Seven Years On Mastodon


Cartoon of a tusked mastodon holding a phone.

I remember seeing the original "A new decentralized microblogging platform" on HackerNews back in October 2016. A few weeks later, I joined - becoming the 7,112th user. As the years went on, my use of it waxed and waned. I started cross-posting to both Mastodon and Twitter. Gradually, I started spending more time on the […]

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An open(ish) redirect on Mastodon


Cartoon of a tusked mastodon holding a phone.

I've responsibly disclosed a small security issue with Mastodon (GHSA-8982-p7pm-7mqw). It allows a sufficiently determined attacker to use any Mastodon instance to redirect unwary users to a malicious site. What do you think happens if you visit: https://mastodon.social/@PasswordReset/111285045683598517/admin? If you aren't logged in to that instance, it will redirect you to a 3rd party site. […]

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Book Review: The Twilight of the British Empire - British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the Middle East, 1948–63 by Chikara Hashimoto


Book Cover featuring Big Ben against a red background.

As the Middle-East convulses in yet another bloody war, and with no end in sight to the barbarity, we're all looking for a way to understand the horrors unfolding. So I went searching in the past. What set the seeds of today's conflict and was there any way to prevent it? This is a dispassionate […]

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Gadget Review: Plugable USB-C Voltage & Amperage Meter (240W)


All USB-C cables are equal. But some, as the saying goes, are more equal than others. This little gadget from Plugable is a fantastic bit of kit. Plug your USB-C power supply into one end of the gadget, plug the gadget in to your laptop, phone, or any other USB-C device. Watch the screen to […]

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Book Review: Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick


Book cover.

Imagine a world with inter-city rockets, where tourists still use film cameras. Where self-driving trucks sport a wide array of sensor apparatus and record all their data onto miles of magnetic tape. Where the latest Androids are life-like and can perfectly clone a dead man's speech, yet are powered by punch-cards. People make video calls […]

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CSS only colour-scheme selector - no JS required


A light website with a photo of a kitten.

Yesterday I wrote about a lazy way to implement a manual dark mode chooser. Today I'll show you a slightly more sensible way to do it. It just uses CSS, no need for JavaScript. Here's a scrap of HTML which present a dropdown for a user to choose their colour scheme: <select id="colour-mode"> <option value="">Theme […]

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Laziest Possible Dark-Mode Toggle - Using :has() and invert()


A dark website with a photo of a kitten.

I'm not saying this is a good way to make a dark mode website. I'm not even saying it's a sensible way to do dark mode. But I'm pretty sure this is the laziest way of getting dark mode on your site. And it is all done with less than a handful of CSS rules. […]

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Converting MoneyDashboard's export file to a CSV - for Firefly III and others


Logo of the Python programming language.

As I mentioned last week, MoneyDashboard is shutting down. They are good enough to provide a JSON export of all your previous transactions. It is full of entries like this: { "Account": "My Mastercard", "Date": "2020-02-24T00:00:00Z", "CurrentDescription": null, "OriginalDescription": "SUMUP *Pizza palace, London, W1", "Amount": -12.34, "L1Tag": "Eating Out", "L2Tag": "Pizza", "L3Tag": "" }, { […]

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New Outlook doesn't unhide your taskbar - two quick fixes


Product shot of the new Outlook for Windows.

I quite like the new Outlook for Windows. But it has a couple of annoying bugs. One of which is, when it is maximised it doesn't let you unhide your bottom task bar. I've set up Windows so the taskbar disappears whenever my cursor isn't at the bottom of the screen. When my mouse touches […]

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Free Open Banking API using Nordigen / GoCardless


Screenshot from GoCardless. 1. Test with your own data See how the product flow would look like for your users and what data is available 2. Set up the API Follow our documentation to set up the API and start collecting bank account data 3. Customise the user interface Pay as you go Make the user agreement flow for your customers to match your brand 4. Ready to go live? Need help and advice to set up faster?

A few weeks ago I was moaning about there being no OpenBanking API for personal use. Thankfully, I was wrong! As pointed out by Dave a company called Nordigen was set up to provide a free Open Banking service. It was quickly bought by GoCardless who said: We believe access to open banking data should […]

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