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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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.…
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![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…
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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 …
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This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: This means readers of my post can see where it has been mentioned around the web. They can read your article after reading mine. Nice! I've also set up a "bridge"…
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I do not care for the game of Rugby. After many wet and cold days on the school sports field, I had any latent enthusiasm for it beaten out of me. There is nothing you or anyone else can say which will convince me to take an interest in it. You may feel the same way about a specific sport, or the Great British Bake Off, or Linux. That's fine. We're all different. This can be a problem on…
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This is a short piece of mostly fiction. It looks at the secret life of data and algorithms. Enjoy! Data Becomes Her I never knew my mother. OK, no one ever really knows their mum. But I never even got to meet mine. She made it clear at the hospital that she'd smother me to death if she was ever left alone with a mewling baby. Looking back, I think I might have preferred that fate. I never…
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Image files are a grid of pixels - each pixel contains colour information. But they don't just have to contain colour information. Here are some thoughts on other things that a future image format might contain. What exists already? A typical bitmap image looks like this under the hood: 0 1 2 3 0 Black Red Red Blue 1 Red White Blue Yellow 2 Orange Purple Green…
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Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a Referer. This says to the other site "Hey, I came here using a link on shkspr.mobi". This is useful because it lets…
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