The HTML5 specification is complicated. I've been an author on it, and even I couldn't tell you all the weird little gotchas it contains. Between that and "idiosyncratic" browser engines, it's a wonder the world wide web works at all. Let's talk about the humble <meta> element. As its name suggests, it contains metadata about the document. A typical element might look like this: <meta…
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Winner of the 2016 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Newcomer. Shortlisted for the 2016 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novel. Shortlisted for the 2016 Locus First Novel Award. Sorcerer to the Crown is the first in Zen Cho's thrilling magical adventure series, the Sorcerer Royal Trilogy. This was an absolute delight to read. Magic, racism, and sexism, wrapped together with…
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Eight years ago, I released an open source database of Shakespeare's plays. Yesterday, it received its first Pull Request! I'm playing the long game... This led me down a curious little rabbit-hole. Which characters appear in Shakespeare's plays - but have nothing to say? The Pull Request looked at the characters mentioned in the Dramatis Personae and correlated them with the characters with…
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. It shows how we can protect ourselves and our …
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Popular URl shortner Bitly allows users to customise its links. This means you can have all sorty of weird and wonderful character in there. For example: bit.ly/ó¾°ó¾° You can also use Emoji! bit.ly/☹ bit.ly/♐ Well, OK, not all Emoji. If you try to use most of them, the Bitly system craps out and generates broken URls, like so: But you can use most Unicode Miscellaneous symbols - so…
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The first book in the bestselling Chronicles of St Mary's series which follows a group of tea-soaked disaster magnets as they hurtle their way around History. This is stupid amounts of fun! A roaring adventure through time. Doesn't bother getting hung-up on paradoxes - or science - but goes straight for the heart of history. Historians! Specifically, historians fightin', drinkin', and…
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You can't post raw audio to Twitter directly. It sucks. Sure, you can post links to audio, but it's not quite the same. Here's a couple of Linux one-liners which will turn audio into simple video suitable for uploading to social media. Waves This converts audio to a waveform: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex "[0:a]showwaves=s=640x480:mode=line,format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:v…
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This book debunks the myth of the State as a large bureaucratic organization that can at best facilitate the creative innovation which happens in the dynamic private sector. It argues that in the history of modern capitalism the State has not only fixed market failures but also shaped and created markets, actively investing in new technologies and sectors that private investors only later find…
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Here's a great set of questions to ask at your next corporate strategy away day. I know you know the answers to these questions - but I promise that the people in charge of your organisation will have some illuminating answers. Thinking about the next five years... will computers be faster or slower? will the price of computing go up or down? will internet speeds get faster or slower? will…
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In the UK, most professional jobs pay monthly. In the USA, it seems most professional jobs get paid every two weeks. This usually comes as a great shock when someone from one side of the pond finds out how poorly employment conditions are on the other side. Naturally, everyone believes their own way of doing it is superior. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI find it strange that Americans are…
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I've been blogging for a long time. Over the years, I've linked to tens of thousands of websites. Inevitably, some of those sites have gone. Even when sites still exist, webmasters seem to have forgotten that Cool URls Don't Change. I use the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin. It periodically monitors the links on my site and lets me know which ones are dead. It also offers to link to…
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Here's something I didn't know - but should have, because it's obvious... Your screen's auto-brightness depends on your webcam. If, like me, you have a privacy cover - this happens: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/WebCamp-Cover.mp4 The MacBook I'm using doesn't have any lux sensors that I can see - most phones have a separate sensor which means the camera isn't in use all…
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