Several years ago, I posted this poll on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf the recent Twitter hack had exposed they way you voted on every Twitter poll, how would you feel?(There is no suggestion that this has happened, I'm just curious about people's relationships to voting and privacy.)Meh. So what?: (167)167Hmph. That's annoying.: (68)68Umm… This could be bad!: (32)32Delete account …
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What is our life? Is it the days we live or the way others perceive us? The comedian Adrian Edmondson steps us through his life. But, as he points out, what we remember and what we're interested in isn't necessarily the most significant part of the subject's life. In 2016 I adapted William Leith’s book Bits of Me Are Falling Apart into a one-man play. It took six weeks to do the adaptation, four …
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Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData. I was bored and asked ChatGPT. The new Omni model claims to be faster and more accurate. But, in my experience, it's wrong more than it is right and is a bit more racist. I asked "Which Oscar …
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I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the…
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There's currently an open consultation about whether banks should have a lower compensation limit to refund their customers who have been scammed. Currently, if a customer falls for an Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam, they may be eligible for up to £415,000 back from their bank. The proposal is to limit this to a maximum of £85,000. What does this mean and is it a bad thing? APP fraud is w…
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It looks like everyone's favourite FIDO token provider might have an unpatchable vulnerability! Much Sturm und Drang from the usual sources. But how bad is it really? Not so bad - but it does expose some weaknesses in the very idea of having physical tokens. First up, as the research paper's abstract says: The attack requires physical access to the secure element So, straight off the bat,…
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It is sometimes useful to embed the contents from one website into another. For example, you may wish to quote a post from a microblogging site like Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, or Mastodon. All of them offer an "embed" button which will copy a snippet of code for you to paste into your website. Here's how they compare: BSky In my considered opinion, BlueSky is the only modern service which…
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If your WordPress site has lots of plugins, it's sometimes difficult to keep track of what is manipulating your content. Ever wondered what priority all your various actions and filters have? This is a widget which will show you which actions are registered to your blog's hooks, and their priority order. It looks like this: Stick this code in your theme's functions.php or in its own plugin. …
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I am a bear of very little brains sometimes. I had a site which, for various boring reasons, was printing a <style> element in the middle of the HTML's body. Because <style> is a metadata element, it should only appear within the <head> element. This is OK: <!doctype html> <html> <head> <style> a { color: #f00; } </style> </head> <body> … This is an error: <!doctype h…
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I'm a little bit obsessed with the idea of Semantic markup. I want the words that I write to be understood my humans and machines. Imagine this piece of code: print( "Hello, world!" ) Is that code example written in Python? C++? Basic? Go? Perhaps you're familiar enough with every programming language to tell - but most people aren't. Wouldn't it be nice to give an indication of what…
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A scrap of code which I hope helps you. Problem You installed the WordPress JetPack plugin and wrote all your blog posts in Markdown. Now you want to remove JetPack or replace it with a better Markdown parser. You turn off JetPack's "Write posts or pages in plain-text Markdown syntax". You click edit on a post and see the HTML version of your page. Where did the Markdown version go? …
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I logged into Twitter using a fresh account last week. No followers, no preferences set. The default experience was an unending slurry of racism and porn. I don't care to use Twitter any more. Whatever good that was there is now drowned in a cess-pit of violent filth. I still have a lot of Tweets embedded on this blog. Using WordPress, it was easy to paste in a link and have it converted to an…
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