I recently watched a brilliant documentary about the building of London's CrossRail system. It discussed many of the challenges involved with a "mega project" - and gave a little insight into what went wrong during construction. What struck me though, was how simple it seems to build an underground railway! Dig some tunnels Lay some tracks Done I mean, that's all it is when you get down to it, right? But, of course, even something as basic as digging a tunnel is hard. Sure, even the…
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After my blog post about recovering my accounts after a disaster, I followed the most repeated advice: Get two YubiKeys Associate them both with your accounts Keep one off-site in a safe location OK, done! My wife and I spend a very boring evening going through every single account we have which supports FIDO tokens with WebAuthN - about a dozen in total. We manually paired two keys each. We put our main key on our keyrings, then drove out to the woods and buried our spares in a a…
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![I have to apologise for some delay in answering your obliging favor, in which you did me the honour of suggesting to me the manufacture of a [mechanical] Lawyer's Clerk. After much consideration, I regret that I have found it impossible to produce an article which should be satisfactory to myself, and to the profession. I have, however, been completely successful in the production of a New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer—adapted to all styles, and all subjects; pointed, pathetic, historic, silver-fork, and Minerva. I do not hesitate to lay before you a few of the flattering testimonials to its efficacy, which I have already received from those most competent to judge.](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/punch-fs8.png)
The Zeitgeist's newest toy is OpenAI's Chat Platform. So I asked it "Could you write a limerick about a man from Woking?" Sure, here's a limerick about a man from Woking: There once was a man from Woking Whose life was quite dull and uneventful He worked at the bank And liked to walk by the tank But never went out and got adventurous Note: Woking is a town in the county of Surrey, England. It is located approximately 30 miles southwest of London. The town is known for its tank…
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You know how it is, you buy one silly domain name and then you get an idea for loads more! A few weeks ago, I got https://⏻.ga/ - I think I'm the first person to get a domain name which uses a glyph from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block. How exciting! And that got me wondering… what other abuses of the Punycode algorithm can I whack into DNS? Well, here's some I whipped up using FreeNom - they offer free domain names on the .ga TLD (and a few others) and are very liberal in accepting P…
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This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: This means readers of my post can see where it has been mentioned around the web. They can read your article after reading mine. Nice! I've also set up a "bridge" service which looks for people posting comments about my work on social media. For example, if you…
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I do not care for the game of Rugby. After many wet and cold days on the school sports field, I had any latent enthusiasm for it beaten out of me. There is nothing you or anyone else can say which will convince me to take an interest in it. You may feel the same way about a specific sport, or the Great British Bake Off, or Linux. That's fine. We're all different. This can be a problem on social media. You might be following someone for their insightful takes on RuPaul's Drag Race but can't…
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This is a short piece of mostly fiction. It looks at the secret life of data and algorithms. Enjoy! Data Becomes Her I never knew my mother. OK, no one ever really knows their mum. But I never even got to meet mine. She made it clear at the hospital that she'd smother me to death if she was ever left alone with a mewling baby. Looking back, I think I might have preferred that fate. I never tried contacting her in my teens - even when things got really bad. I sometimes typed her name into…
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