now. It was quick - in and out in 90 minutes. And didn't hurt a bit. Well, OK, a bit. But they give you as much […]

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VR for Statistics


A basic bar chart - with four columns. The tallest is about the height of the screen.

I'm not a big fan of Virtual Reality. I find it claustrophobic and impractical for most uses. There are some areas which it does impress though. Scale. Half-a-dozen years ago - during one of VR's periodic hype-phases - an employer asked me and my team to "do something interesting" with all the expensive VR kit […]

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Run Internet Explorer 5 in your browser!


About screen for IE 5.

This is a slow, and very silly, way to experience an ancient browser. I'm aware that you could spin up a virtual machine, or pay for a browser testing service. But there's something nice about running a browser in a browser. Like wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Using Copy's v86 it's possible to […]

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Book Review: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon


Book cover with a big red cross on it.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to […]

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Reprojecting Satellite Maps


South up satellite photo.

Regular readers know, I'm Creating an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. I've already had some success using an existing NZ Centric, Equal Earth Map. And I've programmatically created a correctly projected map with R. But is it possible to do this with Satellite imagery? YES! Install gdal For this to work, you'll need […]

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