I'm just getting started with the Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook Meta. It is amazing. OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch. What Government services could / should be run in the Metaverse? Obviously, the answer is "none". Sure, you could create a virtual job centre, housing office, or DMV…
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Skip to instructions I bought a Meta Quest 2 second hand from a child who was bored of it. The Quest was in excellent condition but, after a few days use, it became clear that the physical volume up key was broken. There are lots of tips and trips for fixing this. One of which is factory resetting. I turned off the Quest, held volume down and power, and got into the factory reset screen. In…
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11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But apps were the hip "new" thing, apparently. And there were a lot of people who…
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Welcome to my shop! We have everything that you want to buy. We accept cash, cards, and any discount coupons or vouchers from any other shop! Got a 10% off with Amazon? We'll take it! Buy 1 get 3 free from CostCo? Roll right up! Free TV with every HDMI cable purchased from Fred's Electronics Warehouse? Give it here! Does that sound likely? Stores normally accept manufacturer discounts quite…
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my final assignment! It's from the PP2 module - where I take some CPD related to my profession. I picked Blockchain. Because I hate myself. I've blogged about the course itself. The middle two parts of this paper are about that - why I chose it and how I put it …
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A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to < to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search for ... returned no results</h2> And, somehow, the parser was g…
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I'm playing with the Oculus Quest 2. It's quite good fun. I was wandering around the International Space Station, delighting in being unshackled from gravity's harsh bonds. I came to the cupola observation module and it was so beautiful that my face broke into an involuntary smile. And it hurt. The current range of VR headsets have to be strapped tight to your face. In order to prevent your eyes …
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I've been a vegetarian since the turn of the century. I always felt like I should probably be vegan but, you know, cheese is delicious. Then, without warning, my body decided that producing the human lactase enzyme was for losers. Stupid body! No more cheese for me 😭 The UK has come on leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. When I first became a salad-aficionado, the vegetarian options in most r…
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I'm a huge fan of the US Braille Institute's Atkinson Hyperlegible font. This blog is typeset in it, and I think it looks gorgeous. It's also specifically designed to be readable to people with visual impairments: Atkinson Hyperlegible differentiates common misinterpreted letters and numbers using various design techniques: There's only one problem, the font was released a few years ago and…
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Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men. But it doesn't have to be this way. Instead, ingrained ideas about men and women continue to shape our economic decisions; favouring men and leading us to the same tired set of solutions. For too long we have underestimated the consequences of sexism in our economy, and the way it …
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Google has recently increased the price it pays out to security researchers who responsibly disclose a vulnerability. That got me thinking. Is money the best thing with which to reward people? There's an interesting (if a little silly) economics paper about why gift giving is inefficient. The crux of the argument, as I understand it, is that gift-givers rarely know what recipients need or…
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Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster. While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper authored by one JC Shakespeare. As you can probably tell from that snippet, there is something a bit hinkey going on here. Here's the page that…
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