The good folks at Benfei have sent me another gadget to play about with. This one comes in two parts. The first plugs into an screen's HDMI port, the second beams video from your device's USB-C port across the airwaves. Here's what it looks like: But how does it perform? Plug the HDMI into your TV and its USB-A end into a suitable power source (my TV had one nearby). After a few seconds,…
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Well this is a treat! It is rare to find a pop-science book which does such a good job of actually explaining the science, rather than just using it as a background for storytelling. The Battle of Beams doesn't go too deep into the mechanics and physics, but gives a general overview with just enough detail to keep things interesting. It is also well illustrated (not a given in these sorts of…
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Many years ago, in another lifetime, I was presenting our team's work to a rather senior politician. Here's how I remember it: "We want to provide value for money," I said, "so we propose that running five small pilots of [thing I still can't talk about]. We know there are multiple technologies which could work. But we don't know which one will work best." "How will running something five times …
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This is a stunning book. If some scientists and mathematicians have seen further than others, it is by standing on the mountains of madness. This straddles between being a faithful and fanciful biography of insanity. It is written like a hyperactive friend trying to show you how all the things in the universe connect with each other - while you slowly back away in terror. Are these ghost…
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The "…by Candlelight" concerts have a simple premise - come to a cathedral or church to hear top West End talent sing your favourite singer's songs, backed by a live band. This is a cut above your usual tribute act - they aren't trying to do impressions of the act, they're stamping their own energy onto beloved songs. It works! Mostly. This concert was in a West End theatre so the (electric) c…
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In theory, you should be able to get the base favicon of any domain by calling /favicon.ico - but the reality is somewhat more complex than that. Plenty of sites use a wide variety of semi-standardised images which are usually only discoverable from the site's HTML. There are several services which allow you to get favicons based on a domain. But they all have their problems. Google Exposes…
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Our friends Annie and Dave run the podcast "Will You Still Love It Tomorrow". The premise is great - take a film that you love but you haven't seen for ages, and see if it still holds up. They asked me and Liz to nominate a film to discuss with them. What's something that we loved but last saw 20ish years ago? We suggested The Story of the Weeping Camel. It is my go-to answer when someone asks …
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I've gotten sufficiently annoyed with a trivial problem that I'm preparing to write an IETF RFC. Yeah. That's how ticked off I am! Every site that I sign up for asks me to upload an avatar to represent myself. Whenever I change my photo, I have to log in to a hundred sites and change it there. Perhaps they could all use Gravatar - but that's a centralised service and doesn't work with wildcard…
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Brother Mauro, an older monk, and Nicolo, a young, striving merchant are called by the Pope to traverse the treacherous political, religious, and mercantile terrain of medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire to seek out the powerful Presbyter John, a mysterious king in the Far East who has promised to put his wealth and vast armies to the service of the pope's crusade. I don't understand why…
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There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a website to another. Just like an app!!!! A decade-and-a-half later, and CSS has caught up (mostly). No more JavaScript, just spec-compliant CSS. Well, …
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A few days ago, someone called PixelMelt published a way for Amazon's customers to download their purchased books without DRM. Well… sort of. In their post "How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked" they describe the process of spoofing a web browser, downloading a bunch of JSON files, reconstructing the obfuscated SVGs used to draw individual letters, and running O…
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This is a quick GitHub action to get alerted every time your website is mentioned in a GitHub issue. Doing it manually You can search GitHub for a URl, and sort the results with the newest first, like this: https://github.com/search?q=%22shkspr.mobi%22&type=issues&s=created&o=desc Using the API GitHub has a fairly straightforward API - although it uses slightly different parameters. …
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