As part of our quest to make our house more efficient, we've installed solar panels, a battery, insulation, and all the other stuff you're supposed to do. The next step is working out if we can reduce our dependency on gas. Octopus Energy (join and we both get £50!) offered to send an engineer around for free to assess our property for suitability for an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP). The …
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As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will get you: ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: …
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How do you show two languages simultaneously in HTML? If you want to show text in a foreign language, the markup is simple: <html lang="en-GB"> ... As Caesar said: <i lang="la">veni vidi vici</i> That says the page is in British English (en-GB) but the specific phrase is in Latin (la). But how can you offer an in-text translation of that phrase into the page's native language? Here are a few …
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About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF relationships were defined in terms of positive sentiment. There wasn't (and still…
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I was asked to help create some pseudo-NFT style avatars for Cambridge Digital Humanities' Faust Shop project. Something with vaguely the same æsthetic as those daft "Crypto Punks". You can see it in action partway through this TikTok video. @cambridgeuniversity Visit the #Faust Shop and see what happens when you make a deal with your digital double. #Devil #EduTok #Cambridge #Performance …
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Shamir's Secret Sharing (henceforth "SSS") is clever. Far too clever for most people to understand - but let's give it a go. Suppose you have a super-secure password for a Really Important Thing. Th15IsMyP4s5w0rd!123 You can remember this - because you're awesome. But it might be a good idea to share the password with someone else, just in case. Of course, if you share it with one person,…
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I fucking loved my first visit to #EMFcamp. After two years of lockdown, I was over-excited at the chance to be with all my friends in a field this year. I was over-excited about doing a talk about my beloved solar panels. I was over-excited about sleeping in a goddamned camper-van! I was even - sadly - excited at seeing my name broadcast on TELETEXT! Photograph © Skylar MacDonald 2022. All …
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You remember that bit in Star Wars where the Rebels find the flaw in the Death Star plans and then completely fail to exploit it? Yeah, that's why they don't make movies about inept hackers like me… Anyway, the website https://play.starwars.com/html5/starwars_crawlcreator/ allows users to create their own "Star Wars" style crawl. It's a fun little site - but it has a few flaws. Whenever you l…
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The British town of Scunthorpe is a delightful place to visit. It is a perfectly normal town, with just one tiny problem. Its name is often unfairly redacted online because it contains a "rude" word. See if you can spot it… This sort of overreach is generally known as the Scunthorpe Problem. I ran into this issue on a kid-friendly site from a major brand. I had the temerity to type a perfectly n…
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This is a delightfully funny movie - albeit riddled with implausibilities. It is tender in all the right places, silly where it needs to be, and ruthless in its exploration into the characters' psyches. Leo Grande is the male equivalent of the Manic-Dream-Pixie-Girl trope. But that's exactly what his character is paid to be. He isn't merely a one-dimensional sex-object - the client needs more…
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These are the facts: throughout history human beings have had sex. Sexual culture did not begin in the sixties. It has always been celebrated, needed, wanted and desired part of what it means to be human. So: what can learn by looking at the sexual lives of our ancestors? What does it tell us about our attitudes and worries today, and how can the past teach us a better way of looking forward?I …
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As recommended to me by a comment on my blog. This is ridiculous fun from start to finish. It's a John Grisham-style courtroom drama. Only the defendant is an alien. Literally a multi-limbed beast from a dozen light-years away. That's it. That's the whole plot. And it works wonderfully. Nothing wrong with a bit of good clean sci-fi fun. It lightly explores racism - using the aliens as a proxy…
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