It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between us, just enough cash to rent a newly released movie. Eight of us pile into the local Blockbuster and begin to…
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Problem: My wife and I are going on a long plane journey and don't have seats next to each other. How can we communicate? Constraints: The plane WiFi is ruinously expensive. The in-seat messaging service isn't private. We both have Android phones. Preferences: Open Source. Secure. Easy to use. Solution: Use Bluetooth messaging app Briar. The Good The app was pretty easy to set up. Enter a…
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Another short story. This time in the form of a screenplay - formatted with screenplay.css. What do the algorithms get up to behind our backs? The Life Script 🔗 A play for algorithms 🔗 SCENE I 🔗 INTERIOR A DULL LOOKING OFFICE. A BLUE LIGHT SUFFUSES THE STAGE. TWO ALGORITHMS SIT ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER, EACH ENGROSSED IN THEIR COMPUTE…
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I have never felt less like a human being than while reading this book. I don't mind video-games, I find them mildly diverting. I've never gotten in to massively multiplayer online games (unless you count Twitter). I just don't see what's appealing about them. Why would I want a bunch of teenagers screaming racial slurs at me when I'm trying to relax? The book says "reality is broken" - but it…
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Originally posted as part of HTML Hell's advent calendar. While browsing Mastodon late one night, I came across this excellent blog post called HTML is all you need to make a website. It describes a few websites which are pure HTML. No CSS and no JS. And I thought… do you even need HTML to make a website? A few hours later, I launched the NO-HT.ML website. Proving, once and for all, that you d…
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How many times can you go back to the well before it is completely dry? With Kevin Smith, it's always once more. I remember watching the original Clerks about a hundred years ago at university. It was a cheap & daring movie then - and remains a mainstay of what you can do if you give a bored kid a camera. Kevin Smith's movies are uneven. He writes an amazing script - but give him a cast of…
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Winter has come! And with it the risk of power-cuts. Thankfully, we already have a Uninteruptable Power Supply for vital things like WiFi and security. But what about lights? Hurrah for candles! They're not just for birthday cakes, you know. But how do you light candles? I vaguely remember something about rubbing two stones together? But who can be bothered with that! "What about matches?" I…
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I thoroughly enjoyed the first Red Matter VR game, so I leapt at the sequel when it was on offer. What's it like? Exactly the same as the first. Lots of creepy corridors, a range of puzzles, and a sedate-ish journey. You're exploring an abandoned space-station, looking for clues and trying to figure out what happened. It's a completely linear journey, and consists of a series of locked-room…
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I'm chuffed to bits to announce that I was recently elected to chair the BCS's Open Source community group! The British Computer Society is an august body, and the OSSG have put on some brilliant talks in the last few years. But I'd like to shake things up a little. I want us to move away from doing talks to a small group of London-centric folk. I want us to spread the message of open source…
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The inimitable Simon Willison has a brilliant presentation all about managing side projects: It is all good advice. But I gently disagree with the slide which says: Avoid side projects with user accounts If it has user accounts it’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job I get the sentiment. Storing passwords securely is hard. Dealing with users changing their names is hard. Updating avatars …
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Computer Science has two canonical "hard problems": cache invalidation naming things off-by-one errors Let's talk about how we name unique items in Federated services - for example, posts on a social media service. If you have only one service, it's pretty easy. Every time a new entry is created in a database, give it a sequential number. This becomes a problem at scale. If you have…
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Twitter's over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn't a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub! Anyway, that means there isn't one Mastodon website. There are many. There is only one Twitter. There is only one Facebook. There is only one Instagram. If you want to interact with Twitter/FB/Insta then you have to do it on…
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