What to do about hotlinking
Hotlinking, in the context I want to discuss here, is the act of using a resource on your website by linking to it on someone else’s website. This might be any resource: a script, an image, anything...
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Ronin
In 1701, Asano Naganori, a feudal lord in Japan, was summoned to the shogun’s court in Edo, the town now called Tokyo. He was a provincial chieftain, and knew little about court etiquette, and the...
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Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, a review
So, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, which I have just watched. I have some thoughts. Spoilers from here on out!Up front I shall say: that was OK. Not amazing, but not bad either. It could...
View ArticleNumeric Pangrams
A few days ago I had an interesting maths thought which I dropped on Mastodon:Today’s interesting maths problem to think about: what is the largest total from a correct maths equation which uses any...
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A software Matter device that Alexa can talk to
What’s-a matter you? Hey! Gotta no respect? What-a you t’ink you do, why you look-a so sad? It’s-a not so bad, it’s-a nice-a place Shaddap Your Face, Joe Dolce(If you just want to know about how to...
View ArticleMaking a Discord bot with PHP
Discord have changed the way bots work quite a few times. Recently, though, they built a system that lets you create and register “slash commands” — commands that you can type into the Discord chat and...
View ArticleSomewhere between silver and tin
There’s a YouTube channel called Clickspring, run by an Australian bloke called Chris who is a machinist: a mechanical engineer with a lathe and a mill and all manner of little tools. I am not a...
View ArticleThe Matrix has you, part 2
I’ve recently switched back from vscode to Sublime Text, which means that after all the time I spent training my fingers to type “code somefile.txt” instead of “subl somefile.txt” I now need to undo...
View ArticleThe Pastry Box Project archaeology
Many years ago (2012!) I was invited to be part of "The Pastry Box Project", which described itself thus:Each year, The Pastry Box Project gathers 30 people who are each influential in their field and...
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OED second edition CD-ROM under Wine
I recently discovered that there's an old software edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the second edition) on archive.org for download. Not sure how legal this is, mind, but I thought it would be...
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Family Fortunes board generator
I nerd-sniped myself.Internet: I am disappointed that you have not provided me with one of those meme-maker websites for a Family Fortunes board. Now I will have to make one.— Stuart Langridge (@sil)...
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The CMA wants your comments on web apps
Here's the tl;dr: if you make web apps in or for the UK, the CMA, the UK tech regulator, want to hear from you about their proposals before August 29th 2024, which is only a week away. Read their list...
View ArticleOn iOS, Home Screen web apps are part of your iCloud Backup
Recently I have been most baffled by how on my iPhone, my iCloud backup was over 5GB (and therefore would not back up into the free space that I have) despite how I had turned off most of the apps that...
View ArticleTwo Plumbers
In a land far away, there were two brothers, two plumbers. To preserve their anonymity, we'll call them... Mario and Luigi. Their mother, a kind and friendly woman, and their father, a man with (by the...
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My Keys
I have a problematic relationship with keys.Well, that's not true. I have a problematic relationship with key rings. For some reason, my pockets are a violently hostile environment for things I put in...
View ArticleForty Nine
The sum of the digits of the square of 49 (2401) is the square root of 49.49 is the first square where the digits are squares. In this case, 4 and 9 are square numbers. It seems that 49 is an age of...
View ArticleBlog Questions Challenge
The latest thing circulating around people still blogging is the Blog Questions Challenge; Jon did it (and asked if I was) and so have Jeremy and Ethan and a bunch of others, so clearly it is time I...
View ArticleUse RSS to read newsletters
Everyone's got a newsletter these days (like everyone's got a podcast). In general, I think this is OK: instead of going through a middleman publisher, have a direct connection from you to the people...
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