Numbers are hard. I don't mean that in a snarky way. It's easy to visualise a bunch of bananas, but it's almost impossible for most people to comprehend how many bananas are shipped around the world each year. It's easy to understand your pay-cheque, but understanding a national budget pales in comparison. So British Gas announced profits of £969 million for the first 6 months of the year. Is …
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Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in song. Reminding us (in updated English) that we all know what's coming. It had…
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I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're Gone" by Bryan Adams (featuring Mel C) - when I noticed this: It appears …
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This is an interesting - although frustrating at times - book. It asks a pretty big question - how do we embed justice in to the ways we designs apps and services? I couldn't find much to disagree with (although I have the odd quibble) but some of the language it uses is very exclusionary unless you're terminally online in very specific communities. "Undocuqueer", "heteropatriarchy",…
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My CDN just asked me for all my Twitter API keys... WTF? This would give them complete access to my app's Twitter account, the ability to send and receive messages, and anything else that my API key allows. Giving them - or anyone - the entire set of credentials would be a very bad idea. What's going on? Twitter's slow-motion collapse and hostility to developers is causing a whole bunch of…
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I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the ability to measure heart-rate and a bunch of other things. They think that athletes …
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The other day, my HP M140w printer stopped working. The day before, it printed fine. This time, nothing. I rebooted, reset, updated, and performed all the modern rituals associated with uncooperative hardware. I logged into to the printer's webserver and clicked around the admin panel. On one page, I found an error message. So, like any self-respecting geek, I ignored what it said and Googled…
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My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and they can pay well in "exposure". But OpenBenches is reaching a tipping point where it is slowly overwhelming us. …
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One of the many great things about the Fediverse (Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc) is that your account is portable. Let's say you're bob@social.boring and, one day, you decide to move your account to foxyfun@furryextreme.yif. Well, with a few clicks of a button, all of your old followers are now following your brand new account. You're still following all your old friends. The accounts you…
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There's a link, right here ➡️⬅️ but, if you're on a touchscreen, you can't tap on it. Using a mouse? Nope, that won't work either. The only way to navigate to it is via keyboard navigation. Hit your Tab ⭾ button! There's a little bit of me wants to build an entire website which can only be navigated by keyboard. What would the world look like if Engelbart never invented the mouse? Or if Johnson…
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Much hullabaloo out of America. Apparently elite universities can no long engage in "Affirmative Action". How can they now admit a balanced and fair selection of the population? My suggestion is, as always, sortition. Let me explain. Most top flight universities around the world have the same problem. They have space for 100 students on a specific course. 15,000 apply. How do they select the…
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I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of course Open Source projects will follow the maxim of "go where your audience…
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