There's a famous quote from Tom Goodwin about the way the world has changed recently: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. As part of my MSc,…
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This is probably me being a bit dense. I'm on a video call with two other people. Alice is on the left of my screen, Bob is on the right. Why isn't the audio in stereo? (Zoom lets you send stereo audio - but only of you have a stereo microphone. Whereas I'm talking abound individuals sending mono and receiving to stereo.) Every video conference system I've used delivers the audio in mono.…
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One of my lovely colleagues made an small speech during a recent meeting. She was delighted to announce that she was heading off on maternity leave next month and looked forward to seeing us all next year once the pandemic was over. There were the usual round of congratulations and how-will-we-cope-without-yous. But a few of us were left a little blindsided. For the last 10 months, we've only…
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This is neither a serious proposal, nor an official proposal. This is just me thinking in public. Governments are a monopoly. There is only one institution which can grant you a passport - Her Majesty's Passport Office. That's not quite true, of course. You are free to seek citizenship in other countries. And some countries will sell you a passport. In business studies terms, other countries…
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Inspired by this conversation on Mastodon YouTube hosts 360 videos. Here's one of mine, wandering through the Houses of Parliament. You can drag the video to see all around. If you let YouTube-DL download the "best" version, you'll end up with a video which looks like this: Each lens' view has been horizontally stretched, and then stitched into an over/under view. This is in Google's…
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Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. Tess Rinearson@_tessrIs this a phishing attempt? Goes to "githubverification.com" and asks for username and pw (if so, it nearly got me!) /cc @github pic.x.com/jgt4oNvjF2❤️ 2,243💬 111🔁 016:12 - Sat 16 January 2021 In the replies, you’ll see lots of techbros saying “this is why you should switch on 2FA people!!!” Except, an…
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Back in 2011, I sold all of my shares in my former employer and used the money to buy solar panels. I closed my account at the same time. Or so I thought Fast-forward 9 years, and I was surprised to receive an unwanted email from the corporate shareholding service. It was some nonsense about their corporate rebranding. I dropped them a note saying that I hadn't been a customer for many years…
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The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story! This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works. There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots. There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image. I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the…
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There's nothing wrong with this movie. It's just so... ordinary. Partly, that's a failure of the superhero genre. They're all identical movies. I am strong enough to defeat common thieves! Here is a baddie who is somehow stronger than you! I will defeat you due to really believing in myself! Fan service post-credits scene. WW1984 hits all the tropes in all the right places. Superhero fans…
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How should we live: how should we care for one another; grow our capabilities to work, to learn, to love and fully realise our potential? This exciting and ambitious book shows how we can re-design the welfare state for this century. A challenging read for civil servants and policy makers. When old institutions and systems don't produce the results needed, just how radical are we prepared to…
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I like quoting people's Tweets in my blog posts. But, sometimes, people delete their Tweets. This blog post examines two questions. How to preserve Tweets in blog posts that they are still readable even after the user deletes them. Whether this is morally acceptable behaviour. Let's tackle the easy question first. Preserving Tweets Using the WordPress OEmbed feature, I can just paste in a…
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A literary fantasy about love, music and sorcery, set against the background of Mexico City, finalist for the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst and Aurora awards. The only way I can describe this book is that it's the movie "The Craft" crossed with Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity". At times it gets bogged down in the name dropping of musicians and their albums. I get that - for a certain…
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