Everyone loves Dark Mode. It is kinder on the eyes, less energy intensive, and looks hecking cool. *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you that Dark Mode causes security bugs. (With apologies to Ben Ward) OK, OK. This isn't a particularly severe security bug, but I found it interesting. The Matrix messaging app "Element" lets you sign in to your account on multiple devices. In order to…
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This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously, but published long after the events. At the time, I was a Civil Servant in Cabinet Office. Now I am not. But as we're heading for another General Election, I thought I'd share this post. It's the evening of the 2019 General Election. I am plagued by two thoughts. Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the…
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Once in a while, you'll see some blowhard railing about the modern world. I recently saw someone decrying the fact that Star Trek had "gone woke". This Star Trek? OK, you can argue about whether Kirk and Uhura were forced to kiss in that episode. But how does anyone look at Star Trek - with its women on the command bridge, anti-colonial stance, and mixed-race crew - and not think it was a…
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I saw a prominent AI proponent asking why people always focus on the things that AI gets wrong. AI works so well, he asserted, that it was churlish and childish to focus on a few minor mistakes? Which reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. I was in a rural pub and got chatting to one of the locals. We were getting on great, so I asked him what his name was. "You know," he said,…
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I'm terrible at networking. I forget people's names minutes after meeting them, I never have business cards and lose the ones I'm given, and I can't go five minutes without burbling some nonsense. But I recognise that networking is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to succeed. I've always been told that success isn't always about what you know, but more about who you know. So how…
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I've got about another 10 months left at my current job and after that... I don't know what I'll do. I've already moved down to 4 days a week in an effort to glide down to FIRE. Do I really want to go back up to 5 days? Could I find somewhere that would be happy with me doing 3 days? Can I be arsed to constantly hustle for ad-hoc client work? Can't I just stop? What would happen if I took a…
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Fourteen years ago, I read Fforde's Shades of Grey and my life hasn't been quite the same since. It was a magical tale, almost totally devoid of exposition, building in an fantasy world like no other. Fans have been clamouring for a sequel ever since. The first few chapters of the sequel do an excellent job of exposition - but this isn't the sort of book you can pick up without having recently…
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By and large, the English language doesn't use diacritical marks. Even our loanwords are stripped of them; we drink in a cafe rather than the more pretentious café. This has a consequence for HTML and, by extension, eBooks. As a quick primer, modern computing gives us two main ways of displaying a letter with an accent. The first is simple - encode every single accented letter as a separate …
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Today was quite the accidental milestone! I've edited OpenStreetMap over a thousand times! For those who don't know, OSM (OpenStreetMap) is like the Wikipedia of maps. Anyone can go in and edit the map. This isn't a corporate-controlled space where your local knowledge is irrelevant compared to the desire for profit. You can literally go and correct any mistakes that you find, add recently…
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In a recent episode of Doctor Who, we see a lovely sequence where The Doctor has a nice chat with Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Great larks! The Doctor often meets real people - Dickens, Shakespeare, Rosa Parks. But, crucially, all those people are dead by the time the episode airs. Macca is unusual because we could, theoretically, call him and ask what it was like meeting The Doctor. So, how…
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"History is not erased when statues are pulled down. It is made." Some people celebrated when Saddam's statue was toppled in Iraq. Yet those same voices condemn the felling of Coulson, Rhodes, and a dozen other statues. Why? Alex von Tunzelmann has a knack for getting to the heart of history in an accessible manner. There isn't a hefty amount of ponderous academic theory to wade through - just…
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Less than a year ago, in August 2023, we installed a 4.8kWh Solar Battery at a cost of £2,900. Whenever I talk about the upfront capital costs of solar power, people rightly want to know what the payback period is. Well, after less than 10 months, the battery has given us 1MWh. To put that in to context, the average UK household uses about 3MWh per year. So (again, very roughly) over a third …
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