My doctor told me that sitting at a desk all day was slowly killing me. So I purchased a standing desk adapter. Then my doctor said I ought to take better care of my feet. So I purchased a massaging foot mat to go with my standing desk. Now my doctor says that I need to do more exercise rather than standing still all day. So I purchased a standing desk treadmill. I suspect my doctor might work …
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I was speaking to the absolute epitome of a pub bore. Flapping his jaws about how the problem with the NHS was too many admin staff doing absolutely nothing. "Quite right!" I said, feverishly agreeing with his red-faced ranting, "Nurses should spend less time helping patients and more time ordering bandages!" He paused, slightly, as the gears in his brain started grinding. "Well, no, not like…
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We recently upgraded our home solar storage to 4.8kWh. The battery has sensors to detect how much solar power we're generating, and how much electricity we're buying from (or selling to) the grid. That means... GRAPHS AND STATISTICS! Our battery was commissioned just after midday. This graph shows: 1630 - it was fully charged. 2000 - the sun had set and the battery started discharging into…
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I have upgradeitis. If something newer and shinier comes out, my stupid monkey-brain compels me to buy it. Seven years ago, we installed a solar battery. It was part of an experimental project which looked at creating a community power-grid, so it came at a subsidised price. As I explained to BBC Click, the 2kWh capacity was reasonable - but I expected the future would bring higher capacity,…
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This is ridiculously niche. If this is of help to anyone other than to me... please shout! The IntenseDebate comment system is slowly dying. It hasn't received any updates from Automattic for years. Recently it stopped being able to let users submit new comments. So I've switched to Commentics which is a self-hosted PHP / MySQL comment system. It's lightweight, pretty good at respecting users'…
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I'm a little behind on my reading - I've been busy, OK! This is a collection of tales from 2014. Which means it isn't in the shadow of a damned pandemic, lunatic president, or any of the other modern horrors which have caused shockwaves to authors' psyches. I love short stories. There's absolutely no commitment. I'm not going to be tricked into buying endless sequels of declining quality. …
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I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs! You see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. What a world! This is the MOKiN USB-C Triple-Display Docking Station - MODK1402. It's a bit over £100 depending on …
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My good friend Jess wrote this a little while ago: Jessica Rose@jesslynnroseThe function of a system is its output.If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business.If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy...❤️ 2,323💬 23🔁 013:19 - Thu 07 January 2021 The whole thre…
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Many gallons of digital ink spilled at Google's plans for "Web Environment Integrity" which - depending on who you believe - is either an entirely reasonable proposal to protect users or a devious plan to add DRM to the entire web. (It's the latter, obviously.) We'll never know exactly whether users want this because Google is pathologically adverse to performing or publishing user research. …
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Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again! That's a rallying cry I can get behind. Willy wrote for the groundlings - plenty of sex and violence, interspersed with fart jokes and casual xenophobia. When your audience are drunk and violent, you really need to bring your best rhyming couplets. Shitfaced Shakespeare knows its West End audience have had a few refreshments before the show. Their twist is - so…
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Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off on a journey, it is worth seeing if anyone else has tried this before. I found David Pustansky's First Folio Font.…
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Not everyone can see the images you post online. They may have vision problems, they may have a slow connection, or they might be using a text-only browser. How can we let them know what the image shows? The answer is alt text. In HTML we can add a snippet of text to aid accessibility. For example <img src="monalisa.jpg" alt="A painting of the Mona Lisa."> Most social networks will let users…
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