There's an incredibly distressing story in the BBC about a vulnerable elderly man who was conned out of his life savings. Fraud victim gets surprise £153,000 refund despite rules BBC News In the story, the heartless bank refused to refund the fraud victim due to an absurd technicality - the money was sent to a foreign account rather than a UK account. Once again, big business bending the rules in order to protect their profits from a defenceless pensioner. Only after protests did they …
Continue reading →
This is a fluffy and breezy wander through some of the oddities thrown up be evolution. It's also well illustrated and, luckily, most of the picture suit eInk very well. Of great interest to me were the tantalising asides - for example, a formerly enslaved man taught Darwin the art of taxidermy although very little is known about him. The book is full of delightfully distracting details like that. Along with extensive quoting from Darwin, it really helps to contextualise the history of our…
Continue reading →
A few months ago, I had a lovely rambly chat with Harry Keir Hughes about the nature of data, transparency, and how it can tie into the Net Zero agenda. Harry and his team have taken my pontifications and placed them in the very swanky Digital Radar Report. The full report quotes lots of people - not just me! - and is mostly about "Live data" i.e. data that is transparent, readily accessible, and shared widely – is a prerequisite for innovative, sustainable, and human-centric enterprises. …
Continue reading →
The Mozilla VPN service is great, but it doesn't work using the CLI if you have a "headless" server. After a bit of faffing about, I got it working. I suffered so you don't have to. Get an account Sign up and use code MOZILLA20 for a cheeky 20% discount! Get a token in the browser To start with, you'll need to get an authentication token. This requires you to be on a machine which can run a modern browser like Firefox or Chrome. On a computer with a GUI, download MozWire. This is an…
Continue reading →
How would you read this sentence out aloud? "In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ..." Most people with a grasp of the interplay between English and Latin would say "In Hamlet, Act four, scene nine". And they'd be right! But screen-readers - computer programs which convert text into speech - often get this wrong. Why? Well, because I didn't just type "Uppercase Letter i, Uppercase Letter v". Instead, I used the Unicode symbol for the Roman numeral 4 - Ⅳ. And, it turns out, lots of screen-readers have …
Continue reading →
I've recently completed my Level 7 Apprenticeship. One of the more onerous tasks was completing the portfolio. This document was the source of much stress and confusion with our cohort. This blog post attempts to demystify it and provides a template to make it easy to complete. My main piece of advice is that you should read the official guidance from the Institute For Apprenticeships. If your training provider or Skills Coach tells you something which contradicts the Institute's advice -…
Continue reading →
I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS. As I've mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it does have this to say about the secret: The secret parameter is an arbitrary key value encoded in Base32 according to RFC 3548. The Base32 alphabet is pretty simple. The upper-case letters A - Z, and the numbers 3 - …
Continue reading →
The best gadget I got in lockdown was a set of motion activated lights. They have no user interface. I walk by them in the dark and they turn on. Midnight piss? No fumbling for a light switch, no shouting to a digital assistant, no logging in to an app. Simple. I love it. It got me thinking about other things which have "zero interfaces". Once they're set up, they just keep quietly working. The most obvious is a thermostat. If set right, it keeps the heating off in summer and on in winter. …
Continue reading →
Exactly two years ago to the day, I reported a weird little emoji bug with Bitwarden. Let's say you want a password of: ✅🐎🔋📎 (As close as possible to Correct Horse Battery Staple) That works. Emoji are stored and retrieved correctly. You can use them with any system which supports them. But you can't view them. Here's what it looks like if you try to see your password using the Bitwarden Android app: Yup - a bunch of emoji are replaced with ����. Ew. Now, in fairness, this bug was quick…
Continue reading →
As I've discussed previously, I'm helping a collector who has acquired loads of mobile phones used in Doctor Who. Today's edition - The Poisoned Sky. As the Sontarans choke the Earth, the Doctor and UNIT battle to keep both Martha and Donna alive. A large plot point is Evil Clone Martha stealing a UNIT PDA and using it to HACK THE MAINFRAME. At various times she prevents missiles being launched: And disrupts UNIT's abilities to defeat the Sontaran menace: That original PDA is now…
Continue reading →
Many years ago, I was involved in student politics. It was a great way to understand the fundamental disconnect between the ways different people see the world. I remember having a blazing row high-spirited discussion with someone about the way I thought about society. In a fit of rage an attempt to provide clarity, I tried using a metaphor: "Didn't your mother ever tell you to share your toys?" I asked. He looked at me, baffled. "No..." he said, cautiously. "We each had enough toys." That …
Continue reading →
I had a weird experience in a previous job. As it is long in the past, I thought now was a good time to blog about it. I worked in a hip office. Everyone was trendy and right-on. It was a heavily female dominated industry and the office politics were biased towards intersectional feminism. Which I regarded as a good thing. I'd rather have a natter about reproductive justice than who won the football last night. The office also had a swear jar. Say a word on the banned list, put a quid in the…
Continue reading →
