I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses". The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were…
My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by…
Earlier this year I was playing around with DogeCoin. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn't get their API working. I delved into the settings, to see what was up. Take a look at this setting, is it obvious to you which state is active? I clicked around on it, and the state changed. Had this enabled it or disabled it? By carefully hovering my mouse over the options, I could see what I…
Private Eye is the only "Dead Tree" publication I buy. I think its satire misses the mark more often than not - but its investigative journalism and general muck-raking are second to none. The Eye has reluctantly been drawn into the digital age. It has a piss-poor website run by the sort of "tired and emotional" gnomes who struggle with concepts like sanitising user input. EXCLUSIVE Push…
Right, that's enough keyword stuffing! I've been trying to mount an OwnCloud instance via WebDAV. I kept receiving the error Mounting failed. SSL handshake failed: SSL error: sslv3 alert handshake failure Or SSL handshake failed: SSL alert received: Handshake failed The route of this problem seems to be that the version of libneon (the WebDAVS connector library) shipped with Ubuntu 12.04…
The Citizens' Advice Bureaux have just released a real-time view of what people are searching for on its site. It's heartbreaking. Tom Loosemore@tomskitomskiInteresting new digital stuff emerging from @CitizensAdvice display-screen.cab-alpha.org.uk <-- uncomfortable, messy, visceral reality @mikedixonCAB❤️ 8💬 3🔁 010:03 - Tue 21 October 2014 who supplies my electricity why do some children become…
Originally written in 2014 - but lost somehow. Last week, I had the privilege of being invited into the Guildhall to watch Tim Berners-Lee receive the Honorary Freedom of the City. I was one of a dozen bloggers and tweeters asked to live tweet the ceremony. As The City moves into the digital era, it is beginning to modernise and so this was the first ceremony open to bloggers and the first to…
Yesterday, I gave my first TEDˣ Talk. It was organised by my employers, Telefonica in order to showcase innovative thinking throughout the business (usual work/personal disclaimers apply). I don't want to go into too much detail about how amazing the day was - or the incredible talks that I heard my colleagues give. I'd like to talk a little about preparation. What I think goes in to making a …
I closed the window before I left for work this morning. I mean... I'm pretty certain I did. It would be crazy to drive back home just to check... No... I did it. Or was that yesterday... I'm always doing stupid stuff like that. Leaving the fridge door open, forgetting to switch on the washer, having lights on well after sun rise. How can I use technology to automate away my idiocy? Let's…
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) are the police who police the police. As the Police policers you'd expect their website to be copper-bottomed. That they would detect anything amiss when inspecting their thin blue links. Mind you, some web developers are a law unto themselves. Yeah, yeah, these puns are unbearable. Fine. Whatever. Amusing photo by kind permission of the i…
Just a short usability / security post. Hopefully, you're all using Two-Factor Authentication on your important sites. As well as a username and password, you've also got to enter a one-time code. Usually it is generated by an app, or sent to you via SMS. Each code can only be used once - which makes it all the more curious that, after a few logins, Twitter's website looks like this: Now,…
Recently, I wanted to embed an photograph of a book page. I thought it would be nifty if the text from the page could be selected. If you hover your mouse over this image, you should be able to select part of the text. Ideally, it will look something like this... It even works on Android (tried on Chrome, Opera, FireFox) and iOS 7. So, how did I do it? Originally, I was pointed to…
