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 each episode has a strong comic plot, plenty of chuckles, and general mayhem. Sure, a few of the…
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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 different from the old one. Signed in to a new Trello workspace - ditto. And started a video call with my…
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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 know what? I don't care. It is excellent. It made a 6 hour plane ride whizz by. It has just the…
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This guy's probably right - but there's no need for him to be such a dick about it. The book is about the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis which, simply put, says that the language people use changes the way they experience the world. McWhorter thinks this is bullshit - and goes through his reasoning in painstaking detail. It occasionally veers into personal attacks, which I found a little odd. K. David Harrison has posited that depicting language diversity as marvelously random, as I have, is “…
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About 2.5 years ago I proposed a small accessibility improvement to WordPress. It has taken a bit longer than I'd hoped but, as of WordPress 6.1 it has been merged! Now, if you're using the Classic editor, you'll get a larger and resizeable box for entering alt text. Because the text entry uses <textarea> most browsers will also show any spelling errors. Good spelling is essential for people who use text-to-speech to read out alt text. Huge thanks to the WordPress team for doing all the…
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(Welcome to #NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month. I'm publishing a new blog post every day in November.) My employer encourages employees to have "career conversations" with their line manager. And I hate it. I don't resent them for making me participate, and it's probably good for me to engage in a little introspection. But that doesn't mean I can't whine like a petulant toddler. Since my dreams of being the first astronaut to win an Oscar® crumbled to dust, I haven't known what I want …
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There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff. Bits of it are just sublimely beautiful. Listening to George Harrison's first performance of I, Me, Mine is breathtaking. And then it is devastating to watch the fall-out as the emotional…
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Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM's wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and…
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Ocean is... breathtaking. As is foreshadowed in the first few minutes, it is like a stage version of The Dark Crystal. An explosion of supernatural weirdness, eerie music, and baffling puppetry. It's also full of subtle magic. I mean that literally. Props appear in the blink of an eye, characters change without you noticing, the whole set comes alive. It is reminiscent of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child". Except it's actually good! Whereas Cursed Child threw all its tricks onto the stage…
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As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was unsure how I was going to complete a security exam due to ProctorU not supporting Linux. I'm delighted to say that the examiners - APMG - were understanding about my plight. They were aware of ProctorU's limitations and had a workaround. They had me install Beyond Trust's "bomgar" Linux client - which is a simple Remote Desktop app. It was preconfigured with my invigilator's details and they were able to remotely see my screen and control my…
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Way back in 2010, Paul Battley was blogging about device discrimination on the Internet. The new iPlayer service was using TLS certificates to ensure that only specific devices were able to stream media from the BBC's servers. That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a specially certified device. Well, that's what everyone thought! A few weeks ago, I found this curious…
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