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 tickbox option, only a WordPress filter so you'll have to add the following scrap of code to your…
Continue reading →
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 to developer tools. The last time I developed an Android app…
Continue reading →
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 typo, or a stray comma could break everything. The instructions our WebMaster provided were laughably unc…
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! Some just drive-by and make a single change, others stay for a…
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 first watched The Matrix. As a philosophy, it is a lot…
Continue reading →
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 colour is predominantly white. The issue is with the…
Continue reading →
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 small changes which make it easier for people to do the right thing. …
Continue reading →
I've just seen that I can now add sponsorship to my GitHub projects. Here's a quick guide to how it works: Repo settings There's now a new option in your repository settings. Tick the box and click the button. Easy! WTF is YAML? This is a bit of a weird one. To set up sponsorship, you have to hand-edit a YAML text file. I would have expected this to be a easy to use GUI. Or something to…
Continue reading →
I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at the copious mentions of systemd and freedesktop it's a Linux system! Hmmm... …
Continue reading →
A slightly tongue-in-cheek title for quite a serious subject. The South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust have a list of emergency defibrillators available for public use. To help raise awareness, they've released an app... South Central Ambulance Service@SCAS999Our new app, which locates over 600 AEDs, could help you save the life of a person suffering sudden cardiac arrest.…
Continue reading →
I'm very pleased to announce the launch of 莎士比亚.org - beautiful and readable copies of Shakespeare plays in Chinese. If you would like to help, the text is available on GitHub for people to correct. Why? I've long held a fascination with Shakespeare - hence the name of this website. At university I studied Mandarin as my minor degree. I was a clumsy student, but enjoyed the regularity and po…
Continue reading →
I recently got a MakeyMakey. It's a sort of ersatz USB keyboard that can be plugged into anything electrically conductive. I blogged about using it to control my Raspberry Pi using fruit and veg. I also blogged about controlling Android using a USB keyboard and mouse via a USB OTG cable. Hang on... the MakeyMakey is USB... Android can be controlled via USB... CAN I CONTROL MY ANDROID WITH…
Continue reading →
