Movie Review · 3 comments · 300 words
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…
Continue reading →gadget review usb-c · 4 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~299 times
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…
Continue reading →Game Review metaverse oculus review vr · 400 words · Viewed ~262 times
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 →bcs Open Source · 7 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~203 times
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 →Auth0 OpenBenches Social Media · 7 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~450 times
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 →fediverse MastodonAPI · 1 comment · 500 words · Viewed ~1,294 times
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 →fediverse mastodon ReDeCentralize · 22 comments · 1,000 words · Viewed ~4,106 times
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 →code drm images · 14 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~1,855 times
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 →darth vader Star Wars · 3 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~289 times
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 →food gadget review · 5 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~489 times
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 →rant · 4 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~316 times
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 →fido security WebAuthn yubikey · 11 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~570 times
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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