Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn't even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you ever wondered just how slow modern web development has made the web - Lynx will show you the meaning of haste. I use Lynx most days. Not as my exclusive browser - I'm not a masochist - but as a handy tool.…
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(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.) My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. They presented me with the following monthly options: Drop to 100Mbps for the same price I'm paying today (£44) Keep at 350Mbps for a tenner more (£55) Rise to 500Mbps for a fiver more (£49) Go to GI…
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I've been thinking about better ways to display footnotes in eBooks. So this is my horrible and hacky way to display inline footnotes in pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript. Here's how it works: The most cited work in history, for example, is a 1951 paper <details> <summary>1</summary> Lowry, O. H., Rosebrough, N. J., Farr, A. L. Randall, R. J. J. Biol. Chem. 193, 265–275 (…
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It's possible to encode QR images as text. In this case, Emoji! (more…) …
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Lab grown meat is nearly here. To be fair, it has been "nearly" here for a long long long long long time. But with the imminent arrival of lab-grown meat, it is time to investigate Synthetarianism. A diet of Synthetic food. I haven't eaten meat for... oh... 20 years now. I live with a carnivore but, despite her amazing cooking, I've no real desire to eat animal flesh. I'm sure it tastes nice …
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I spent the first few months of lockdown in a blur. Working with NHSX, on the national app launch, meant that I didn't have a minute to think about what was going on outside my immediate focus. Then, a few months ago, I switched to a new job in the Data Standards Authority - so I've had all the excitement of getting up to speed on new projects. And this week. Just... *bleugh*. I've hit the wall. …
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A group of college kids staying at a riverside cabin are menaced by a swarm of deadly zombie beavers. The moment that the zombie beavers deliberately chewed through the phone lines in order to strand our hapless heroes, I knew I was in for a treat. This is an unapologetic B-Movie. It knows exactly how much sex and violence it can cram into a 15 certificate. The female cast members mostly…
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If you have Virgin Media's cable service, you may have been forcibly opted-in to their WiFi Hotspot Sharing service. This allows anyone with a Virgin Media account to connect to your WiFi! Virgin have been moderately sensible with their design of this - users get a separate IP address, so their activity cannot be commingled with yours. But what about your bandwidth? Here, Virgin have been…
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Apple's HEIC format is... annoying. At the moment, Apple's products are the only mainstream cameras which use it. Forums are littered with people trying to upload HEIC files to web services and failing. So, here are four quick tips for dealing with this formal. Display in browser Absolutely no browser supports HEIC. Not even Apple's own browser supports it. Why? Terence Eden is on…
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In his first-ever Doctor Who novel, Tom Baker’s incredible imagination is given free rein. A story so epic it was originally intended for the big screen, Scratchman is a gripping, white-knuckle thriller almost forty years in the making. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane Smith arrive at a remote Scottish island, when their holiday is cut short by the appearance of strange creatures – hideous sca…
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Some background reading. Skip if you're familiar with fonts. A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that. Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the Latin letter Capital W, U+20AC is the Euro…
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Hello gang! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every single episode of Doctor Who! This bonus post looks at a very special entry from s01e01 - but feel free to rummage in the archives. A Rose By Any Other Name... The very first episode of New-Who has some lovely zeitgeisty phones. But there was one I MISSED! I'm indebted to James Sutton for pointing out something which was hiding …
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