Jon Hicks has a lovely blog post about his site's design. In it, he briefly touches on something I find interesting: Blogging like it's 1972 I also finally realised that there's nothing stopping me from adding journal posts dated from before I started blogging. So I'm going to start adding key life moments as much as I can. A blog isn't an immutable chain of events. There's nothing to stop us travelling in time. When I go digital sperlunking though my history, I often find interesting…
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My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules). Last year, I read an astonishing 85 books! That is too many books. This year I was doing lots of reading for my MSc - which was mostly academic papers. I also didn't have any long relaxing breaks. But, nevertheless, I'm happy to have read 42 books. Not bad! A few stats. The gender split was roughly 50:50. Some of the books were compilations and I think a few of the authors are non-binary. I'm pretty happy with that balance. As per my…
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It's my birthday! Therefore it marks the end of another year of me hurtling around Earth's yellow sun. So, as is customary, here's my year in review. (more…) …
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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 value-proposition is simple. It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data …
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I'm off to a wedding in Canada which means dealing with the bureaucracy of the Electronic Travel Authorisation. The form asked me if I'd ever had a previous visa for Canadaland. As it happens, yes! I spent a year studying in Ottawa. Well then, said the form, you'd better tell me your old visa number. Ah… In amongst the various shoe boxen which serve as my ersatz filing system lay a tatty old passport. Crumpled in it was a fading visa, the ink smeared with a barely legible reference number. I…
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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 order to confirm the reset, you need to press... Volume up! The Oculus chat team were very helpful.…
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As regular readers will know, I love adding Semantic things to my blog. The standard WordPress comments HTML isn't very semantic - so I thought I'd change that. Here's some code which you can add to your blog's theme - an an explanation of how it works. The aim is to end up with some HTML which looks like this (edited for brevity): <li itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Comment" itemid="#246827"> <article> <time…
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Twenty-Twenty-Two is Twenty-Twenty-NEW. Yup - time for me to regenerate into a new job. To recap - five years ago, I started at GDS in the Open Standards Team. Two-and-a-bit years later, I took a 6 months secondment to NHSX to do Open Standards. Eighteen months later, they finally let me go. I joined the Data Standards Authority to do - you guessed it - Open Standards! I've been banging on about Open Standards for what feels like forever. I've worked with a vast array of vastly talented…
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At the start of 2020, for some strange reason, I decided to publish a new blog post every single day of the year. And, a third of the way through that, COVID struck. In a way, it was good for my motivation. I didn't have any fun and exciting trips to go on - so I had plenty of free time. But there's only so long you can stare at four walls while your friends are sick and dying, without going out of your mind. So I started buying random tech to review. And then companies started sending me…
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Last year, I set myself a challenge to only read books by women. I got through 42 books - not bad for a pandemic! This year I was more relaxed - I just picked books which took my fancy. And a few that I needed to read for my MSc. Quite a few came from NetGalley which gives out Advance Reader Copies. So I got to read unpublished books for free in exchange for a review. My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules) and, I'm somewhat surprised to say, I read 85 books! I try to spend what …
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It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. Like lots of you, I guess, it kind of feels like a year of stasis and stagnation. The last year seems to have whizzed by. Most of it spent in the same house - with only occasional forays to OutsideLand. A couple of day-trips to the coast, a few doctor's appointments, and one funeral. I feel like we got off lightly. I've completed one year of my MSc. I have mixed…
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The one thing I know about myself is that I hate introspection. So, fair warning, this will be a mopey and self-indulgent post. As part of my MSc, I have to create and discuss my Personal Development Plan in relation to my Career and I'm… stumped! I've never known what I wanted to be when I grow up. Sure, vague dreams of being a starship pilot (unlikely) or an actor (failed) - but other than that? Just… I dunno. Computers? My "career" so far has been drifting from gig to gig going "Oh, that l…
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