Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
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Good Food, Bad Authorisation
(BBC) Good Food has started adding "premium" content for which you have to install their app and pay for a subscription. Except the paywall they've put in place is so weak that I fell through it without even meaning to. It's a great - and relatively harmless - example of how front-end-first development is undermining the development of secure Web systems.
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Vmail via FreshRSS
It's been a while since I shared a recipe for enhancing your FreshRSS experience with some XPath Scraping, so I guess it's that time again! Today I'm fetching issues of Vmail, vole.wtf's community-driven newsletter.
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A Pressure Cooker for Tea
I'm told that black tea brewed at 90℃ is bad, but brewed at 100℃ is good. What if we built a specialised pressure cooker that released tea into superheated water at, say, 110℃? Could that be... even better?
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Building a Secret Cabinet
As part of efforts to build myself a new bedroom in our attic, I expanded my carpentry, electronics, and Python skills by building a remotely-triggered secret cabinet in my bookcase!
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Ladybird Browser
Y'know how I predicted that we'd never again see a new fully-featured Web browser engine after the death of EdgeHTML? It turns out that maybe, just maybe, I was wrong. And that's brilliant.
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Science Weekend
It was a weekend full of science, starting with a visit to the excellent open day at Harwell Campus and a trip to the Diamond Light Synchrotron, and finishing with a series of medical tests on my lungs and why they're not working as well as they ought to. With graphs!
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A Stupid Joke About Elephants
It was too hot to sleep, so I learned about how to differentiate species' of elephant from one another instead. And then I thought of a really, really stupid joke, which you now get to experience too...
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Special Roads
Today I learned why some British roads have seemingly-unnecessary speed limit signs, e.g. "70" signs on something that appears to be a motorway.
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ARCC
I've finally reached a point at which I've seen almost everything in ARCC, so it's time for me to shout a glowing review about why you should give it a go , too.
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Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters
I've tried a variety of unusual anti-spam solutions. Here's how they worked out for me.
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Woke Kids
The other weekend I took our 10-year-old to her first Pride parade, and she blew my mind with the level of allyship she's already achieved.
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Framing Device
This weekend I repaired an ill-fitting door, which I learned to do by watching my grandfather, over thirty years ago.
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Multi-Phase Maps in FoundryVTT
Using FoundryVTT's powerful API and a little bit of JavaScript code, we can easily produce a battlemap that changes through a series of phases as the adventure progresses. Here's how...
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Don't Ask, Don't Teach
It looks like the Tories want to ban teachers from talking about gender identity to children of any age. What is this, 1987 again?