1861: "On the one hand, slavery is bad. On the other hand, cheap cotton from the South keeps the UK economy working." 2022: "On the one hand, invading Ukraine is bad. On the other hand, cheap gas from Russia keeps the UK economy working." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose… This is an incredible book. I knew very little about the American Civil War - this is a thorough history of that blo…
Continue reading →
Because I don't trust Alan, the Hyperprat who now runs Twitter, I decided to download my Twitter archive before setting my account to dormant. About a decade ago, I wrote about how the Twitter archive works and where it is deficient. Things have got better, but there are still annoying limitations. For example, Hannah Kolbeck - founder of the Alt Text Reminder Bot recently pointed out that…
Continue reading →
Two years ago to the day, I built Twistory - a service for seeing what you posted on Twitter on this day in previous years. If you've ever used Facebook, you'll know how it is supposed to work. You see posts which show that exactly 5 years ago you were starting a new job, 6 years ago you were at a wedding, etc. The Twitter version never really worked properly because the Twitter API doesn't…
Continue reading →
This is an astoundingly delightful book. It takes Nagel's classic question "What is it like to be a bat?" and takes us in to the heart of the hive. Humans can only understand our own lived reality. So here we have bees' behaviour translated into schemes and intrigues which would not be out of place in a medieval court. Bees wings are roaring engines, and their enemies are the hoards of…
Continue reading →
This was a rare DNF for me. I'm sure there's a brilliant story in there somewhere but it became too much of a chore to read. The prose is excruciatingly complicated. Half a dozen times in one page I had to use my eReader's dictionary to look up an archaic word. Perhaps that's part of the metastory? How much we rely on our external brains. The book is weirdly formatted. It uses different fonts…
Continue reading →
I am weak. I flounced off WhatsApp at the start of the pandemic due to Meta's shitty policies. Many of my friends made the move to Signal and some stuck with Telegram. But lots of them preferred WhatsApp and didn't want yet another inbox - especially one which was only connected to their weirdo privacy freak friends. I like Signal. It does everything I need. But some people are reluctant to move …
Continue reading →
WordPress's Jetpack plugin allows you to easily syndicate your blog to Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Email, and a few other services. But there's no native way to publish directly to your Mastodon feed. This is a guide to how I got my blog to publish every new post to Mastodon with a nicely formatted preview. This uses Jan's "Share on Mastodon" plugin which you'll need to install and configure. …
Continue reading →
I like beer. I like the Internet. What if I could get beer using the Internet?!?! A few years ago I purchased a mixed crate of beer online. I unticked all the checkboxes for marketing messages - but incautiously allowed them to send me special offers. Every couple of months, they'd send me an email offering discount beer. And I'd ignore it. Mostly because I was still slowly working my way…
Continue reading →
After spending 2020 watching every episode of Frasier, we thought we'd binge watch its predecessor sitcom "Cheers". It's a tough watch. It obeys all the familiar tropes of a sitcom - a static location, characters drawn in broad strokes, and whacky banter. On paper, it's great. But on screen... Look, let's get this out of the way - Cheers is pretty funny! We're only on the first 3 seasons, but…
Continue reading →
One Friday last year, I posted some farewell messages in Slack. Removed myself from a bunch of Trello cards. Had a quick video call with the team. And then logged out of my laptop. I walked out of my home office and sat in my garden with a beer. The following Monday I opened the door to the same office. I logged in to the same laptop. I logged into a new Slack - which wasn't remarkably…
Continue reading →
Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The val…
Continue reading →
Andy Weir has hit on a winning formula. To wit: Somehow I, an otherwise unremarkable man, has to SAVE ALL OF HUMANITY! OH NO! Something is BROKEN! I'll use SCIENCE to fix it! Pop culture reference. OH NO! Something else is broken. I'll use SCIENCE to fix it! The science didn't work!!! ... and repeat until (spoilers) the day is saved. Look, this is basically the same as The Martian. And, you…
Continue reading →
