The all-knowing sage Douglas Adams had this to say about technology: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against th…
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Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol is, by some measure, the most popular way for computers to talk to each other on the Internet. Generally speaking, clients (like browsers) talk to servers using a set number of HTTP "verbs". This tells the server what sort of thing the client is trying to do. The two most popular verbs are probably POST - which lets you send data to a server - and GET - which lets…
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How do you fairly split a country into electoral subdivisions? This is a difficult problem. Whatever you choose, you'll piss off someone. A politician will be annoyed that their loyal voters are no longer in their district. And voters will be annoyed that they're now lumped in with people from the wrong side of the tracks. This is a very human problem. So let's ignore all the human aspects and…
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I'm concerned about the longevity of the domains I register. I want my domains to be available for as long as possible. But it seems that every year prices rise - and the discount often provided for a new domain rarely continues into subsequent years. So I recently started renewing them for as long as possible. It turns out that most domains can be registered for a maximum of 10 years. A…
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I'm just getting started with the Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook Meta. It is amazing. OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch. What Government services could / should be run in the Metaverse? Obviously, the answer is "none". Sure, you could create a virtual job centre, housing office, or DMV…
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Skip to instructions I bought a Meta Quest 2 second hand from a child who was bored of it. The Quest was in excellent condition but, after a few days use, it became clear that the physical volume up key was broken. There are lots of tips and trips for fixing this. One of which is factory resetting. I turned off the Quest, held volume down and power, and got into the factory reset screen. In…
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11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But apps were the hip "new" thing, apparently. And there were a lot of people who…
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Welcome to my shop! We have everything that you want to buy. We accept cash, cards, and any discount coupons or vouchers from any other shop! Got a 10% off with Amazon? We'll take it! Buy 1 get 3 free from CostCo? Roll right up! Free TV with every HDMI cable purchased from Fred's Electronics Warehouse? Give it here! Does that sound likely? Stores normally accept manufacturer discounts quite…
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my final assignment! It's from the PP2 module - where I take some CPD related to my profession. I picked Blockchain. Because I hate myself. I've blogged about the course itself. The middle two parts of this paper are about that - why I chose it and how I put it …
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A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to < to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search for ... returned no results</h2> And, somehow, the parser was g…
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I'm playing with the Oculus Quest 2. It's quite good fun. I was wandering around the International Space Station, delighting in being unshackled from gravity's harsh bonds. I came to the cupola observation module and it was so beautiful that my face broke into an involuntary smile. And it hurt. The current range of VR headsets have to be strapped tight to your face. In order to prevent your eyes …
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I've been a vegetarian since the turn of the century. I always felt like I should probably be vegan but, you know, cheese is delicious. Then, without warning, my body decided that producing the human lactase enzyme was for losers. Stupid body! No more cheese for me 😭 The UK has come on leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. When I first became a salad-aficionado, the vegetarian options in most r…
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