Ever since phone manufacturers killed off the headphone jack, there has been an epidemic of people blasting sounds from their shitty speakers in public. Music, TikTok, phone calls - it seems some people want the whole world to share their sonic experience. Forget that noise! I have a passive-aggressive death-wish and want to hand out free headphones to people annoying me on public transport. …
Continue reading →
The people who built my kitchen were idiots. They designed it to be lit with a dozen recessed GU10 spotlights. That's not so terrible - GU10 LED bulbs are only about £1 each - but because I am a bigger idiot, I decided I wanted remote-controlled bulbs. And ZigBee bulbs are expensive! Five years ago, feeling flush with cash, I replaced all the bulbs with a mixture of Hue and Innr Smart bulbs. …
Continue reading →
I was sent some medical images in a password-protected CFS file. Here's how to open them in Linux. You can't. OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's complex, but here's how to do it. The Linux software for the Compact File Set hasn't been updated in years and only works with ancient versions of Linux. Here's how to temporarily install an old version, install the software, and then…
Continue reading →
What is the city but the people? What indeed? David Oyelowo is a powerhouse. His Coriolanus is a shitheel teetering somewhere between Trump and Mugabe. He isn't a noble character with a fatal flaw; his flaws are his character. The citizens celebrate him, turn on him, fear him. It isn't about power corrupting, it's about venal people abusing power structures. There are persistent theories about …
Continue reading →
There are some movies - like Snakes On A Plane - where the title simultaneously tells you the whole plot and compels you to watch it. Similarly, how can you resist something called "Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant"? Like the darkest of chocolates, the bitterness only accentuates the tender sweetness of the protagonist. A young female vampire who suffers from what can only be…
Continue reading →
Why do so many vastly-wealthy tech personalities go mad? My ideal job involves being employed by a millionaire tech-bro. Just before they get on stage, or moments before they file a lawsuit, or an instant before they publish their thought leadership - I will appear to them. I will be dressed in rags, body smeared with excrement, weeping sores blotching my face. I will sidle up to them, lean…
Continue reading →
A fun little CSS experiment! There's a new(ish) feature in CSS which allows you to set the way text is wrapped. Ordinarily, a long line of text might be split at an inopportune time. For example: This very long headline ends with a single word Having a dangling word doesn't always look great. Using text-wrap:balance would give us something like: This very long headline ends with balanced…
Continue reading →
I was 25% of the way through reading this when I purchased the sequel. It is an utterly compelling murder mystery - not least because the death doesn't occur until well after the halfway point. Who dies? Why? Who did it? Why?! With every paragraph I felt myself trying to decipher the characters' motives. A murder mystery set in an amateur dramatics society is a bit Simon Brett but this has much …
Continue reading →
I've quit JetPack stats. I've moved to Koko Analytics. All the stats code is self hosted, it is privacy preserving, and the codebase is small and simple. But I am vain. I want all my old JetPack stats to appear in Koko so I can look back on the glory days of blogging. Koko has two main tables. The first is a summary table called wpbp_koko_analytics_site_stats : date visitors …
Continue reading →
Because Ma.tt continues to burn all of the goodwill built up by WordPress, and JetPack have decided to charge a ridiculous sum for their statistics, I've decided to move to a new stats provider. But I don't want to lose all the statistics I've built up over the years. How do I download a day-by-day export of my JetPack stats? Luckily, there is an API for downloading all your JetPack stats! …
Continue reading →
After seeing one Doctor Who on stage, it was time for another! I was lucky enough to get preview tickets for Jodie Whittaker in "The Duchess [of Malfi]". The Duchess is… dark. No, darker than than you're imagining. I've seen plays with content warnings. This is the first I've seen where they cover both sides of a sheet of paper. Content and Sensory Warnings - Contains Spoilers The theatre p…
Continue reading →
Unconferences are brilliant. Rather than a set agenda, people come up with their own sessions. A dozen Post-It® Notes are slapped on a wall, everyone writes down what they want to talk about, they're slotted into a grid, and - BAM! - you've got yourself an unconference. At the recent OggCamp there were a number of brilliant spontaneous talks. But nearly all of them involved one person standing …
Continue reading →
