This is a retropost. It was written in 2022, but published later. Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode. Errr... OMG, yes! So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the…
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Wouldn't it be good if digital currencies worked offline? I'm going to talk through a proposed user experience, and then discuss how it would work in practice. Let us imagine a future digital currency ₢. It might be fiat, it might be crypto, doesn't really matter. Alice loads up a smartcard with ₢100 and locks it. Alice gives Bob the smartcard. Bob uses offline verification to see that the sma…
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They say that The Best Camera Is The One That's With You - the same is true of Raspberries Pi. As much as I'd love a 4B, they seem permanently sold out. So I dug through my scrapheap of old tech and resurrected an ancient Pi2. It's old, outdated, slow, with limited RAM, and has a bunch of much-abused GPIO pins. But it works and - crucially - is still supported by Home Assistant OS. Well...…
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I don't understand capitalists. Taylor Swift - the popular beat combo - wanted to sell tickets for her concert. She priced the tickets too low. People purchased the tickets and resold them at a higher price - up to $28,000. Tay-Tay's fans purchased the higher priced tickets. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Why didn't the organisers of the concert just sell the tickets at the…
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This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect on how different authors tackle the same subject. The stories alternate between Chinese authors and English-speaking…
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I'm a big fan of Untappd. It's a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I've drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints! After checking in, the app automatically posts to Twitter. But who wants to prop up Alan's failing empire? Not me! So here's some quick code to…
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The last part of my MSc Apprenticeship was my EPA Professional Discussion. It's designed to be a 90 minute chat to make sure you've actually learned something on the course. The official guidance is available. But I thought you might find it helpful to see the questions that I was asked. Disclaimer I jotted these down while doing the assessment. They are relevant to the Digital Technology…
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I was looking to buy the latest Zelda game for my wife as a present (Shhh! Don't tell her!) and it was SIXTY BLOODY QUID! For a video game! That seems extortionate. I remember, when I were a lad, video games cost... wait? Do I remember? Or is it just rose tinted glasses? I remember saving up my pocket-money for weeks on end, and getting an advance on my birthday money, in order to be able to…
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A few weeks ago, I received a billing email from my phone provider O2. While glancing at it, I noticed all the images were broken. Viewing the source of the email showed that they were all coming from http:// mcsaatchi-email-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/o2/... What happens if we visit that domain? Ah, the dreaded "The specified bucket does not exist" error. At some point the images were…
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One of the things about AI is that it is brilliant at fooling us into seeing what we want to see. That's even more true when you're an investor who has poured millions into it. The journalist Martin Bryant has posted what Bing's A.I appears to know about him: My opinion of him is that he is a knowledgeable and influential figure in the tech and media industry. He has a lot of experience and…
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Every day is a school day. I'd recently seen a post about highlighting images without alt text. That got me thinking. Is it possible to style alt text? Yes. Yes it is. And it's pretty simple. Well, OK, it's CSS, so simple is a relative term! Let's take a broken image like <img src="http://example.com/bigfoot.jpg" alt="The best quality photo of bigfoot!" /> There are two slightly different…
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Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them! This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing - calls, texts, and..." And... And that's where the problem was. That third thing was different for…
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