A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no…
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Modern Android cameras can take "Motion Photos". They capture a few seconds of video from before and after you hit the shutter button. You can then either select the bit of the photo where no-one is blinking, or you can send the whole thing as a little movie. Some apps (like WhatsApp) will play the motion photo when the image is selected, others will just show a static image. So how do you…
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This is delightful whimsy wrapped up in a sensible chuckle. The sort of gigglesome nonsense that washes over you and worms its way into your ears. There's a hint of caper, a soupçon of cosy crime, and a sprinkling of a love story. And then there's a massive tonal shift where it all becomes rather menacing and a bit bleak. Bob Mortimer's prose, pacing, and peculiarities are smashing. This is …
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I like using microdata within my HTML to provide semantic metadata. One of my pages had this scrap of code on it: <time itemprop="datePublished" itemscope datetime="2025-06-09T11:27:06+01:00">9 June 2025 11:27</time> The Google Search Console was throwing this error: I was fairly sure that was a valid ISO 8601 string. It certainly matched the description in the Google…
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My friend Sal has written a book! I was lucky enough to get early access to it. Code, Chips and Control is an in depth look at cyber security. And I do mean in depth - this literally starts at the silicon wafer level! It isn't just about the trivial logic bugs which so often get exploited; this goes into the geopolitics of supply chains, the physics of satellite hackings, and the history of…
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I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque, upload it to our site, and we share it with the world. Might sound a bit niche,…
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I read this book while on a long flight to Tokyo. While superficially about Japan, it's more about American anxiety about the relationship between the two countries. The constant undercurrent is an admiration about how Japan played capitalism better than the country which conquered it. There's a momentary diversion at the start of the book to look at how the Meji Restoration changed Japan's…
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At a recent unconference on AI, someone introduced me to the story of a guy who'd tasked an LLM with writing a bedtime story for his daughter. It personalised the tale to include her favourite stuffed toy, whichever cartoon she was obsessing over, and a range of not-too-scary baddies. And all I could think of was "don't you like your child?" Your kid isn't a sophisticated media consumer who…
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One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers" who want to gobble up all the HTML for their inscrutable purposes. The thing is, …
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After reading about a menopausal werewolf (fictional) I decided that it was probably a sensible idea to read up on the reality. Dr Lundy has an inclusive and relaxed tone of writing. She methodically goes through every aspect of the menopause in great detail. The book is sprinkled with humour to lighten what is otherwise an intimidating topic. This is almost solely focussed on the medical…
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I like to visit new countries. I also need to eat in order to survive. As a vegetarian, some countries make that easier than others. I was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was go Interrailing around Europe while maintaining a Vegan / Vegetarian diet. My next adventure was Japan. People told me that it was impossible to be veggie in Japan. That was nonsense. I wouldn't say it was easy, but…
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This book is astonishingly good. A high-flying career woman thinks she's going through the menopause but she isn't. She's becoming a werewolf. That, as it turns out, is more than enough of a premise to drive this book. What I loved was just how well observed the characters are. Our protagonist works in a tech start-up and every character there is someone I've worked with before! I could feel …
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