Twenty-Twenty-Two is Twenty-Twenty-NEW. Yup - time for me to regenerate into a new job. To recap - five years ago, I started at GDS in the Open Standards Team. Two-and-a-bit years later, I took a 6 months secondment to NHSX to do Open Standards. Eighteen months later, they finally let me go. I joined the Data Standards Authority to do - you guessed it - Open Standards! I've been banging on about Open Standards for what feels like forever. I've worked with a vast array of vastly talented…
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I've moved to s a standing desk. So now, obviously, I need something useful to do with my feet! It's time for a USB powered set of foot pedals! They're between £20 - £40 depending on what the algorithm think you'll pay. The USB cable is about 2 metres long - which is just about adequate for me. The switches have little tactile nubs on them and are well sprung. These aren't Cherry MX quality switches - but they feel decent. There's a bit of a clack as they spring back up again. The OEM is P…
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Fourteen years ago, I blogged about the future of voice. In the post, I asked these two questions - which I'd nicked from someone else: Are you faster at speaking or typing? Are you faster at reading or listening? Lots of us now use Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and the like because it is quicker to speak than type. For long-form wordsmithing - it's still probably easier to type-and-edit than it is to speak-then-edit. And the way humans speak is markedly different from how they write. But the…
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This is a regular HTML page. But if you click or tap on the text, you will be able to edit it!HTML is magic! This isn't a fancy styled <textarea>, it's a <div> element which uses the contenteditable global attribute.There are some nifty features - depending on your browser.You canadd more bulletsby pressing enterHow 🆒 is that?!Same goesfor numbered listsclick here and type a new lineSplelcheck is enabled using spellcheck="true" so ya myte cee som wigggly rred linees underr sertin wordz.You can e…
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A box set of late-era Tom Baker stories. And they're a bit of a mixed bunch. Full Circle First up, Full Circle - which introduces us to Adric. Ah, poor sweet Adric. He's an exercise in wish-fulfilment. Getting a nerdy, 17 year old, Who-geek to write a teenage nerd to appeal to other teenage nerds. I don't think the character quite works because, in my opinion, the Doctor needs a slightly dimmer foil in order to explain things to. And because, sadly, no-one likes watching grumpy know-it-all…
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Two years ago, I got a DophiGo DV-200 WiFi Doorbell. It's been OK, but I was hankering for an upgrade. Something with a more reliable app and better video / audio quality. About a year ago, I got a Eufy Security Camera System. It has been excellent. The main advantage is that it comes with its own hub. That gives it a dedicated wireless channel and it stores my videos locally! It turns out there's a Eufy Doorbell addon which pairs with the base station. So I got that for £129. Cool features …
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I know shamefully little about the British Empire and its colonisation of India. I remember going on a school trip to the memorial at Ypres - but I don't remember hearing about the thousands of Indian troops who served and died. I learned endlessly about Churchill - but not about his racist attitudes towards the Bengal famine. I was vaguely aware of partition - but not the casual ignorance which caused it. "Inglorious Empire" strikes me as a very even-handed book - even in the face of…
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As part of my MSc I'm taking a short course in Practical Machine Learning via QA.com. The first three days were just about basic stats visualisation using Python. It was great to have a refresher - but I would have expected that to be a pre-requisite. The tutor was excellent - very patient at explaining complex concepts. And the use of Jupyter Notebooks is a gamechanger for taught courses like this. Ultimately, it was a useful course - although I expected a lot more time to be spent on…
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Google has decided to fuck over its early adopters. Way back in 2006, Google announced Google Apps for Your Domain. Basically it was Gmail - but you could use your own domain. No more [email protected] now you could be [email protected]. Hurrah! At the time, they said: organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service). Google still offers the service - since renamed G-Suite, then…
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Scratching my own itch. I want an alert when there's been a price drop on an item on my Amazon wishlist. I couldn't find an easy way to get an email directly from Amazon (customer-focused my shiny metal arse) so I knocked something up in Python. This is heavily inspired by Leigh Dodds' Wishlist Monitor. Amazon don't offer an API for wishlists (innovative my shiny metal arse). So this uses Beautiful Soup to grab the data from the HTML. To be fair, there's also some microdata on the page, which …
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NB: The bit about NFT and smart contracts is at the end. As I discussed yesterday, being able to resell digital art via an NFT means that the price of art falls to zero. Let's assume that I'm correct and, through a combination of technology and changing social attitudes, no one wants to pay for music, books, films, or art any more. What are the ways that art and artists could get funded? Here are a few sketched out ideas - they all overlap a little. And then a brief discussion about how…
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At the moment, it is not possible to sell a 2nd hand eBook or MP3. This seems fairly reasonable because a re-seller might keep copies of their original files after selling them. This would allow the re-seller to undercut the original publisher and sell the file multiple times. We tend to label this "Piracy". Someone buys a DVD, rips it, then either sells or gives away copies. The Blockchain book that I'm reading suggests NFTs as a way to combat this (stop giggling at the back). Let's say…
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