Print to Google Drive in a non-Gnome desktop
Jeremy Bicha wrote up an unknown Ubuntu feature: “printing” direct to a Google Drive PDF. I rather wanted this, but I don’t run the Gnome desktop, so I thought I might be out of luck. But no! It works...
View ArticleWhy isn’t it their job
Bruce Lawson has written a rather nice description of the practical value of semantic HTML, and you should read it, especially if you’re a full-stack developer who feels that HTML is the super-easy...
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Brum tech pub crawl 2018
It’s time for the Birmingham tech pub crawl! Saturday 29th December 2018.This is called a pub crawl, but it’s really an excuse to get together, hang out, have a couple of drinks — alcoholic or not,...
View ArticleChicken McNuggets
Back in the old days, when things made sense, you could buy Chicken McNuggets in boxes of 6, 9, and 201. So if you were really hungry, you could buy, for example, 30: two boxes of 9 and two boxes of 6....
View ArticleThe ray-traced pictures
A two-decade-long search is over.A couple of years ago I wrote up the efforts required to recover a tiny sound demo for the Archimedes computer. In there, I made brief mention of a sample from an Arc...
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Three HomeSignal femtocell for bad coverage
My flat has terrible mobile coverage. It’s okaaaay-ish in the living room and dead in the bedrooms, and it’s infuriating. You might be thinking, but Stuart! you live right in the centre of Birmingham!...
View ArticlePyramid
I keep wanting this quotation and not being able to remember half the things in the list, so I’m putting it on my website: this is what websites are for.It’s from The Official Slacker Handbook by Sarah...
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Brum tech pub crawl 2019
It’s time for the Birmingham tech pub crawl! Saturday 28th December 2019.This is called a pub crawl, but it’s really an excuse to get together, hang out, have a couple of drinks — alcoholic or not,...
View ArticleThe tiniest of Python templating engines
In someone else’s project (which they’ll doubtless tell you about themselves when it’s done) I needed a tiny Python templating engine. That is: I wanted to be able to say, here is a template string,...
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Number word sequences
I was idly musing about number sequences, and the Lychrel algorithm. If you don’t know about this, there’s a good Numberphile video on it: basically, take any number, reverse it, add the two, and if...
View ArticleWrite more
I’ve written a couple of things here recently and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy doing that. I should do more of it. Most of my creative writing energy goes into D&D, or stuff for work, or talks at...
View ArticleAll My Endeavour
A discovery. What a return for all my endeavour— Not to mention the L. S. D! I am an atheist now and for ever, Because this God has afflicted me!It’s from Rudyard Kipling’s Natural Theology, which I’d...
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The most powerful birthday in the world
Being that this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off… You’ve got to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?— “Dirty” Harry CallaghanKinda,...
View ArticleGetting a new phone
So, I’m getting a new phone. Here’s an insight into my decision-making processes.I have, repeatedly and irritatedly, complained that phones now are too big. My beloved Sony Xperia Z5 Compact is the...
View ArticleOn the Birmingham tech scene
A certain amount of kerfuffle over the last couple of days in the half of the Birmingham tech scene that I tend to inhabit, over an article in Business Live about Birmingham Tech Week, a new...
View ArticleAndroid home screen widgets in HTML and JS
I like having the news headlines on my phone’s home screen. (Well, on the screen to the right.) It helps me keep up with what’s going on in the world. But it’s hard to find a simple headline home...
View ArticleOn ethical design, and the Ethical Design Handbook
We live in a world where websites and apps mostly make people unhappy. Buying or ordering or interacting with anything at all online involves a thousand little unpleasant bumps in the road, a thousand...
View ArticleOnline shopping at the Co-op
On the Saturday just gone, I thought to myself: OK, better get some food in. The cupboards aren’t bare or anything, but my freezer was showing a distinct skew towards “things that go with the main bit...
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A UK map made of squares
For a visualisation thing I was doing, I wanted a UK map made out of small squares: these seem a useful way to make heatmaps of the way a thing affects the UK. There are plenty of such maps but they...
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Remote Applause
For online conferences, someone should make it so 👏🏻 or 😆 in the chat leads to the sound of claps and laughs on video. The audience feels like a missing piece of what makes conferences so special. (The...
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