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…
Continue reading →
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…
Continue reading →
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 …
Continue reading →
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…
Continue reading →
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…
Continue reading →
People contact me with all sorts of weird opportunities. Some are fun. Some are not. I've lost count of the number of NFT grifters who've asked me to "revolutionise" the art space. I'm generally not a fan. But I had one chat with someone who wanted to do something intriguing. They were worried about people right-clicking or screenshotting their precious images and had a plan to stop that. I…
Continue reading →
As long term readers know, I got married dressed as Darth Vader. After keeping my wedding suit in storage for far too long, I purchased a mannequin to display the costume. Ever since then, Vader has lurked behind me in my home office. Looming over my every decision. But a few weeks ago, the old chap took a tumble. A gust of wind caught his cape - NO CAPES - and sent him crashing to the…
Continue reading →
I don't know when social media influencers started banging on about Air Fryers. All I know is that they're the new hip thing and that I am easily influenced. Anyway, I saw this on sale and thought I'd take a punt on it. What's the worst that could happen? The technology is pretty basic. Point an over-powered hair-dryer into an enclosed space, have a motor gently stir the bowl, wait. Done. …
Continue reading →
I recently watched a brilliant documentary about the building of London's CrossRail system. It discussed many of the challenges involved with a "mega project" - and gave a little insight into what went wrong during construction. What struck me though, was how simple it seems to build an underground railway! Dig some tunnels Lay some tracks Done I mean, that's all it is when you get down to…
Continue reading →
After my blog post about recovering my accounts after a disaster, I followed the most repeated advice: Get two YubiKeys Associate them both with your accounts Keep one off-site in a safe location OK, done! My wife and I spend a very boring evening going through every single account we have which supports FIDO tokens with WebAuthN - about a dozen in total. We manually paired two keys each.…
Continue reading →
![I have to apologise for some delay in answering your obliging favor, in which you did me the honour of suggesting to me the manufacture of a [mechanical] Lawyer's Clerk. After much consideration, I regret that I have found it impossible to produce an article which should be satisfactory to myself, and to the profession. I have, however, been completely successful in the production of a New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer—adapted to all styles, and all subjects; pointed, pathetic, historic, silver-fork, and Minerva. I do not hesitate to lay before you a few of the flattering testimonials to its efficacy, which I have already received from those most competent to judge.](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/punch-fs8.png)
The Zeitgeist's newest toy is OpenAI's Chat Platform. So I asked it "Could you write a limerick about a man from Woking?" Sure, here's a limerick about a man from Woking: There once was a man from Woking Whose life was quite dull and uneventful He worked at the bank And liked to walk by the tank But never went out and got adventurous Note: Woking is a town in the county of Surrey, England. It…
Continue reading →
You know how it is, you buy one silly domain name and then you get an idea for loads more! A few weeks ago, I got https://⏻.ga/ - I think I'm the first person to get a domain name which uses a glyph from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block. How exciting! And that got me wondering… what other abuses of the Punycode algorithm can I whack into DNS? Well, here's some I whipped up using FreeNom …
Continue reading →
