Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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/pfp - a /slashpage for profile picture history
/pfp is a /slashpage standard intended to showcase a timeline of 'profile pictures' you've used to represent yourself online over the years. I've added one, now, and man do I look young in some of those photos!
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Origami (Weird Web October)
A (well-folded) love letter to the Weird World Wide Web: my entry for day 14 of Weird Web October is "Origami". Go play with virtual paper!
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Webpage Copy-Protection is Impossible (and that's great!)
A friend of mine was inconvenienced by an over-eager bit of Web copy-protection JavaScript this week, and it reminded me that more-than-ever, these scripts are both harmful (to legitimate users) and pointless (ineffective at preventing downloading).
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What Argentine Tango is like...
A series of metaphors about what tango feels like, to me. Like improvising music. Like spinning tops. Like an flock of birds. Or something like that.
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Halifax Leaked My Financial Information... (Again)
For the second time in two years, Halifax wrote to me about my credit card... but sent the letter to entirely the wrong person, leaking my personal financial information.
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Move the mouse across the screen (Weird Web October)
This year, I'm (slightly) participating in Weird Web October. For today's theme, 'skeuomorphism', I implemented a mouse curser... (not a typo)
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Exploiting Fail2ban "portscan" permablocks over HTTP for denial-of-service
On a forum they and I share, Loebas suggested that I should be careful doing portscans in case I hit e.g. fail2ban rules. I counter that such rulesets would be a terrible idea (and are therefore uncommon), and provide a specific demonstration of how an attacker can turn them against the site's legitimate users!
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Firefox 157 broke my vertical tabs
Firefox 157's new UI engine Nova made my previously-beautiful vertical tabs into a pile of hot garbage. Ugh.
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Top 100 Geohasher
I'm now in the top-hundred geohashers! But the exciting achievement is that I upgraded geohashing.site from MediaWiki 1.31 to 1.43, after leaving it somewhat technically-neglected for about seven years!
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Styling :visited links using hue-rotation
My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...
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Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)
A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!
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Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American
When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!
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WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!
25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...
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A Postcard from a Labyrinth Artist
Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!
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Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000
AI peaked in 2014 with the invention of the Taco Bot 3000. With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again.