By @edent · games · 15 comments · 750 words · read ~369 times.
I was looking to buy the latest Zelda game for my wife as a present (Shhh! Don't tell her!) and it was SIXTY BLOODY QUID! For a video game! That seems extortionate. I remember, when I were a lad, video games cost... wait? Do I remember? Or is it just rose tinted glasses? I remember […]
Continue reading →By @edent · CyberSecurity o2 Responsible Disclosure telefonica · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~380 times.
A few weeks ago, I received a billing email from my phone provider O20. While glancing at it, I noticed all the images were broken. Viewing the source of the email showed that they were all coming from http:// mcsaatchi-email-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/o2/... What happens if we visit that domain? Ah, the dreaded "The specified bucket does not […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI · 4 comments · 500 words · read ~8,699 times.
One of the things about AI is that it is brilliant at fooling us into seeing what we want to see. That's even more true when you're an investor who has poured millions into it. The journalist Martin Bryant has posted what Bing's A.I appears to know about him: My opinion of him is that […]
Continue reading →By @edent · a11y accessibility css HTML · 1 comment · 400 words · read ~995 times.
Every day is a school day. I'd recently seen a post about highlighting images without alt text. That got me thinking. Is it possible to style alt text? Yes. Yes it is. And it's pretty simple. Well, OK, it's CSS, so simple is a relative term! Let's take a broken image like <img src="http://example.com/bigfoot.jpg" alt="The […]
Continue reading →By @edent · technology · 6 comments · 200 words · read ~391 times.
Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them! This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing - calls, texts, and..." And... […]
Continue reading →By @edent · signal url · 5 comments · 350 words · read ~1,011 times.
A few years ago, I idly wondered "Whatever happened to URI Schemes?". Older communications protocols didn't rely on http. You can use mailto:me@example.com to send email, sms:+447700900123 to send a text message, and skype:terence.eden to use Skype. There are dozens of these sorts of protocols. But modern apps seem to prefer making everything an https: […]
Continue reading →By @edent · blogging meta · 8 comments · 300 words · read ~307 times.
Jon Hicks has a lovely blog post about his site's design. In it, he briefly touches on something I find interesting: Blogging like it's 1972 I also finally realised that there's nothing stopping me from adding journal posts dated from before I started blogging. So I'm going to start adding key life moments as much […]
Continue reading →By @edent · academia MSc pdf url · 12 comments · 450 words · read ~293 times.
There's a new pre-print paper called Pinpointing the problem: Providing page numbers for citations as a crucial part of open science by Leon Y. Xiao and Nick Ballou. It's a short, easily understandable paper, and well worth a read. I think I disagree with nearly all of its conclusions! The main point, I agree with. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · css demo encryption HTML5 · 9 comments · 500 words · read ~8,479 times.
I recently saw Robin Moisson's method of password protecting a statically served HTML page. It's quite neat! But it does rely on JavaScript. That got me wondering if there was a way to encrypt a static page only using CSS? And... I think I've done it! I'll warn you now, this is a deeply stupid […]
Continue reading →By @edent · emoticons history shakespeare · 600 words · read ~227 times.
Exactly a decade ago, I wrote about how Shakespeare invented the emoticon. Nestled deep in "Winter's Tale" is the first recorded use of the typographic smilie :) As I discussed, Sir Smile's smile appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th folios. One hundred years after the 4th folio was printed, the smile vanished. The […]
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