One of the things I loved about Facebook was its “On This Day” feature. There’s something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Twitter doesn’t have anything like that. So I built it. Introducing – Twistory.ml Stick your @ name in, hit the big button, and you’ll…
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A few weeks ago, I received an unsolicited email inviting me to try out an exciting new “quantum resistant” cryptography app called Cyph. Because I hate myself, I signed up. Of particular interest to me was the fact that the homepage loudly proclaimed that it was “Open Source” – and had a public GitHub repo.…
Continue reading →A question to the void. Are you entitled to get the source history of open source projects? Lots of Open Source licences give the consumer of software the right to a copy of the source code. For example, GPLv3 says that distributors of software have to: give anyone who possesses the object code … a…
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If you have the Akismet spam plugin for WordPress, you’ll be familiar with this problem. When your mouse pointer goes over any URL, you get a large website preview taking over parts of your screen. I asked for a way to turn this off and I’m happy to say the developers listened! Sadly, there’s no…
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This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering – specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don’t think we ever believed in a user-centred approach…
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I’m going to revisit an argument I had in… Ooooh… 2001ish? I wanted to make some edits to my university’s fledging student union website. In order to do this, I needed to learn the arcane art of SSH. This was one of my first introductions to text based config files. I was horrified! A single…
Continue reading →I love reading Changelogs – but I hate writing them. Here’s what’s changed with SuperTinyIcons since I launched it in 2017. It’s a project to create SVG logos of popular services in under 1KB. Maximum filesize is 1,023 bytes. New Contributors! What started off as just me noodling around, has now attracted over 60 contributors!…
Continue reading →Imagine that you’re a spotty 16 year-old. You’ve just discovered philosophy. You will almost certainly have a conversation like this… Dude… DUDE! What if… What if, like, we’re all just brains in a jar and, like, a machine is projecting reality around us…? Whoa…! I bet you’ve had that conversation with someone. Probably after you…
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In order to provide a video playback UI, WordPress uses the excellent MediaElement library. Recently, I discovered a slightly annoying flaw – I couldn’t see the play button! Here’s a screenshot of the video UI. In the middle of this screenshot is a white play button. I have trouble seeing it, because the video’s background…
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My mate, the accessibility specialist Léonie Watson, has this to say about how we improve the world, piece-by-piece: Accessibility doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be a little bit better than yesterday. Source: Twitter Damn straight! One of the best ways we can make tomorrow slightly better than today is by making…
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