ElektraPlay Theatre Review · 400 words
Experimental and unconventional theatre is rare in the prime spots of the West End. There's a sea of jukebox musicals, film adaptations, standard Shakespeare, and Worthy Plays. Theatreland runs on bums-on-seats - doesn't matter what the critics say as long and punters keep paying outrageous prices for cramped stalls in dilapidated venues. Elektra is uncompromising. It is the sort of play the…
Continue reading →Book Review NetGalley · 2 comments · 650 words · Viewed ~240 times
Malcolm Croft (under the pseudonym Catherine Nappington) has produced a compendium of cat illustrations from ancient manuscripts. It's then peppered with a variety of regurgitated facts and captions of a sub-Facebook levels of humour. There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by…
Continue reading →2fa CyberSecurity HTOP MFA Open Source totp · 11 comments · 1,250 words · Viewed ~7,061 times
Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no…
Continue reading →CyberSecurity javascript totp · 2 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~725 times
The Web Crypto API is, thankfully, nothing to do with scammy cryptocurrencies. Instead, it provides access to powerful cryptographic features which were previously only available in 3rd party tools. So, is it possible to build a TOTP code generator without using any external JS libraries? Yes! And it is (relatively) simple. Here's the code that I've written. It is slightly verbose and contains…
Continue reading →android app eink HowTo Kotlin · 500 words · Viewed ~374 times
Last year, I reviewed a Four-Colour eInk Name Badge - the ManyTag HSN371. The hardware itself is perfectly fine, but the Android app isn't great. It is complicated, crash-prone, and not available in the app-store. After some back-and-forth with the manufacturer, they agreed to send me their Android SDK and documentation. Sadly, the PDF they sent me was riddled with errors and the software…
Continue reading →comedy Theatre Review · 600 words · Viewed ~342 times
This is three excellent plays in one. First, a ghost story. Second, a tribute act. Thirdly, a meditation on the nature of comedy. In many ways, it is the complement to Inside Number 9 playing next door. Cooper, Morecambe, and Monkhouse were dead to begin with. Perhaps you grew up watching them live at the Palladium, or on grainy VHS tapes, or in microbursts on TikTok. But they got their last…
Continue reading →blogging HowTo php WordPress · 1 comment · 200 words · Viewed ~235 times
WordPress does not respect an admin's preferred date format. Here's how the admin list of posts looks to me: I don't want it to look like that. I want it in RFC3339 format. I know what you're thinking, just change the default date display - but that only seems to work in some areas of WordPress. It doesn't change the column-date format. Here's what mine is set to: So that doesn't work. …
Continue reading →a11y accessibility Book Review · 2 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~602 times
My friend Manuel has sent me his latest book to review - and it is a corker. The best thing about this book is that it doesn't waste any time trying to convince you that Accessibility Is Good™. You're a professional web developer; you know that. Instead, it gets straight down to brass-tacks and gives you immediate and useful examples of what to do. You could read the book linearly - but it is m…
Continue reading →CyberSecurity rant security standards totp · 4 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~5,190 times
If you use Multi-Factor Authentication, you'll be well used to scanning in QR codes which allow you to share a secret code with a website. These are known as Time-based One Time Passwords (TOTP). As I've moaned about before, TOTP has never been properly standardised. It's a mish-mash of half-finished proposals with no active development, no test suite, and no-one looking after it. Which is…
Continue reading →qr QR Codes · 18 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~33,385 times
Take a look at these two QR codes. Scan them if you like, I promise there's nothing dodgy in them. Left is upper-case HTTPS://EDENT.TEL/ and right is lower-case https://edent.tel/ You can clearly see that the one on the left is a "smaller" QR as it has fewer bits of data in it. Both go to the same URl, the only difference is the casing. What's going on? Your first thought might be th…
Continue reading →Book Review Proust · 4 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~330 times
A friend mentioned that they were going to a Proust book club where they'd be discussing Swann's Way, the first volume of the masterpiece. "Well," I thought, "That sounds like a fun challenge!" It was not. I picked up the Standard eBooks version translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and started my journey. It starts with a young man having a wet dream and then, in excruciating detail, describing …
Continue reading →Theatre Review · 1 comment · 200 words
I went into this as a cynic and came out a grinning maniac. Look, it is basically "Stomp" but for kids. It's a join-in pantomime where four babbling fools play with junk in a recycling centre to make music. Oh, sure, you could analyse it as being a blend of Commedia dell'arte and modern dance, but it is closer to Minions. All cartoon violence, generic-Euro-mumble speech, and tunes that they'll…
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