Here's a little telephony mystery for you - can you find out how much your phone provider charges for 056 calls? (Skip the background and jump to the survey) Background Way back in the mists of time - 2004 - Ofcom decreed that "Voice over Broadband" was going to be the next big thing. VoB (which is like VoIP, but specifically tied to a broadband line) would receive the prefix 056. In that…
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M'colleague Charles has introduced me to the most spectacular phrase - "Time To 200". That's a measurement of the length of time it takes a new user to go from signing up to your API to getting their first HTTP 200 response. Think about the last time you started using a new API... Fill in a tediously long registration form Set up billing in case you go over the free trial limits Wait for a…
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Ven was once a holy man, a keeper of ancient archives. It was his duty to interpret archaic texts, sorting useful knowledge from the heretical ideas of the Burning Age – a time of excess and climate disaster. For in Ven’s world, such material must be closely guarded, so that the ills that led to that cataclysmic era can never be repeated. But when the revolutionary Brotherhood approaches Ven, pr…
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The UK is facing an epidemic of SMS fraud. Scammers know that we're all at home eagerly waiting for deliveries. So they send out phishing messages saying "Sorry we missed you" or "You need to pay a delivery fee". If you click on the link they send, you'll go to a very convincing website which looks identical to the courier's page. Whereupon the fraudsters will ask for your bank details, credit…
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Every so often, a celebrity is castigated over their "youthful indiscretions" i.e. racist Tweets they sent when they were a teenager. I don't think I've posted anything too horrific, but I wanted to check. I searched Twitter for a variety of slurs sent from my account - and all seemed clean. But... there's a lot of stuff that's not so easy to find with a simple search. So I decided to read…
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I use Zotero to manage my references. Instead of in-text citations of (Smith, 1984) - I want that to be hyperlinked to the academic paper referenced. For example ([Smith, 1984](https://doi.org/.....)) This is possible, if you're willing to hack around with CSL - the Citation Style Language. Here's a fragment of CSL that I've adapted from Brenton M. Wiernik's zotero-tools/apa-doi-in-text.csl …
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I don't often blog about my feelings. Mostly because I find them confusing. Three weeks after our first vaccination jab, my wife and I broke our lockdown to go on a date. In the last 15 months we've left the house a few times for doctor's appointments, a couple of visits to the post office, some brief walks round the park, and that's about it. Nothing social, nothing fun. We thought it would…
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I have a cheap WiFi enabled vacuum cleaner. One morning, I barked "ALEXA! CLEAN THE HOUSE." The gynoid immediately responded with "Now playing songs by Crowded House." The future's ace, innit? So I opened the cleaner's app, hit a button, and heard the sound of a domestic-droid doing its thing. For two minutes. The app spat out this fabulously helpful warning. I trundled downstairs to see…
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Twitter has never really solved its spam problem. It is a constant irritation that ordinary people get booted off the service for minor infractions, while large spam rings go unpunished. For the past few months, some of my old tweets have been getting liked by random women. I'm sure you've see something similar. The idea is, I suppose, to arouse your curiosity. "Who is this young woman…
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Back in the good old days, when men were real men - and people like you knew their place - the world was simple. There were three titles to choose from: Mr, Mrs, and Miss. Perhaps also Dr if you were feeling fancy. But these fucking millennials with their "Ms" and "Mx" - amirite?!!? Anyway, I was signing up to a service recently which wanted my title. I didn't think they needed a proxy for my …
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Marketing really is crap. Recently, SE Railways sent this piece of email drivel to my wife: We don't have any kids, thankfully - and are not having any in the future. My wife was literally recovering from a sterilisation procedure when the email arrived. So it seemed a bit weird that they'd send her a message like that. My wife has never booked a child's fare. She's done nothing to indicate to …
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I have only been on the periphery of this project - back from when I worked at a Mobile Operator - so it's incredibly exciting for me to see this come to life. This morning, my phone picked up an Emergency Alert test from the Cell Broadcast system. I had to specifically opt-in to receive test messages. Each phone is different, but on Android I unlocked developer options and found the alerts…
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