As of today, I've quit. I started working full time before going to university. I worked part-time during my studies. Graduated into a crappy job. Got a place on a prestigious grad scheme. Worked my way up through the public and private sector. Start-ups and Ministries of State. Constantly working. Not any more! Yesterday was my last day in the office. Laptop and lanyard handed back.…
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Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves" is one of those massive, crushing, momentous, century-spanning and era-defining hard sci-fi novels. It starts with the immortal line "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." Classic! It dives into a world plagued with Kessler syndrome and the grimly inevitable consequences for the future of humanity. Scalzi's latest book is cheesy homage -…
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Because I'm dead fancy and know lots of mega-important people, I occasionally get to go to swanky places. A few weeks ago, I was invited to the House of Lords for a high-powered business meeting about important stuff. The best meetings take place in opulent surroundings, so we adjourned to The Woolsack - a bar nestled deep within the Lords. As a prolific user of Untappd - the social network for …
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This is a real mixed bag of a book. Some of it is outrageously fun stories of real-life diplomacy and derring-do, and other parts are tediously basic information with plenty of padding. I suppose it's helpful for the uninitiated to understand the lay of the land but, when mixed with the frequent name-dropping, comes across as one of those senior leaders who is desperate to prove they are still…
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Back in 2022, I wrote this rather grumpy post on Mastodon, the federated social media platform. @Edent@mastodon.socialTerence EdenMastodon enforces a "noreferrer" on all external links.I have mixed feelings about that.As a blogger, I want to see *where* visitors are coming from. I also like to see (and sometimes join in) with the conversations they're having.But, I get that people want privacy…
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My long journey to replace my teeth is (I hope) at an end. Last week, my lovely dentist fitted my two custom-made teeth. After all the months of drilling, screwing, photographing, x-raying, and prodding, the last fitting was little more than gluing. I now have two colour-matched gnashers installed in my bonce. And all my brain can do is scream… ARGH! THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH! The first f…
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I take great delight in seeing people reply to my blog posts. I use WebMentions to collect replies from social media and other sites. But which of my posts has the most comments? Here's a snipped to stick in your functions.php file. It allows you to add ?comment-order to any WordPress URl and have the posts with the most comments on top. // Add ordering by comments add_action( 'pre_get_posts', …
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A few weeks ago, I got a chance to speak truth to power. I used my WordPress.org account to sign in to the official WordPress.org Slack where the various WordPress dramas were being discussed. After a brief chat about the latest shenanigans, I publicly replied to the CEO: Here's a link to the full exchange There was no reply forthcoming - although, as you can see, my message gathered a fair…
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This has been a tough year - I've found it hard to get back in to reading. A few books knocked me off my stride and the lack of a commute meant less downtime for reading. Nevertheless, 46 books isn't too bad! Of note, for the first time in ages I read a couple of paper books! Like some kind of old-fashioned cave-man! Myself When Young from 1938 is astounding. If you want to understand…
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This is so fucking stupid. There is no way to update the logo of a custom social connection on Auth0 without using the command line. On literally every other service I've used, there's a little box to upload a logo. But Okta have a funny idea of what developers want. And, to make matters worse, their documentation contains an error! They don't listen to community requests or take bug reports,…
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Let's say you have a website - your_website.tld - and you want people to log in to it using their Mastodon account. For a traditional social-media site like Twitter or Facebook, you would create an OAuth app on the service that you want. But there are hundreds of Mastodon servers. So you need to create a new app for each one. That sounds hard, but it isn't. Well… not too hard. Here's some c…
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When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary in 1857, I'm not sure if he imagined a cast of four playing every character, bouncing around the stage, performing magic, and reacting to non-diagetic sound. I cannot overemphasise how silly this production is! It is a joyful explosion of madcap mayhem, with dozens of costume changes per minute, and a healthy disregard for the fourth wall. I'm unfamiliar with…
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