This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. There's also a sweet moral core to the story …
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This uses the wp shell command. It gives you an interactive prompt into which you can do various WordPress "things". One small annoyance is that it doesn't like multi-line entry. It treats every hit of the enter key as "plz run the codez" - so, at the end of this blog post, I've put the commands in copy-n-paste format. Once you've installed WP CLIP, go to the command line and run wp shell.…
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I like the JetPack related post functionality. But I wanted to customise it far beyond what the default code allows for. So here's how I went from this: To this: Documentation The complete documentation for related posts is pretty easy to follow. This is an adaptation of "Use Jetpack_RelatedPosts_Raw to build your own list of Related Posts". Remove the automatic placement You can turn…
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There's a popular saying; "No One Wants a Drill. What They Want Is the Hole". It's a pithy (and broadly) correct statement. But I don't think it goes far enough. Let's apply the Five Whys method to the issue: No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole. No one wants a hole. What they want is a picture hook. No one wants a picture hook. What they want is art hanging on the walls. No one…
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It's always a bit concerning when a new icon suddenly appears at the top of your phone's screen. Without any warning, my ageing OnePlus 5T - which now runs LineageOS - started showing this: I know that, from right to left, it is showing me my battery percentage, WiFi strength, and that I'm using work mode. But what's the weird circle? ZOOM! ENHANCE! Well, that's not much help, is it! …
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I love my Linux laptop. But, once in a while, it forgets it has a keyboard. I wake it from a little nap and it's all like "no, sir! no keyboards here! just use a mouse please!" Logging in is pretty simple. Pop_OS has an on-screen keyboard which lets me hunt-n-peck P4ssW0rd123! into the box. But then I'm stuck. I can launch apps - but I can't type into them. The on-screen keyboard only seems…
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I'm writing this post in the hope someone will rip off my idea and start selling it on Ali Express. Many years ago, I got a "Pressy". It was a little dongle which fitted into your phone's headphone jack. It had a single button on the top. It came with an app so when you tapped the button the app would do something. For example, tap once to open email, double-tap to switch to flight mode, etc. …
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The recent news that MoneyDashboard is suddenly shutting down has exposed a gap in the way OpenBanking works. It is simply impossible for a user to get read-only access to their own data without using an aggregator. And there are very few aggregators around. Why is it impossible for me to get programmatic access to my own data? There are two interlinked reasons which I'd like to discuss. …
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If you use WordPress's HTML5 comments, there's an annoying little gotcha. There's a four year old bug which prevents client-side form validation. HTML allows <input> elements to have a required attribute. In theory, that means the form shouldn't submit until the input is filled in. Sadly, WordPress uses novalidate on the form - as the name suggests it stops any validation. But! WordPress is…
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The UK has what is known as a "Standard Scale" of fines for criminal acts. For example, breaking the law may incur "a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale". Part of the reasoning behind this, so I understand, is to make it simpler for the Government to update the value of those fines. Rather than having to change every law in the land - and have tedious votes on them - it's possible…
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If you've ever learned Mandarin Chinese, you'll know about "measure words". They're the sort of thing that trip up all new learners of the language. While 个 (gè) can be used as a generic measure word, using it everywhere makes you sound like an idiot (according to my old teacher). So you learn to use 个 for people, 包 for packets, and 根 for things which are long and thin. English has a similar con…
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After watching the BBC comedy series The Cleaner staring Greg Davies, I was surprised to learn that it was actually a remake of a German comedy series called Der Tatortreiniger. I don't think I've ever seen a German sitcom before, so I found the US DVDs (which is the only way to watch it with English subtitles) and gave it a go. It is fantastisch! It veers between farce, satire, and slapstick…
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