Phishing is the devious practice of tricking users into giving away their usernames and passwords to fraudulent sites. It is big business, and the best defence against it is constant vigilance. I'm going to walk you, step-by-step, through a scam that targetted me today. Along the way we'll see how to avoid falling prey to these monsters. It starts with a text I was sent this SMS from a…
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Welcome to my descent into a mulberry-induced madness. As I was wandering through the quaint European town of Woodstock, I noticed a most intriguing plaque affixed to one of the houses. This seems like a curiously specific act to pass! This house is № 28 High Street - so why would Parliament pass an act declaring it to be 1 Mulberry Tree? My first stop was the Parliamentary Legislation site. …
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This is a sort of poker variant / group solitaire which can be played either competitively or collaboratively. These rules were thrashed out at the Oxford January Games Jam. I think it is original - but there are literally thousands of card games, so it is hard to tell! As I've mentioned before, I love collaborative games. I'd much rather help my friends than beat them. This game is…
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(Disclaimer - I currently work for GDS, although I don't work on FOI. This is an opinion piece and doesn't represent the views on any of my employers - past, present, or future.) The Irish government recently complied with a Freedom of Information Act request from journalists at RTÉ. The journalists wanted copies of messages sent via a WhatsApp group. The Irish government complied and sent out …
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The good folk at PITAKA have sent me one of their Carbon Fibre wallets to review. It is a gorgeous bit of kit - but does that justify the price tag? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PITAKA-Carbon-Fibre-Wallet-Review-6mP3siO8Sps.webm You can also view the unboxing on YouTube This is a card-holder with space for 6 cards - wrapped up in a protective bundle, secured with strong …
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I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission. I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset to get into - almost all games are competitive. But with the help of an amazing team, …
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I want to correct a common misconception. Many people think that you can dial the emergency services even if you do not have a SIM in your phone. I see this advice scattered around the web - often telling people to keep an old, SIMless phone for an emergency - and it is dangerously wrong. If you are in the UK, you must have an active SIM in your phone! Your SIM does not need to be in credit,…
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A few weeks ago I tried some delicious vegetarian caviar. Beautiful - but expensive. I began to wonder how hard it would be to make my own flavour pearls. Well, all good experiments start by buying a beginners' kit. Before attempting basic "spherification", I decided to attempt something much more simple. Agar-Agar veggie strips. 400g Apple Juice 100g Caster Sugar 7g Agar-Agar Powder The …
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I've just finished reading the most wonderful short story - Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang. In it, he speculates on what would happen if The Tower of Babel were completed. For those unfamiliar with the legend, it tells of a people who tried to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. The book talks about the people who live partway up the massive tower, unable to comprehend what life is…
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Scratching my own itch. I have a bunch of directories which I want moved into alphabetic sub-directories. This is handy is you have a bunch of MP3s, books, or other catalogued files. This bash script moves a top level directory (and all the files and subdirectories under it), to a folder based on the (upper-case) version of the first character of the directory name. #!/bin/bash for dir in */…
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As ever, notes to myself. I hope you appreciate this future me! Photographs often contain EXIF metadata - really useful for finding out when a photo was taken. It turns out that you can add similar metadata to MP4 format videos. Here's how to do it with ffmpeg on Ubuntu Linux. The magic option is -metadata creation_time="2015-12-25T12:34:56" Stick that in when you're encoding your video and it …
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I've grown to loath IFTTT. What started out as a cool way to plug internet things together has being an opaque an uncommunicative company with no real interest in customer service. That's not surprising, I suppose, its paying customers are the companies who can't be bothered to develop a proper API and so just shove some integrations up there. But it is annoying for those of us who want…
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