Someone took a nice photo of me recently. I'd like to use it as my avatar photo everywhere to present a consistent image. This is not easy to do. I've had to manually change it on a dozen different Slacks, a bunch of social networks, a few forums, all my email accounts, and I'm still not done. I just want to change my photo once. Because I'm vain and lazy. For a nerd like me, the solution is…
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I stared at my TOTP generator. Surely this must be a bug? Leap Year related? Or a cold-start error? Or some freaky prank? How could my login code be 000000?!?! A standard TOTP code is normally 6 digits long. There are a million combinations, from 000000 to 999999. A million isn't a particularly big number. A million seconds is about 12 days. A TOTP code changes every 30 seconds. Assuming the…
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Noodling thoughts. The humble <img> element is one of the oldest parts of HTML. It allows you to put a static image in a document. Later revisions allowed for animated images - like GIFs. And the <map> element made parts of the image clickable. But what about interactive images? Like panoramas and photospeheres? Here's a 360° image. You can drag it to see all around. That uses the …
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Kepler is like you, but not like you. With a simple touch, Kepler can move into any body, live any life - for a moment, a day or for years. And your life could be next. I thoroughly enjoy Claire North's writing. This was a perfect slice of sci-fi. Body-jumping, fast-talking, continent-hopping fun! An ancient set of humans which can take over anyone's body. Leaping from life-to-life, putting…
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There's no doubt that technology has made it easier to communicate. It's also easier to shut someone out when we are confronted with online discourse. Why bother to understand strangers--or even acquaintances--when you can troll them, block them, or just click "Unfriend" and never look back? This is a mish-mash of essays which never quite comes to a conclusion. Virtual Reality experiences…
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Facebook has an interesting feature. It will let you see which companies have associated your off-Facebook activity with your Facebook account. If you visit: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ you'll see what companies are snitching on you to Facebook. Alice St⭕️llmeyer@StollmeyerEU#AirBnB shares your activity with #Facebook ?!Delete that @Airbnb app, folks! Mine didn't even allow …
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I recently went to a university hackathon, where students were trying to invent novel ways to help prevent pandemics. This was purely an academic exercise - they were not developing a fully-fledged app, nor were they creating official policies. I spent some time with one group discussing the privacy implications of what they had built. Thesis By monitoring nearby Bluetooth devices, we can…
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There are many sectarian divides in computer. "Little-Endians" and "Big-Endians" wage bitter war against each other over the order of bits. Should line in text files end with \r\n or just \n? And both vi and emacs users fight betwixt themselves while ignoring the superior foe - nano. Perhaps the most contentious of these is the battle between URI and URL. Should we refer to links on the web…
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I don't understand the world of academic publishing. Incredibly niche books, some barely longer than a novella, are sold for ridiculously high prices. Or, worse than that, they're not sold at all. Let me explain. A friend of mine recommended an obscure book, published a couple of years ago. The blurb made it look right up my alley, so I tried to buy it. I only read eBooks, but I couldn't find…
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Problem: I have a multiline string - not a file - and I want to remove the first few lines from it and keep the rest. I found this surprisingly unintuitive. So these are notes in case I want to do it again. Feel free to suggest a better way! Example Given this input: $str = "Once upon\nA Time\nLived a big\nDragon\nCalled Cuthbert."; I want the output to be: "Dragon\nCalled Cuthbert." …
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Hello fam! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every single episode of Doctor Who! This post looks at S12 - but feel free to rummage in the archives. Spyfall - part 1 Straight out of the credits, and The Doctor is yapping away on this gorgeous retro flipper. It isn't the 2020 Moto Razr with folding screen - it's literally the original Razr V3i! Hello Moto! We haven't seen a Razr …
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SETI is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. They use massive radio-telescopes to search the sky for signs of intelligent life. But the sky is big. Where should we point the telescopes to improve our chances of detecting a signal? Rather than point at random stars, or promising looking constellations, I propose a more scientific approach: Find a planet where the length of the year…
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