Tag: technology
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Tangled earphones were a feature, not a bug.
Akshay Chugh misses wired headphones for the anti-feature that they'd inevitably tangle up in your pocket. I echo his sentiment, and add a few other observations about things we've traded away in exchange for the convenience of wireless buds.
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The modern app
The other month, David Bushell made a tongue-in-cheek interactive simulation of the state of modern desktop applications. It's pretty fun, and I see what he means.
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Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026
Back in 2006, adding vanity nameservers to my personal domains was just something I did as a matter of course, but - like most of the Internet - I don't bother any more. Until today, when I switched danq.me's nameservers to four subdomains of danq.me. For the sake of nostalgia!
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They love RSS
unstory claims that people who, like, me, announce their love of RSS in footers etc. don't actually love RSS, and couldn't handle operating the protocol 'by hand'. unstory is wrong, at least in my case.
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BeepAlive - keeping my soundbar from going to sleep
My dog ate the remote for the soundbar on my TV/media centre, and it keeps going into 'sleep mode'. So I wrote a software tool that periodically makes an inaudible noise to trick the soundbar into staying 'awake'. That's how a hacky engineer like me fixes a hardware problem with a software solution!
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Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don't Understand
Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from early in my career...
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How I (Don't) Collect Blog Statistics
I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.
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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
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CSS or BS
Keith Cirkel's made a game where you have to identify if something is a CSS property or a convincing fake. How's your CSS knowledge?
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Something's gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household's film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition...
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TV screen interface showing posters for many films. Groundhog Day is listed twice in succession. This is funny because the film is about a celebration date, 'groundhog day', repeating itself.
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Reply to: I'm OK being left behind, thanks!
A reply to Terence Eden's post about not buying in to every cryptocurrency or AI fad, but being happy to 'wait and see'.
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A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees.
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You don’t have to disconnect
Derek Slivers' post about being online only for an hour or two, every few days, inspired a lot of people. But I'd like to share Rishi Dass's rebuttal, and add my own thoughts about the importance of finding your own solution to some of the distractions and stresses of the always-online world.
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Why Security Engineering needs a Hacker Mentality
Security engineering is about a lot of things, but the best security engineers show the 'hacker mindset' characteristics of curiosity and imagination. Here's an example of how I found an XSS vulnerability in a forum, mostly by accident, and how curiosity was the key.
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What can you do with a software privacy polariser?
Samsung's 2026 phones will feature a dynamic privacy filter, blacking-out parts of the screen selectively from shoulder-surfers. I'm so curious about the capabilities of (and API for) this technology: what could I make it do?