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Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... I was working for a Big Corporate on a Big Product. We were negotiating launch dates. It was the sort of thing where you have to book TV advertising months ahead. We were all set to go, when someone on our team said "Is this really the date when we want to launch?" The Big Scary Manager looked down at them and said "Yes. The…
Continue reading →api banking data money openbanking · 3 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~278 times
After writing about how to use MoneyDashboard's unofficial API, the good folk at Moneyed told me about their officially supported API! So here's a quick review & howto guide. Moneyed is a slightly strange service. I think it is designed for companies to give as a benefit to their employees. But you can sign up as an individual. The first month is free - but I don't see a way to tell how much…
Continue reading →HTML5 php web · 21 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~83,147 times
This experiment has now ended. The code is available on https://gitlab.com/edent/very-slow-website One thing most websites try to do is try to serve you the page as fast as possible. So I've decided to do the opposite. I've made a (toy) web server which goes as slow as humanly possible. You can visit it at http://slowww.rf.gd - but you'll need to be patient. This delivers a page at about 175 …
Continue reading →Movie Review · 1 comment · 500 words
There are two contradictory ways to view this movie. It's a dumb screwball comedy, sure, but it also tries to expose the depressing underbelly of the modern world. Part of the problem is that it rarely challenges the views that it exposes. It is content to let people make fools of themselves, but never asks them to reflect on their foolishness. Nor does it give us the tools to tackle hate…
Continue reading →Movie Review · 100 words
A group of friends who meet regularly for game nights find themselves entangled in a real-life mystery when the shady brother of one of them is seemingly kidnapped by dangerous gangsters. This is "Smug Marrieds - The Movie". But it is so funny. Like most modern comedy movies, it is little more than a series of sketches tied together by a paper-thin plot. Weirdly, it is shot much more…
Continue reading →game itch.io review · 150 words
I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow. It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything…
Continue reading →gmail google i18n rant · 10 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~8,095 times
/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well…
Continue reading →games itch.io review · 200 words
I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This starts as a fun little logic puzzle, but quickly descends into frustration. Like Portal, you have limited array of actions and have to manipulate your environment in order to get move on to the next level. But it has a bit of a problem. It is so easy to get lost.…
Continue reading →Movie Review · 300 words
Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman) gets a nice call confirming his name and other identifying information. The next thing he knows, a spa in Florida is reminding him of his appointment and his credit cards are maxed out. With his identity stolen, Sandy leaves his wife, kids and job to literally bring the thief to justice in Colorado. Keeping tabs on the other Sandy (Melissa McCarthy) and run-ins…
Continue reading →game itch.io review · 200 words
I'm (slowly) playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. Remember all those one-night-stands you had when you were younger? No - me neither. I was a paragon of virtue... But, if you did engage in such shameless behaviour, did you ever wonder how the morning-after-the-night-before could have gone if you'd played things just …
Continue reading →repair tv · 3 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~388 times
Working from home without a monitor SUCKS. My wife decided that she didn't want to peer at her tiny laptop screen any more, so we decided to repurpose an old 37 inch TV. MEGAMONITOR! I bought the Pansonic TV back in 2012 and it served us pretty well over the last 8 years. But when we came to switch it on, it just displayed a blinking LED. The brilliant folks at ElectroMix helped confirmed the…
Continue reading →api banking data money openbanking · 700 words · Viewed ~255 times
Note: MoneyDashboard is now closed. Yesterday, I wrote up how to use the MoneyDashboard Classic API. Read that blog post first before reading this one. MoneyDashboard have launched a new "Neon" service. The API is a bit more simple, but authentication is harder. Here's a quick guide to the bits of the API that I found useful. I've lightly redacted some of the API responses for my privacy. …
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