My Linux laptop used to suspend perfectly. I'd close the lid and it would go to sleep. Open it up, it would spring to life - presenting me with a password screen. But, some time in the last few months, it has stopped doing that. If I close the lid, it keeps running. This is unhelpful. If I manually run the suspend command - systemctl suspend - the laptop blanks the screen then immediately…
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Some of my best friends are designers. But I think we can all agree that - however well-meaning - they can be a little obsessive. Whether it is fretting over tiny details, or trying to align to a grid which doesn't exist, or spending time removing useful affordances in the name of æsthetics - they always find a way to make something prettier at the expense of usability. Google used to have some …
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The great thing about getting older is that the popular culture of your youth is repackaged and sold back to you with increasing urgency. Yes, I want that Lego set I couldn't afford as a kid. Why, of course I want to watch a reboot of Frasier! Another few Ghostbusters movies? I'm in! Brendan Murphy has prepared a dose of 100% pure 90's nostalgia and wishes to inject it into your eyeballs. Ahhh!…
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Several years ago, at the start of the pandemic, I tried using Nintendo's Ring Fit as an exercise method. It didn't last long. I felt I was spending too much time earning in-game currency, making choices on what to spend it on, crafting, managing inventory, choosing power-ups, and all sorts of other tedious nonsense. In short, I constantly felt like I was working rather than working out. If…
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This is the 3,000th blog post I've published on this site! Bloody hell! I first started a blog on Blogger.com in 2004 - twenty years ago. Like all blogs, I managed half a dozen posts before I forgot about it. Cut to 2007 and I decided to launch shkspr.mobi as a weird site dedicated to rendering Shakespeare's plays in txt spk. Judging by Archive.org I was still using Blogger. By 2008 I was…
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Infrastructure is impossible. You have to wrangle thousands of people over dozens of months, with a budget of millions, to deliver something made of hundreds of plans, which has to fit seamlessly into the world. How does any infrastructure get built? It mostly doesn't. This is the terrifying true story of all the different ways big projects fail. If you've ever been part of a big IT project,…
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