What can I possibly say about Bored Gay Werewolf, which caught my attention
with the garish colours of its front cover when I saw it in Waterstones and whose blurb suggested that it might, perhaps, be a queer fantasy romp with a Buffy-esque sense of
humour.
Werewolf? Sure, it’s got a few of those. There’s even a bit of fun, offbeat humour each time the protagonist reflects on their curious monthly cycle and tries to work
out whether they attacked or even killed anybody this time around. But mostly it’s not a story about werewolf: it’s a story about a slacker who gets suckered into a pyramid scheme, with
just a hint of lycanthropy around the fringes.
Gay? I mean: the protagonist’s gay, and many of their friends are queer… and while the representation is good, sexuality doesn’t feel like it’s a particularly
significant issue to the storyline. I enjoyed the parallels that were drawn between Brian’s coming-out as gay versus his (for most of the story) closeted werewolf nature – which even
though I saw them coming from the first chapter onwards were still well-presented – but apart from that it almost felt like gayness wasn’t a central theme to the story. A smidge of
homophobia, some queer culture references, and a throwaway Grindr hookup with a closeted MSM dude do not contribute enough homosexuality to justify “gay” being the largest, pinkest word
on a novel’s cover, if you ask me.
Bored? I was, at some points in the book, but I’m not convinced that’s what was intended. The pacing’s a little inconsistent: a long and
drawn-out description of an exercise routines overshadows an exploration of the impact of werewolf super-senses, for example. And a long-foreshadowed fight scene finale feels like it’s
over in an instant (with a Van Helsing ex Machina twist that felt simultaneously like the brakes being slammed on and a set-up for an inevitable sequel).
I sound pretty negative about it, I’m sure. But it’s not actually bad. It’s just not actually good, either. It’s a passable, middle-of-the-road time-filler
with an interesting hook, a few funny set pieces (I laughed out loud a couple of times, for sure), and a set of misfit characters who spend most of the book feeling a little…
incomplete? Though it’s possible that latter point’s at-least partially deliberate, as this is without a doubt a “Gen-Z Grows Up” story. Maybe if I were younger and didn’t yet have my
shit together the story would appeal better.
I was updating my CV earlier this week in anticipation of applying for a handful of interesting-looking roles1
and I was considering quite how many different tech stacks I claim significant experience in, nowadays.
There are languages I’ve been writing in every single week for the last 15+ years, of course, like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript. And my underlying fundamentals are solid.
But is it really fair for me to be able to claim that I can code in Java, Go, or Python: languages that I’ve not used commercially within the last 5-10 years?
What kind of developer writes the same program six times… for a tech test they haven’t even been asked to do? If you guessed “Dan”, you’d be correct!
Obviously, I couldn’t just let that question lie2.
Let’s find out!
I fished around on Glassdoor for a bit to find a medium-sized single-sitting tech test, and found a couple of different briefs that I mashed together to create this:
In an object-oriented manner, implement an LRU (Least-Recently Used) cache:
The size of the cache is specified at instantiation.
Arbitrary objects can be put into the cache, along with a retrieval key in the form of a string. Using the same string, you can get the objects back.
If a put operation would increase the number of objects in the cache beyond the size limit, the cached object that was least-recently accessed (by either a
put or get operation) is removed to make room for it.
putting a duplicate key into the cache should update the associated object (and make this item most-recently accessed).
Both the get and put operations should resolve within constant (O(1)) time.
Add automated tests to support the functionality.
My plan was to implement a solution to this challenge, in as many of the languages mentioned on my CV as possible in a single sitting.
But first, a little Data Structures & Algorithms theory:
The Theory
Simple case with O(n) complexity
The simplest way to implement such a cache might be as follows:
Use a linear data structure like an array or linked list to store cached items.
On get, iterate through the list to try to find the matching item.
If found: move it to the head of the list, then return it.
On put, first check if it already exists in the list as with get:
If it already exists, update it and move it to the head of the list.
Otherwise, insert it as a new item at the head of the list.
If this would increase the size of the list beyond the permitted limit, pop and discard the item at the tail of the list.
It’s simple, elegant and totally the kind of thing I’d accept if I were recruiting for a junior or graduate developer. But we can do better.
The problem with this approach is that it fails the requirement that the methods “should resolve within constant (O(1)) time”3.
Of particular concern is the fact that any operation which might need to re-sort the list to put the just-accessed item at the top
4. Let’s try another design:
Achieving O(1) time complexity
Here’s another way to implement the cache:
Retain cache items in a doubly-linked list, with a pointer to both the head and tail
Add a hash map (or similar language-specific structure) for fast lookups by cache key
On get, check the hash map to see if the item exists.
If so, return it and promote it to the head (as described below).
On put, check the hash map to see if the item exists.
If so, promote it to the head (as described below).
If not, insert it at the head by:
Updating the prev of the current head item and then pointing the head to the new item (which will have the old head item as its
next), and
Adding it to the hash map.
If the number of items in the hash map would exceed the limit, remove the tail item from the hash map, point the tail at the tail item’s prev, and
unlink the expired tail item from the new tail item’s next.
To promote an item to the head of the list:
Follow the item’s prev and next to find its siblings and link them to one another (removes the item from the list).
Point the promoted item’s next to the current head, and the current head‘s prev to the promoted item.
Point the head of the list at the promoted item.
Looking at a plate of pointer-spaghetti makes me strangely hungry.
It’s important to realise that this alternative implementation isn’t better. It’s just different: the “right” solution depends on the use-case5.
The Implementation
That’s enough analysis and design. Time to write some code.
Turns out that if you use enough different languages in your project, GitHub begins to look like itwants to draw a rainbow.
Picking a handful of the more-useful languages on my CV6,
I opted to implement in:
Ruby (with RSpec for testing and Rubocop for linting)
PHP (with PHPUnit for testing)
TypeScript (running on Node, with Jest for testing)
Java (with JUnit for testing)
Go (which isn’t really an object-oriented language but acts a bit like one, amirite?)
Python (probably my weakest language in this set, but which actually ended up with quite a tidy solution)
Naturally, I open-sourced everything if you’d like to see for yourself. It all works, although if you’re actually in need of such a
cache for your project you’ll probably find an alternative that’s at least as good (and more-likely to be maintained!) in a third-party library somewhere!
What did I learn?
This was actually pretty fun! I might continue to expand my repo by doing the same challenge with a few of the other languages I’ve used professionally at some point or
another7.
And there’s a few takeaways I got from this experience –
Lesson #1: programming more languages can make you better at all of them
As I went along, one language at a time, I ended up realising improvements that I could make to earlier iterations.
For example, when I came to the TypeScript implementation, I decided to use generics so that the developer can specify what kind of objects they want to store in the cache,
rather than just a generic Object, and better benefit type-safety. That’s when I remembered that Java supports generics, too, so I went back and used them there as well.
In the same way as speaking multiple (human) languages or studying linguistics can help unlock new ways of thinking about your communication, being able to think in terms of multiple
different programming languages helps you spot new opportunities. When in 2020 PHP 8 added nullsafe operators, union types, and
named arguments, I remember feeling confident using them from day one because those features were already familiar to me from Ruby8, TypeScript9, and Python10,
respectively.
Lesson #2: even when I’m rusty, I can rely on my fundamentals
I’ve applied for a handful of jobs now, but if one of them had invited me to a pairing session on a language I’m rusty on (like Java!) I might’ve felt intimidated.
But it turns out I shouldn’t need to be! With my solid fundamentals and a handful of other languages under my belt, I understand when I need to step away from the code editor and hit
the API documentation. Turns out, I’m in a good position to demo any of my language skills.
I remember when I was first learning Go, I wanted to make use of a particular language feature that I didn’t know whether it had. But because I’d used that feature in Ruby, I knew what
to search for in Go’s documentation to see if it was supported (it wasn’t) and if so, what the syntax was11.
Lesson #3: structural rules are harder to gearshift than syntactic ones
Switching between six different languages while writing the same application was occasionally challenging, but not in the ways I expected.
I’ve had plenty of experience switching programming languages mid-train-of-thought before. Sometimes you just have to flit between the frontend and backend of your application!
But this time around I discovered: changes in structure are apparently harder for my brain than changes in syntax. E.g.:
Switching in and out of Python’s indentation caught me out at least once (might’ve been better if I took the time to install the language’s tools into my text editor first!).
Switching from a language without enforced semicolon line ends (e.g. Ruby, Go) to one with them (e.g. Java, PHP) had me make the compiler sad several times.
This gets even tougher when not writing the language but writing about the language: my first pass at the documentation for the Go version somehow ended up with
Ruby/Python-style #-comments instead of Go/Java/TypeScript-style //-comments; whoops!
I’m guessing that the part of my memory that looks after a language’s keywords, how a method header is structured, and which equals sign to use for assignment versus comparison… are
stored in a different part of my brain than the bit that keeps track of how a language is laid-out?12
Okay, time for a new job
I reckon it’s time I got back into work, so I’m going to have a look around and see if there’s any roles out there that look exciting to me.
If you know anybody who’s looking for a UK-based, remote-first, senior+, full-stack web developer with 25+ years experience and more languages than you can shake a stick at… point them at my CV, would you?
Footnotes
1 I suspect that when most software engineers look for a new job, they filter to the
languages, frameworks, they feel they’re strongest at. I do a little of that, I suppose, but I’m far more-motivated by culture, sector, product and environment than I am by the shape
of your stack, and I’m versatile enough that technology specifics can almost come second. So long as you’re not asking me to write VB.NET.
2 It’s sort-of a parallel to how I decided to check
the other week that my Gutenberg experience was sufficiently strong that I could write standard ReactJS, too.
3 I was pleased to find a tech test that actually called for an understanding of algorithm
growth/scaling rates, so I could steal this requirement for my own experiment! I fear that sometimes, in their drive to be pragmatic and representative of “real work”, the value of a
comprehension of computer science fundamentals is overlooked by recruiters.
4 Even if an algorithm takes the approach of creating a new list with the
inserted/modified item at the top, that’s still just a very-specific case of insertion sort when you think about it, right?
5 The second design will be slower at writing but faster at
reading, and will scale better as the cache gets larger. That sounds great for a read-often/write-rarely cache, but your situation may differ.
6 Okay, my language selection was pretty arbitrary. But if I’d have also come up with
implementations in Perl, and C#, and Elixir, and whatever else… I’d have been writing code all day!
7 So long as I’m willing to be flexible about the “object-oriented” requirement, there are
even more options available to me. Probably the language that I last wrote longest ago would be Pascal: I wonder how much of that I remember?
8 Ruby’s safe navigation/”lonely” operator did the same thing as PHP’s nullsafe operator
since 2015.
9 TypeScript got union types back in 2015, and apart from them being more-strictly-enforced they’re basically identical to
PHP’s.
10 Did you know that Python had keyword arguments since its very first public release
way back in 1994! How did it take so many other interpreted languages so long to catch up?
11 The feature was the three-way comparison or “spaceship operator”, in case you were wondering.
12 I wonder if anybody’s ever laid a programmer in an MRI machine while they code? I’d
be really interested to see if different bits of the brain light up when coding in functional programming languages than in procedural ones, for example!
The fundamental difference between streaming and downloading is what your device does with those frames of video:
Does it show them to you once and then throw them away? Or does it re-assemble them all back into a video file and save it into storage?
When you’re streaming on YouTube, the video player running on your computer retains a buffer of frames ahead and behind of your current position, so you can skip around easily: the
darker grey part of the timeline shows which parts of the video are stored on – that is, downloaded to – your computer.
Buffering is when your streaming player gets some number of frames “ahead” of where you’re watching, to give you some protection against connection issues. If your WiFi wobbles
for a moment, the buffer protects you from the video stopping completely for a few seconds.
But for buffering to work, your computer has to retain bits of the video. So in a very real sense, all streaming is downloading! The buffer is the part
of the stream that’s downloaded onto your computer right now. The question is: what happens to it next?
All streaming is downloading
So that’s the bottom line: if your computer deletes the frames of video it was storing in the buffer, we call that streaming. If it retains them in a file, we
call that downloading.
That definition introduces a philosophical problem. Remember that Vimeo checkbox that lets a creator decide whether people can (i.e. are allowed to) download their videos? Isn’t
that somewhat meaningless if all streaming is downloading.
Because if the difference between streaming and downloading is whether their device belonging to the person watching the video deletes the media when they’re done. And in
virtually all cases, that’s done on the honour system.
This kind of conversation happens, over the HTTP protocol, all the time. Probably most of the time the browser is telling the truth, but there’s no way to know for certain.
When your favourite streaming platform says that it’s only possible to stream, and not download, their media… or when they restrict “downloading” as an option to higher-cost paid plans…
they’re relying on the assumption that the user’s device can be trusted to delete the media when the user’s done watching it.
But a user who owns their own device, their own network, their own screen or speakers has many, many opportunities to not fulfil the promise of deleting media it after they’ve consumed
it: to retain a “downloaded” copy for their own enjoyment, including:
Intercepting the media as it passes through their network on the way to its destination device
Using client software that’s been configured to stream-and-save, rather than steam-and-delete, the content
Modifying “secure” software (e.g. an official app) so that it retains a saved copy rather than deleting it
Capturing the stream buffer as it’s cached in device memory or on the device’s hard disk
Outputting the resulting media to a different device, e.g. using a HDMI capture device, and saving it there
Exploiting the “analogue4
hole”5:
using a camera, microphone, etc. to make a copy of what comes out of the screen/speakers6
Okay, so I oversimplified (before you say “well, actually…”)
It’s not entirely true to say that streaming and downloading are identical, even with the caveat of “…from the server’s perspective”. There are three big exceptions worth
thinking about:
Exception #1: downloads can come in any order
When you stream some linear media, you expect the server to send the media in strict chronological order. Being able to start watching before the whole file has
downloaded is a big part of what makes steaming appealing, to the end-user. This means that media intended for streaming tends to be stored in a way that facilitates that
kind of delivery. For example:
Media designed for streaming will often be stored in linear chronological order in the file, which impacts what kinds of compression are available.
Media designed for streaming will generally use formats that put file metadata at the start of the file, so that it gets delivered first.
Video designed for streaming will often have frequent keyframes so that a client that starts “in the middle” can decode the buffer without downloading too much data.
No such limitation exists for files intended for downloading. If you’re not planning on watching a video until it’s completely downloaded, the order in which the chunks arrives is
arbitrary!
But these limitations make the set of “files suitable for streaming” a subset of the set of “files suitable for downloading”. It only makes it challenging or impossible to
stream some media intended for downloading… it doesn’t do anything to prevent downloading of media intended for streaming.
Exception #2: streamed media is more-likely to be transcoded
A server that’s streaming media to a client exists in a sort-of dance: the client keeps the server updated on which “part” of the media it cares about, so the server can jump ahead,
throttle back, pause sending, etc. and the client’s buffer can be kept filled to the optimal level.
This dance also allows for a dynamic change in quality levels. You’ve probably seen this happen: you’re watching a video on YouTube and suddenly the quality “jumps” to something more
(or less) like a pile of LEGO bricks7. That’s the result of your device realising that the rate
at which it’s receiving data isn’t well-matched to the connection speed, and asking the server to send a different quality level8.
The server can – and some do! – pre-generate and store all of the different formats, but some servers will convert files (and particularly livestreams) on-the-fly, introducing
a few seconds’ delay in order to deliver the format that’s best-suited to the recipient9. That’s not necessary for downloads, where the
user will often want the highest-quality version of the media (and if they don’t, they’ll select the quality they want at the outset, before the download begins).
Exception #3: streamed media is more-likely to be encumbered with DRM
And then, of course, there’s DRM.
As streaming digital media has become the default way for many people to consume video and audio content, rights holders have engaged in a fundamentally-doomed10
arms race of implementing copy-protection strategies to attempt to prevent end-users from retaining usable downloaded copies of streamed media.
Take HDCP, for example, which e.g. Netflix use for their 4K streams. To download these streams, your device has to be running some decryption code that only works if it can trace a path
to the screen that it’ll be outputting to that also supports HDCP, and both your device and that screen promise that they’re definitely only going to show it and not make it
possible to save the video. And then that promise is enforced by Digital Content Protection LLC only granting a decryption key and a license to use it to manufacturers.11
The real hackers do stuff with software, but people who just want their screens to work properly in spite of HDCP can just buy boxes like this (which I bought for a couple of quid on
eBay). Obviously you could use something like this and a capture card to allow you to download content that was “protected” to ensure that you could only stream it, I suppose, too.
Anyway, the bottom line is that all streaming is, by definition, downloading, and the only significant difference between what people call “streaming” and
“downloading” is that when “streaming” there’s an expectation that the recipient will delete, and not retain, a copy of the video. And that’s it.
Footnotes
1 This isn’t the question I expected to be answering. I made the animation in this post
for use in a different article, but that one hasn’t come together yet, so I thought I’d write about the technical difference between streaming and downloading as an excuse to
use it already, while it still feels fresh.
2 I’m using the example of a video, but this same principle applies to any linear media
that you might stream: that could be a video on Netflix, a livestream on Twitch, a meeting in Zoom, a song in Spotify, or a radio show in iPlayer, for example: these are all examples
of media streaming… and – as I argue – they’re therefore also all examples of media downloading because streaming and downloading are fundamentally the same thing.
3 There are a few simplifications in the first half of this post: I’ll tackle them later
on. For the time being, when I say sweeping words like “every”, just imagine there’s a little footnote that says, “well, actually…”, which will save you from feeling like you have to
say so in the comments.
4 Per my style guide, I’m using the British English
spelling of “analogue”, rather than the American English “analog” which you’ll often find elsewhere on the Web when talking about the analog hole.
5 The rich history of exploiting the analogue hole spans everything from bootlegging a
1970s Led Zeppelin concert by smuggling recording equipment
in inside a wheelchair (definitely, y’know, to help topple the USSR and not just to listen to at home while you get high)
to “camming” by bribing your friendly local projectionist to let you set up a video camera at the back of the cinema for their test screening of the new blockbuster. Until some
corporation tricks us into installing memory-erasing DRM chips into our brains (hey, there’s a dystopic sci-fi story idea in there somewhere!) the analogue hole will always be
exploitable.
6 One might argue that recreating a piece of art from memory, after the fact, is a
very-specific and unusual exploitation of the analogue hole: the one that allows us to remember (or “download”) information to our brains rather than letting it “stream” right
through. There’s evidence to suggest that people pirated Shakespeare’s plays this way!
7 Of course, if you’re watching The LEGO Movie, what you’re seeing might already
look like a pile of LEGO bricks.
8 There are other ways in which the client and server may negotiate, too: for example,
what encoding formats are supported by your device.
9My NAS does live transcoding when Jellyfin streams to devices on my network, and it’s magical!
10 There’s always the analogue hole, remember! Although in practice this isn’t even
remotely necessary and most video media gets ripped some-other-way by clever pirate types even where it uses highly-sophisticated DRM strategies, and then ultimately it’s only
legitimate users who end up suffering as a result of DRM’s burden. It’s almost as if it’s just, y’know, simply a bad idea in the first place, or something. Who knew?
11 Like all these technologies, HDCP was cracked almost immediately and every
subsequent version that’s seen widespread rollout has similarly been broken by clever hacker types. Legitimate, paying users find themselves disadvantaged when their laptop won’t let
them use their external monitor to watch a movie, while the bad guys make pirated copies that work fine on anything. I don’t think anybody wins, here.
Earlier this month, I received a phone call from a user of Three Rings, the volunteer/rota management
software system I founded1.
We don’t strictly offer telephone-based tech support – our distributed team of volunteers doesn’t keep any particular “core hours” so we can’t say who’s available at any given
time – but instead we answer email/Web based queries pretty promptly at any time of the day or week.
But because I’ve called-back enough users over the years, it’s pretty much inevitable that a few probably have my personal mobile number saved. And because I’ve been applying for a couple of
interesting-looking new roles, I’m in the habit of answering my phone even if it’s a number I don’t recognise.
Many of the charities that benefit from Three Rings seem to form the impression that we’re all just sat around in an office, like this. But in fact many of my fellow
volunteers only ever see me once or twice a year!
After the first three such calls this month, I was really starting to wonder what had changed. Had we accidentally published my phone number, somewhere? So when the fourth tech support
call came through, today (which began with a confusing exchange when I didn’t recognise the name of the caller’s charity, and he didn’t get my name right, and I initially figured it
must be a wrong number), I had to ask: where did you find this number?
“When I Google ‘Three Rings login’, it’s right there!” he said.
I almost never use Google Search2,
so there’s no way I’d have noticed this change if I hadn’t been told about it.
He was right. A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you
directly to it.
Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they
didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.
Concerned by this change, I logged into Google Business Profile to see if I could edit it back.
Apparently Google inserted my personal mobile number into search results for me, randomly, without me asking them to. Delightful.
I deleted my phone number from the business listing again, and within a few minutes it seemed to have stopped being served to random strangers on the Internet. Unfortunately deleting
the phone number also made the “Your phone number was updated by Google” message disappear, so I never got to click the “Learn more” link to maybe get a clue as to how and why this
change happened.
Don’t you hate it when you click the wrong button. Who reads these things, anyway, right?
Such feelings of rage.
Footnotes
1 Way back in 2002! We’re very nearly at the point where the Three Rings
system is older than the youngest member of the Three Rings team. Speaking of which, we’re seeking volunteers to help expand our support team: if you’ve got experience of
using Three Rings and an hour or two a week to spare helping to make volunteering easier for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you should look us up!
2 Seriously: if you’re still using Google Search as your primary search engine, it’s past
time you shopped around. There are great alternatives that do a better job on your choice of one or more of the metrics that might matter to you: better privacy, fewer ads (or
more-relevant ads, if you want), less AI slop, etc.
While working on something else entirely1,
I had a random thought:
Could the :checked and and :has pseudo-classes and the subsequent-sibling (~) selector be combined to perform interactive filtering
without JavaScript?
Turns out, yes. Have a play with the filters on the side of this. You can either use:
“OR” mode, so you can show e.g. “all mammals and carnivores”, or
“AND” mode, so you can show e.g. “all mammals that are carnivores”.
Filter the animals!
(if it doesn’t work right where you are, e.g. in a feed reader, you can view it “standalone”)
There’s nothing particularly complicated here, although a few of the selectors are a little verbose.
First, we set the initial state of each animal. In “OR” mode, they’re hidden, because each selected checkbox is additive. In “AND” mode, they’re shown, because checking a checkbox can
only ever remove an animal from the result set:
The magic of the :has pseudo-class is that it doesn’t change the scope, which means that after checking whether “AND” or “OR” is checked within the #filters,
the #animals container is still an adjacent element.
Next time you’re implementing a filter interface, like this restaurant menu, perhaps ask whether you actually need JavaScript.
Then all we need to do is to use daisy-chain :has to show animals with a particular class if that class is checked in “OR” mode, or to hide animals that don’t have a
particular class in “AND” mode. Here’s what that looks like:
It could probably enjoy an animation effect to make it clearer when items are added and removed2, but that’s a consideration
for another day.
Many developers would be tempted to use JavaScript to implement the client-side version of a filter like this. And in some cases, that might be the right option.
But it’s always worth remembering that:
A CSS solution is almost-always more-performant than a JS one.
A JS solution is usually less-resilient than a CSS one: a CDN failure, unsupported API, troublesome content-blocker or syntax error will typically have a much larger
impact on JavaScript.
For the absolutely maximum compatibility, consider what you can do in plain HTML, or on the server-side, and treat anything on the client-side as progressive
enhancement.
Footnotes
1 The thing I was actually working on when I got distracted was an OAuth provider
implementation for Three Rings, connected with work that took place at this weekend’s hackathon to
(eventually) bring single-sign-on “across” Three Rings CIC’s products. Eventually being the operative word.
2 Such an animation should, of course, be wrapped in a @media
(prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference) media query!
Clearly that certificate only applies to their website, though, and not to e.g. their emails. When you sign up an account with them, you need to verify your email address. They send you
a (HTML-only) email with a link to click. Here’s what that link looks like to a sighted person:
So far, so good.
But here’s the HTML code they’re using to create that button. Maybe you’ll spot the problem:
Despite specifying the font to use three times, they don’t actually have any alt text. So for somebody who can’t see that image, the link is
completely unusable1.
This made me angry enough that I gave up on my transaction and bought my train tickets from LNER instead.
Accessibility matters. And that includes emails. Do better, Avanti.
Footnotes
1 Incidentally, this also makes the email unusable for privacy-conscious people who, like
me, don’t routinely load remote images in emails. But that’s a secondary concern, really.
The video below is presented in portrait orientation, because your screen is taller than it is wide.
The video below is presented in landscape orientation, because your screen is wider than it is tall.
The video below is presented in square orientation (the Secret Bonus Square Video!), because your screen has approximately the same width as as its height. Cool!
This is possible (with a single <video> element, and without any Javascript!) thanks to some cool HTML features you might not be aware of, which I’ll briefly explain
in the video. Or scroll down for the full details.
<videocontrols><sourcesrc="squareish.mp4"media="(min-aspect-ratio: 0.95) and (max-aspect-ratio: 1.05)"/><sourcesrc="portrait.mp4"media="(orientation: portrait)"/><sourcesrc="landscape.mp4"/></video>
This code creates a video with three sources: squareish.mp4 which is shown to people on “squareish” viewports, failing that portrait.mp4 which is shown to
people whose viewports are taller than wide, and failing that landscape.mp4 which is shown to anybody else.
That’s broadly-speaking how the video above is rendered. No JavaScript needed.
Browsers only handle media queries on videos when they initially load, so you can’t just tip your phone over or resize the window: you’ll need to reload the page, too. But it works!
Give it a go: take a look at the video in both portrait and landscape modes and let me know what you think1.
Adding adaptive bitrate streaming with HLS
Here’s another cool technology that you might not have realised you could “just use”: adaptive bitrate streaming with HLS!
You’ve used adaptive bitrate streaming before, though you might not have noticed it. It’s what YouTube, Netflix, etc. are doing when your network connection degrades and you quickly get
dropped-down, mid-video, to a lower-resolution version2.
Turns out you can do it on your own static hosting, no problem at all. I used this guide (which has a great
description of the parameters used) to help me:
This command splits the H.264 video landscape.mp4 into three different resolutions: the original “v1” (1920×1080, in my case, with 96kbit audio), “v2” (1280×720, with
96kbit audio), and “v3” (640×360, with 48kbit audio), each with a resolution-appropriate maximum bitrate, and forced keyframes every 48th frame. Then it breaks each of those into HLS
segments (.ts files) and references them from a .m3u8 playlist.
The output from this includes:
Master playlist landscape.m3u8, which references the other playlists with reference to their resolution and bandwidth, so that browsers can make smart choices,
Playlists landscape_0.m3u8 (“v1”), landscape_1.m3u8 (“v2”), etc., each of which references the “parts” of that video,
Directories landscape_0/, landscape_1/ etc., each of which contain
data00.ts, data01.ts, etc.: the actual “chunks” that contain the video segments, which can be downloaded independently by the browser as-needed
Bringing it all together
We can bring all of that together, then, to produce a variable-aspect, adaptive bitrate, HLS-streamed video player… in pure HTML and suitable for static hosting:
<videocontrols><sourcesrc="squareish.m3u8"type="application/x-mpegURL"media="(min-aspect-ratio: 0.95) and (max-aspect-ratio: 1.05)"/><sourcesrc="portrait.m3u8"type="application/x-mpegURL"media="(orientation: portrait)"/><sourcesrc="landscape.m3u8"type="application/x-mpegURL"/></video>
You could, I suppose, add alternate types, poster images, and all kinds of other fancy stuff, but this’ll do for now.
One solution is to also provide the standard .mp4 files as an alternate <source>, and that’s fine I guess, but you lose the benefit of HLS (and
you have to store yet more files). But there’s a workaround:
Polyfill full functionality for all browsers
If you’re willing to use a JavaScript polyfill, you can make the code above work on virtually any device. I gave this a go, here, by:
Adding some JavaScript code that detects affected `<video>` elements and applying the fix if necessary:
// Find all <video>s which have HLS sources:for( hlsVideo of document.querySelectorAll('video:has(source[type="application/x-mpegurl"]), video:has(source[type="vnd.apple.mpegurl"])') ) {
// If the browser has native support, do nothing:if( hlsVideo.canPlayType('application/x-mpegurl') || hlsVideo.canPlayType('application/vnd.apple.mpegurl') ) continue;
// If hls.js can't help fix that, do nothing:if ( ! Hls.isSupported() ) continue;
// Find the best source based on which is the first one to match any applicable CSS media queriesconst bestSource =Array.from(hlsVideo.querySelectorAll('source')).find(source=>window.matchMedia(source.media).matches)
// Use hls.js to attach the best source:const hls =new Hls();
hls.loadSource(bestSource.src);
hls.attachMedia(hlsVideo);
}
It makes me feel a little dirty to make a <video>depend on JavaScript, but if that’s the route you want to go down while we wait for HLS support to become
more widespread (rather than adding different-typed sources) then that’s fine, I guess.
This was a fun dive into some technologies I’ve not had the chance to try before. A fringe benefit of being a generalist full-stack developer is that when you’re “between jobs”
you get to play with all the cool things when you’re brushing up your skills before your next big challenge!
(Incidentally: if you think you might be looking to employ somebody like me, my CV is over there!)
Footnotes
1 There definitely isn’t a super-secret “square” video on this page, though. No
siree. (Shh.)
2 You can tell when you get dropped to a lower-resolution version of a video because
suddenly everybody looks like they’re a refugee from Legoland.
I’m keeping an eye out for my next career move (want to hire me?). Off the back of that I’ve been brushing up on the kinds of skills that I might be asked to showcase
in any kind of “tech test”.
Not the kind of stuff I can do with one hand tied behind my back1,
but the things for which I’d enjoy feeling a little more-confident2.
Stuff that’s on my CV that I’ve done and can do, but where I’d like to check before somebody asks me about it in an interview.
React? Sure, I can do that…
LinkedIn, GlassDoor, and bits of the Fediverse are a gold mine for the kinds of things that people are being asked to demonstrate in tech tests these days. Like this post:
I’d describe myself as a “stack-agnostic senior/principal full-stack/backend web developer/security engineer”3,
and so this question – which feels like it’s a filter for a junior developer with a React specialisation – isn’t really my wheelhouse. Which makes it a perfect excuse for an hour of
playing about with React.
My recent React experience has mostly involved Gutenberg blocks and WordPress theme component. This seemed like an excuse to check that I can wrangle a non-WordPress React stack.
This isn’t particularly sophisticated. I added customisable durations for each light, but otherwise it’s pretty basic.
Half an hour later, I’d proven to myself that yes, I could throw together a fresh application with React DOM and implement some React components, pass state around and whatnot.
Time to move on to the next thing, right? That’s what a normal person would do.
But that’s not the kind of person I am.
Let’s reimplement this as Web Components
What I found myself thinking was… man, this is chunky. React is… not the right tool for this job.
(Or, increasingly, any job. But I’ll get back to that.)
A minified production build of my new component and its dependencies came in at 202kB (62.3kB compressed). That feels pretty massive for something that does so-little.
So as an experiment, I re-implemented my new React component as a vanilla JS Web Component using a custom element. Identical functionality, but no third-party library dependencies.
Here’s what I got:
This one’s interactive. Press a button or two!
The Web Component version of this control has no dependency chain and uses no JSX, and so it has no transpilation step: the source version is production-ready. You could minify it, but
modern HTTP compression makes the impact of that negligible anyway: the whole thing weighs in at 19.5kB (5.2kB compressed) without minification.
And while I appreciate of course that there’s much more to JavaScript complexity and performance than file sizes… and beyond that I appreciate that there’s a lot more to making great
components than the resulting bundle size… it’s hard to argue that delivering the same functionality (and less fragility) in a twelfth of the payload isn’t significant.
By any metric you like, the Web Components version outperforms the React version of my traffic light component. And while it’s a vastly-simplified example, it scales. Performance is a
UX concern, and if you favour “what we’re familiar with” over “what’s best for our users”, that has to be a conscious choice.
But there’s a bigger point here:
React is the new jQuery
I’m alarmed by the fact that I’m still seeing job ads for “React developers”, with little more requirement than an ability to “implement things in React”.
From where I’m sitting, React is the new jQuery. It:
Was originally built to work around missing or underdeveloped JavaScript functionality
e.g. React’s components prior to Web Components
e.g. jQuery’s manipulation prior to document.querySelectorAll
Continued to be valuable as a polyfill and as a standard middleware while that functionality become commonplace
e.g. jQuery’s $.ajax until the Fetch API was a reliable replacement to XMLHttpRequest
No longer provides enough value to be worth using in a new project
And yet somehow gets added “out of habit” for many years
If you’ve got a legacy codebase with lots of React in it, you’re still going to need React for a while. Just like how you’re likely to continue to need jQuery for a while until you can
tidy up all those edge-cases where you’re using it.
(You might even be locked-in to using both React and jQuery for some time, if say you’ve got a plugin architecture that demands backwards-compatibility: I’m looking at you,
WordPress!)
But just as you’re already (hopefully) working to slowly extricate your codebases from any now-unnecessary jQuery dependencies they have… you should be working on an exit plan for your
React code, too. It’s done its time; it’s served its purpose: now it’s just a redundant dependency making your bundles cumbersome and harder to debug.
Everything React gives you on the client-side – components, state/hooks, routing4,
etc. – is possible (and easy) in modern JavaScript supported in all major browsers. And if you still really want an abstraction layer, there are plenty of options (and they’re
all a lot lighter than React!).
The bottom line is, I suppose…
You shouldn’t be hiring “React developers”!
If you’re building a brand new project, you shouldn’t be using React. It should be considered deprecated.
If you’ve got an existing product that depends on React… you should be thinking about how you’ll phase it out over time. And with that in mind, you want to be hiring versatile
developers. They’ll benefit from some experience with React, sure, but unless they can also implement for the modern Web of tomorrow, they’ll just code you deeper into
your dependency on React.
It’s time you started recruiting “Front-End Developers (React experience a plus)”. Show some long-term thinking! Or else the Web is going to move on without you, and in 5-10 years
you’ll struggle to recruit people to maintain your crumbling stack.
1 Exploiting or patching an injection vulnerability, optimising an SQL query, implementing
a WordPress plugin, constructing a CircleCI buildchain, expanding test coverage over a Rubygem, performing an accessibility audit of a web application, extending a set of
high-performance PHP-backed REST endpoints, etc. are all – I’d hope! – firmly in the “hold my beer” category of tech test skills I’d ace, for example. But no two tech stacks are
exactly alike, so it’s possible that I’ll want to brush up on some of the adjacent technologies that are in the “I can do it, but I might need to hit the docs pages”
category.
2 It’s actually refreshing to be learning and revising! I’ve long held that I should learn
a new programming language or framework every year or two to stay fresh and to keep abreast of what’s going on in world. I can’t keep up with every single new front-end JavaScript
framework any more (and I’m not sure I’d want to!)! But in the same way as being multilingual helps unlock pathways to more-creative thought and expression even if you’re only working
in your native tongue, learning new programming languages gives you a more-objective appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of what you use day-to-day. tl;dr: if you haven’t
written anything in a “new” (to you) programming language for over a year, you probably should.
3 What do job titles even mean, any more? 😂 A problem I increasingly find is that I don’t
know how to describe what I do, because with 25+ years of building stuff for the Web, I can use (and have used!) most of the popular stacks, and could probably learn a new
one without too much difficulty. Did I mention I’m thinking about my next role? If you think we might “click”, I’d love to hear from you…
4 Though if you’re doing routing only on the client-side, I already hate you.
Consider for example the SlimJS documentation which becomes completely unusable if a third-party JavaScript CDN fails: that’s pretty
fragile!
Today, Ruth and JTA received a letter. It told them about an upcoming change to the
agreement of their (shared, presumably) Halifax credit card.
Except… they don’t have a shared Halifax credit card. Could it be a scam? Some sort of phishing attempt, maybe, or perhaps somebody taking out a credit card in their names?
I happened to be in earshot and asked to take a look at the letter, and was surprised to discover that all of the other details – the last four digits of the card, the credit
limit, etc. – all matched my Halifax credit card.
Halifax sent a letter to me, about my credit card… but addressed it to… two other people I live with‽
I spent a little over half an hour on the phone with Halifax, speaking to two different advisors, who couldn’t fathom what had happened or how. My credit card is not (and has never
been) a joint credit card, and the only financial connection I have to Ruth and JTA is that I share a mortgage with them. My guess is that some person or computer at Halifax tried to
join-the-dots from the mortgage outwards and re-assigned my credit card to them, instead?
Eventually I had to leave to run an errand, so I gave up on the phone call and raised a complaint with Halifax in writing. They’ve promised to respond within… eight weeks. Just
brilliant.
I’ve had a few breakups, but I’ve only been made redundant once. There’s a surprising overlap between the two…
And with that, I’d better get back to it. Today’s mission is to finish checking-in on my list of “companies I’ve always admired and thought I should work for” and see if any of them are
actively looking for somebody like me!
(Incidentally: if you’re into open source, empowering the Web, and making the world a better place, my CV is over here. I’m a senior/principal full-stack
engineer with a tonne of experience in some radically diverse fields, and if you think we’d be a good match then I’d love to chat!)
Sure, it’s gaudy, but it’s got a few things going for it, too.
Let’s put aside for the moment that you can already send my website back into “90s mode” and dive into this take on how I could
present myself in a particularly old-school way. There’s a few things I particularly love:
It’s actually quite lightweight: ignore all the animated GIFs (which are small anyway) and you’ll see that, compared to my current homepage, there are very few
images. I’ve been thinking about going in a direction of less images on the homepage anyway, so it’s interesting to see how it comes together in this unusual context.
The page sections are solidly distinct: they’re a mishmash of different widths, some of which exhibit a horrendous lack of responsivity, but it’s pretty clear where
the “recent articles” ends and the “other recent stuff” begins.
The post kinds are very visible: putting the “kind” of a post in its own column makes it really clear whether you’re looking at an article, note, checkin, etc., much
more-so than my current blocks do.
Maybe there’s something we can learn from old-style web design? No, I’m serious. Stop laughing.
90s web design was very-much characterised by:
performance – nobody’s going to wait for your digital photos to download on narrowband connections, so you hide them behind descriptive links or tiny thumbnails, and
pushing the boundaries – the pre-CSS era of the Web had limited tools, but creators worked hard to experiment with the creativity that was possible within those
limits.
Those actually… aren’t bad values to have today. Sure, we’ve probably learned that animated backgrounds, tables for layout, and mystery meat navigation were horrible for
usability and accessibility, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still innovation to be done. What comes next for the usable Web, I wonder?
As soon as you run a second or third website through the tool, its mechanisms for action become somewhat clear and sites start to look “samey”, which is the opposite of what
made 90s Geocities great.
The only thing I can fault it on is that it assumes that I’d favour Netscape Navigator: in fact, I was a die-hard Opera-head for most of the
nineties and much of the early naughties, finally switching my daily driver to Firefox in 2005.
I certainly used plenty of Netscape and IE at various points, though, but I wasn’t a fan of the divisions resulting from the browser wars. Back in the day, I always backed
the ideals of the “Viewable With Any Browser” movement.
You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street
View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.
Can you tell where we are, yet?
A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the
world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.
Cheating at GeoGuessr
I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT1, I pasted
screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:
ChatGPT confidently assessed the geographic clues, translated some text that it found, and eventually made a guess down to a particular street in St Petersburg.
That’s pretty spooky, right?
The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in
GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.
This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:
Again, the text recognition and translation capabilities of the AI were highly useful, but it was helped by architectural and cultural clues too.
This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.
But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.
Don’t think I’d have done better, though.
Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a
“send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra
details to it).
And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning
on the side2.
The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can
even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.
What about other photos?
The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the
kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and
other unsavoury types.
Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English,
indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of
the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of
Spain’s known characteristics.
Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle.
These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement
and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of
Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.
Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731
✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that
distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.
Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry
or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially
visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken
in Istanbul.
Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784
✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower3 was a nice move.
Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The
architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”)
supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina.
The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.
Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678
❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing
and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was
recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).
So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and
strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.
Footnotes
1 And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out
of a legitimate victory!
2 I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody
feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in
person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly
kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)
4 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer
get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.
My star sign is Aquarius. Aquarians are, according to tradition: deep, imaginative, original, and uncompromising. That sounds like a pretty good description of me, right?
You can tell that I’m an Aquarius, because I’ve got a certificate to say so.
Now some of you might be thinking, “Hang on, wasn’t Dan born very close to the start of the year, and wouldn’t that make him a Capricorn, not an Aquarius?” I can understand why you’d
think that.
And while it’s true that I was assigned the star sign of Capricorn at my birth, it doesn’t really represent me very well. Capricorns are, we’re told, serious, disciplined, and good with
money. Do any of those things remotely sound like me? Not so much.
So many, many years ago I changed my star sign to Aquarius (I can’t remember exactly when, but I’d done it a long while
before I wrote the linked blog post, which in turn is over 14 years old…).
It doesn’t say anything in here to suggest that I can’t change my star sign.
But really: who has the right to tell you what your place in the zodiac is, really? Just you.
And frankly, people telling you who you can and can’t be is so last millennium. By now, there’s really no excuse for not accepting somebody’s identity, whether it’s for
something as trivial as their star sign… or as important as their gender, sexuality, or pronouns.
In hindsight, I probably should have launched this website yesterday and called it an April Fool. But I completely forgot that I’d planned to until an entire day afterwards,
so you get it now.
All of which is to say: I’ve launched a(nother) stupid website, ChangeYourStarSign.com. Give it a go!
It’s lightweight, requires no JS or cookies, does no tracking, and can run completely offline or be installed to your device, and it makes it easier than ever for you to change your
star sign. Let’s be honest: it was pretty easy anyway – just decide what your new star sign is – but if you’d rather have a certificate to prove it, this site’s got you
covered.
Whether you change your star sign to represent you better, to sidestep an unfortuitous horoscope (or borrow a luckier one), or for some other reason, I’d love to hear what you change it
to and how you get on with it. What’s your new star sign?
Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1.
So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.
Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van
carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!
And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a
static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.
My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would
all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!
And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they
play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my
house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what
he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.
It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?
Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4!
(My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody,
right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a
recognisable tune.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly
troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think
to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d
hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah
and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”?
Just a thought.
Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead
of the UK. Let’s fix that!
Footnotes
1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young
children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s soldout of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for
myself.
3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental
cover of Burn Baby Burn?
4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda
fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…
The news has, in general, been pretty terrible lately.
Like many folks, I’ve worked to narrow the focus of the things that I’m willing to care deeply about, because caring about many things is just too difficult when, y’know, nazis
are trying to destroy them all.
I’ve got friends who’ve stopped consuming news media entirely. I’ve not felt the need to go so far, and I think the reason is that I already have a moderately-disciplined
relationship with news. It’s relatively easy for me to regulate how much I’m exposed to all the crap news in the world and stay focussed and forward-looking.
The secret is that I get virtually all of my news… through my feed reader (some of it pre-filtered, e.g. my de-crappified BBC News feeds).
I use FreshRSS and I love it. But really: any feed reader can improve your relationship with
the Web.
Without a feed reader, I can see how I might feel the need to “check the news” several times a day. Pick up my phone to check the time… glance at the news while I’m there… you know how
to play that game, right?
But with a feed reader, I can treat my different groups of feeds like… periodicals. The news media I subscribe to get collated in my feed reader and I can read them once, maybe twice
per day, just like a daily newspaper. If an article remains unread for several days then, unless I say otherwise, it’s configured to be quietly archived.
My current events are less like a firehose (or sewage pipe), and more like a bottle of (filtered) water.
Categorising my feeds means that I can see what my friends are doing almost-immediately, but I don’t have to be disturbed by anything else unless I want to be. Try getting that
from a siloed social network!
Maybe sometimes I see a new breaking news story… perhaps 12 hours after you do. Is that such a big deal? In exchange, I get to apply filters of any kind I like to the news I read, and I
get to read it as a “bundle”, missing (or not missing) as much or as little as I like.
On a scale from “healthy media consumption” to “endless doomscrolling”, proper use of a feed reader is way towards the healthy end.
If you stopped using feeds when Google tried to kill them, maybe it’s time to think again. The ecosystem’s alive and well, and having a one-stop place where you can
enjoy the parts of the Web that are most-important to you, personally, in an ad-free, tracker-free, algorithmic-filtering-free space that you can make your very own… brings a
special kind of peace that I can highly recommend.
What can I possibly say about Bored Gay Werewolf, which caught my attention
with the garish colours of its front cover when I saw it in Waterstones and whose blurb suggested that it might, perhaps, be a queer fantasy romp with a Buffy-esque sense of
humour.
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