About a million years ago, my wife's work sent her on a training course optimistically titled "How To Use Excel As A Database." We were both horrified. Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program - but it is categorically not a database! OK, it has rows and columns which sorta look like a database table. And you can put constraints on cells which mimic a schema. And, yes, you can sort and…
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Twitter's trending topics are... inflammatory. Probably deliberately so in order to drive engagement. It's a mix of "who shall we hate today" and lowest-common-denominator "celebrity" gossip. I hate it. There are various ways you can block content on the web - but they usually involve installing a plugin to your browser. Here's a simple hack to remove the sidebar - or, at the very least, make…
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(This blog post is going to be UK specific, and biased towards jobs that I've personally done.) How much does it cost to go to work in a physical office? I'm going to try and list all the things I have to pay for just in order to be able to show up. This ignores things I can claim back on expenses (although that's an issue if you don't have sufficient credit access). Commuting is the big one. …
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(This post written partly to tease my delightful colleague Charles, but also as a way of thinking about user needs.) During a recent Open Data Café, one of the guests made an entirely reasonable point. An API only method of getting data is elitist. Martine Wauben@MHWaubenAlready having my assumptions tested - are APIs elitist? food for thought for me #ODCafe❤️ 2💬 0🔁 011:44 - Sat 10 April 2021 I…
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If you're unfamiliar, security.txt is a proposed Internet standard. The idea is simple, your website hosts a plain text file at /.well-known/security.txt which tells people who your security contacts are, what your vulnerability disclosure policies are, where your PGP key is, etc. Useful! Because it is in draft, people can comment on it to make things better. So I did. I noticed that all the…
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I hope this rant is useful to someone... I have some shares leftover from an old employer. The sharesave account was managed by ComputerShare who are pretty crap. For some reason, ComputerShare have decided to migrate lots of their customers to an equally crap service called EquatePlus. I only found out about this when trying to log in to ComputerShare to do my annual tax return. It told me to…
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Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite proclamations that Big Data consists of data-sets too large to fit in an…
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I hate everyone in Stars Hollow. They're all immature, narcissistic, power-hungry, ego-fuelled maniacs - some of whom border on psychotic. I hold them in such contempt that I would gladly abandon them all on a deserted island and let nature take its course. There isn't a single one of them who isn't a complete failure of a human being. Their collective brain power wouldn't even light an energy…
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Verity Jane, gifted app-whisperer, has been out of work since her exit from a brief but problematic relationship with a Silicon Valley billionaire. Then she signs the wordy NDA of a dodgy San Francisco start-up, becoming the beta tester for their latest product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, soon man…
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This is a thought experiment inspired by the sort of rambling and speculative conversations my wife and I have been having in lockdown. Most countries in the world place legal limits on alcohol production at home. There are, usually, several good reasons for this: Improperly brewed alcohol can cause severe health problems - including death. Poorly set up stills can - and do - explode.…
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Whenever I start up Netflix, I'm asked if I want to create an account for my children. I don't have children. I don't want children. I find most children annoying - not yours, obviously, yours are lovely. But I resent being asked every single time whether my imaginary kids want an account. It's just annoying. I can't imagine what it is like for bereaved parents who have recently lost a child. …
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Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and travelled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of…
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