This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause this? I maintain several Amazon Wishlists® of things I want to buy. One of those is for presents I might want to buy my wife - and it is set to private. If you want to buy me a prese…
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Inspired by John Hoare at the Dirty Feed blog - I've asked the British Library to assign my blog an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). An ISSN is an 8-digit code used to identify newspapers, journals, magazines and periodicals of all kinds and on all media–print and electronic. Why? Shut up. OK. It turns out that lots of people cite my blog in academic papers - so I wanted to make it slightly easier for scholars of the future to use metadata to trace my vast influence on Human …
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Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice. In this powerful new…
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Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organisation was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story. From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, …
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The CSS property -webkit-text-stroke is a curious beastie. MDN gives a big scary warning saying "Non-standard: This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web." And yet, it works everywhere. All modern browsers support it. Except on Emoji. Here's how it work. -webkit-text-stroke: pink 1px; draws a pink outline around text. This has a pink outline! Nifty! But what happens if you apply to emoji? Smile 😁, Star ⭐, Melon 🍈 Nothing…
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Twitter can be amazing sometimes... I was reading about "L'Inconnue de la Seine". The face of a young woman found drowned in the river Seine in the 1800s. Her death mask was enormously popular - with copies of it appearing all over the world. Her smile was compared to the Mona Lisa and her face decorated the popular salons of the day. Her death mask was even the basis for the first "CPR Doll". Her death has helped save more lives than anyone can possibly count. There are thousands of…
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This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the lasting impact of war, and of his family's struggle to forge a new future. And it serves as a doorway into parts of Little Dog's life his mother has never known - episodes of bewilderment, fear and passion - all the while moving closer to an unforgettable revelation. I hated…
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I've recently launched TweeView - a new way to visualise Twitter conversation threads in 2D and 3D. Sadly, I don't have a Virtual Reality system - feel free to buy me one! - but I have the next best thing. A web browser! Demo! Using the awesome power of A-Frame, here's a demo of how to view a conversation object as AR. Play! You can play with it yourself at TweeView.ml/ar. You will need to download this AR target image. It works best printed onto matt white paper, then mounted on card. …
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I run lots of automated Twitter accounts - "bots" in common parlance. But there's no way for people to know that these are automated accounts. This leads to slightly odd situations where people try to have conversations with them. Colours by @edent@RGB_Colours Automated"Dark Slate Blue"#483d8b pic.x.com/vi2novdlgr❤️ 54💬 0🔁 1505:30 - Tue 24 August 2021waaaaahat @ Spoutible@waaaaahatReplying to @RGB_Colours@RGB_Colours It sure looks like a shade of purple to me. 🤔❤️ 0💬 0🔁 005:40 - Tue 24 August…
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Scratching my own itch. Here's how to make a "beta" ribbon in CSS. Place this HTML at the end of your document: <hr id="beta" aria-label="Warning this page is a beta."> (Doesn't have to be <hr> - use whatever makes sense in your design.) Then, add this CSS: #beta { float: left; top: 1.5em; left: -3em; position: absolute; /* or fixed if you want it to always be visible */ transform: rotate(-45deg); background: red; color: white; font-weight: bold; …
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Magic is forbidden in Myrsina, along with various other abominations, such as girls doing maths. This is bad news for Gretel Mudd, who doesn’t perform magic, but does know a lot of maths. When the sinister masked Huntsmen accuse Gretel of witchcraft, she is forced to flee into the neighbouring Darkwood, where witches and monsters dwell. There, she happens upon Buttercup, a witch who can’t help turning things into gingerbread, Jack Trott, who can make plants grow at will, the White …
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Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it. In Bias Interrupted, Joan C. Williams shows how it's done, and reassuringly, how easy it is to get …
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