The Future of the Web is VNC


The HTML5 Logo.

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 […]

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Theatre Review: Sh!t Faced Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing


Title graphic for Shit-Faced Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again!0 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 […]

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Shakespeare Serif - an experimental font based on the First Folio


Collection of letters - each is vertically centred.

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 […]

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Should you embed alt text inside image metadata?


Screenshot showing technical details of the metadata on a photo. It contains a copyright notice.

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. […]

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Big Numbers Are Difficult To Contextualise


A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

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 […]

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Theatre Review: Shakespeare in the Garden's Romeo and Juliet


Poster for Romeo and Juliet. The outlines of two lovers kiss. The necks form the silhouette of a heart.

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 […]

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Bryan Adams lied to you


A white plastic desktop phone with QWERTY keyboard and a video screen.

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 […]

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Book Review: Design Justice - Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock


Book cover for Design Justice.

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 […]

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Please don't give away your Twitter API keys to Cloudinary


Hi Terence, We don't have a way for customers to configure this on their own currently. Our team will handle the configurations for you. Here are the details needed for us to do the required changes: API Key and Secret. Access Token and Secret.Best Regards

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. […]

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Let's track footballers' heart rates!!


Photo of a football match. The striker's BPM is a high 150, the goalie a more leisurely 75. Original photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonker/8603265115/

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 […]

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