Many gallons of digital ink spilled at Google's plans for "Web Environment Integrity" which - depending on who you believe - is either an entirely reasonable proposal to protect users or a devious plan to add DRM to the entire web. (It's the latter, obviously.) We'll never know exactly whether users want this because Google is pathologically adverse to performing or publishing user research. Anyway, I have a solution to all of Google's problems. Forget this notion of untrusted "user agents" …
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Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again! That's a rallying cry I can get behind. Willy wrote for the groundlings - plenty of sex and violence, interspersed with fart jokes and casual xenophobia. When your audience are drunk and violent, you really need to bring your best rhyming couplets. Shitfaced Shakespeare knows its West End audience have had a few refreshments before the show. Their twist is - so has one of the cast members. Take six classically trained thesps, get one of them pissed, proceed…
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Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off on a journey, it is worth seeing if anyone else has tried this before. I found David Pustansky's First Folio Font. There's not much info about it, other than it's based on the 1623 folio. It's a nice font, but missing …
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Not everyone can see the images you post online. They may have vision problems, they may have a slow connection, or they might be using a text-only browser. How can we let them know what the image shows? The answer is alt text. In HTML we can add a snippet of text to aid accessibility. For example <img src="monalisa.jpg" alt="A painting of the Mona Lisa."> Most social networks will let users add alt text to help describe their images. Brilliant! But... People don't always add alt text when…
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Numbers are hard. I don't mean that in a snarky way. It's easy to visualise a bunch of bananas, but it's almost impossible for most people to comprehend how many bananas are shipped around the world each year. It's easy to understand your pay-cheque, but understanding a national budget pales in comparison. So British Gas announced profits of £969 million for the first 6 months of the year. Is that a big number? Yes and no. It's more money than I'll ever have, and it's too big for me to …
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Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in song. Reminding us (in updated English) that we all know what's coming. It had never occurred to me that the rhythm and rhyme of Shakespeare's poetry fits perfectly to music. Now,…
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I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this: It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that…
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This is an interesting - although frustrating at times - book. It asks a pretty big question - how do we embed justice in to the ways we designs apps and services? I couldn't find much to disagree with (although I have the odd quibble) but some of the language it uses is very exclusionary unless you're terminally online in very specific communities. "Undocuqueer", "heteropatriarchy", "LGBTQIATS" - I scuttled off to the glossary more than once to try and understand what was being talked about. …
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My CDN just asked me for all my Twitter API keys... WTF? This would give them complete access to my app's Twitter account, the ability to send and receive messages, and anything else that my API key allows. Giving them - or anyone - the entire set of credentials would be a very bad idea. What's going on? Twitter's slow-motion collapse and hostility to developers is causing a whole bunch of second-order effects. Lots of services let people log in to them using Twitter. It is (was?!) a…
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I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the ability to measure heart-rate and a bunch of other things. They think that athletes and exercisers will be interested in knowing these vital statistics. But they're wondering if…
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The other day, my HP M140w printer stopped working. The day before, it printed fine. This time, nothing. I rebooted, reset, updated, and performed all the modern rituals associated with uncooperative hardware. I logged into to the printer's webserver and clicked around the admin panel. On one page, I found an error message. So, like any self-respecting geek, I ignored what it said and Googled the text. The first result on Google looked hopeful. I clicked on it and, somehow, ended up back on…
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My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and they can pay well in "exposure". But OpenBenches is reaching a tipping point where it is slowly overwhelming us. We've now got nearly 300GB of photos - which means our storage and bandwidth costs are on the high side. …
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