We recently spent 30 days criss-crossing Europe. One of my concerns was how to feed myself. I know Amsterdam is full of weirdo hippies like me who avoid meat and dairy - but what about Frankfurt? What about Prague? What about Ljubljana? What about the trains themselves? Nightmare, right? I packed a bunch of snack bars, stocked up Google translate with suitable phrases, and resigned myself to…
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Code Golf is the art/science of creating wonderful little demos in an artificially constrained environment. This year the js1024 competition was looking for entries with the theme of "Creepy". I am not a serious bit-twiddler. I can't create JS shaders which produce intricate 3D worlds in a scrap of code. But I can use slightly obscure JavaScript APIs! There's something deliciously creepy about…
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Human brains seem hardwired to defer to authority figures for morality decisions. Thousands of years after Aristotle made a first stab at defining an objective stance on morals, humans are seemingly no closer to agreeing on a universal system for what is and isn't the right thing to do. So we fall back on the wisdom of the ancients. If you are religious, you have a fairly clear text-book which…
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Another day, another data breach. the spreadsheet, initially shared in 2022, and thought to contain data related to a small number of applicants, had contained hidden data related to more than 18,000 people. ICO statement in response to 2022 MoD data breach Why are people still sending files to each other? I remember having a stand-up argument a decade ago with a project manager who wanted us …
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I have a dual SIM Android phone. When I call or text, I get a choice of which SIM to use. But there's no quick way to swap which SIM is used for data. There used to be a built-in settings tile on stock Android, and some manufacturers still have it, but Google's Pixels don't. So here's how to make a (fairly) quick shortcut to swap between data SIMs. First, get the brilliant open source Activity …
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Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance. Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies: There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points. Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the…
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Imagine, just for a moment, that a mathematical breakthrough had occurred on the eve of the second World War. Perhaps Turing or Rejewski or Driscoll realised that prime number theory held the key to unbreakable encryption. This blog post attempts to answer the question "could public-key cryptography have been used in 1939?" Let's briefly step back into history. The Enigma machine represented…
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Written because it pissed me off. I hope this helps you in your hour of need. You have to do one bulb at a time. If you plug in multiple bulbs and try to pair them, it won't work. I don't know why. You will need a portable lamp - or some other way to bring the bulb as close as possible to the hub. Open the Hue app, go through the "Add Device" sequence. The app changes regularly and may be…
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I've reviewed several thermal imaging products over the years. They range from tiny USB-C add-ons to professional quality hulking great handhelds. Topdon have sent me a mid-point model to review. It's relatively cheap for a thermal imaging product - only £140 on Amazon. I think the sensor is made by Raytrontek. But is it any good? While it has a bunch of useful features, there's no video …
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This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into what its future holds. Or, as the rather academic intro puts it: The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: …
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This is the best book on practical feminism that I've read. Because it is long out of print, I had to get the British Library to pull this book out of the archives for me. I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) which is a series of mini-autobiographies of prominent women. One of them was Dame Caroline Haslett - an electrical…
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Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said: 😱 I Can't Use On This Day 😭 Seriously, What’s Going On?! 🔍 I’ve been trying to use the On This Day feature, but it’s just not working for me! 😩 Every time I input my d…
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