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Happy DjangoCon US 2024 to you. Whilst I am not there, I have adopted the spirit of the season and got to work hacking together a new tool. Djade is a formatter for Django templates. It applies rules based on the template style guide in Django’s contribution documentation, plus some more. Ryan Cheley put together this section back in February (forum discussion). I enjoyed contributing to this discussion and wrote …

IntroductionToday, TLS certificates in the Web public key infrastructure (PKI) have long validity: almost all remain valid for at least three months! An attacker compromising a certificate early enough in its lifetimenote 1 keeps it compromised for months. Certificate revocation addresses this problem: a client must know to distrust a certain key for a domain, even if the valid key hasn’t expired yet.The issue? Billions of clients use the Web …

Pointless Exposition I’m not in the Apple ecosystem, but I was quite enthused about the announcement of the airtag and the FindMy network back in 2019. The private-by-design protocol / implementation looked great, especially compared to literally any other existing tracker. And the reporting network being more-or-less all iOS devices made sure that it would have a very large userbase to begin with. I wanted to use an airtag at …

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024. How I work – image from State Library of New South Wales I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and …

There are those who define as AGI (or ASI) as technology that will "outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Ok, but then this work will simply cease to be so economically valuable, and humans will mostly stop doing it. Humans will instead find new economically valuable work to do.This has happened repeatedly in the history of humanity. Imagine telling someone 1000 years ago that in the future, very few …

I’ve been in a few places where there’s been talk about justifying the cost of UCD and similar roles. At first glance it’s a fair point. What impact do we have? How are we helping? How do we ensure we’re doing the best we can? But the question rarely gets asked in that spirit. It’s one of the ways I note the health of an organisation or profession. If the …

Moon’s Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance Compiled by Peter Christopherson & Andrew Lahman Foreword by Andrew Lahman Afterword by Gavin Semple Limited to 1,000 Copies Debossed Hardcover with Dustjacket 170x190mm 224 pages Full Colour £45.00 PRE-ORDER HERE In 2002 Coil released Moon’s Milk, a double CD collection of four EPs comprising improvised performances recorded over successive equinoxes and solstices (recently reissued by our friends at Dais records). For friends and …

A bug in Chromium and Safari makes support of proper superscript and subscript characters problematic. See exactly why, and what you might be able to do about it. Read more.

In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a harmful political agenda which legitimizes adult attraction to minors, consistently defends adults accused of and convicted of sexual crimes with respect to minors, and more generally erodes norms of …

When this blog was in its prime it was a reasonably common occurrence to feature artists that had yet to release any ‘official’ recorded music, instead relying on shaky live You Tube clips or dodgy Soundcloud demos. The last band that featured here in that way was The Dinner Party, who a few months on had changed their name (for the better) to The Last Dinner Party and became a …

I wanted my old life back... but it was going to take time. And I faced the dreaded post-treatment tests. Continue reading →

To slow down time. Life feels longer when there’s more of it to look back on. Take more photos and you preserve more memories. The more you do it, the richer your life looks in retrospect. Here are some photos I’ve taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max this year:

warmbru curiosity explored why, after centuries of wearing hats, the trend fell out of favor in the middle of the 20th century. He explained that while both men and women wore hats for practical reasons, such as to keep the elements at bay, hats were also indicative of society and class. Why did hats suddenly almost die out? Not completely but to a large extent. Let’s first consider why people …

This is a talk I gave for the Toulouse Game Dev Master Class. I talk about my methods of discovering cool game art tricks (which I then document on this blog) by asking around, doing research, using mod tools or injecting into the rendering process with Intel GPA, RenderDoc or NVIDIA NSight. I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO. I …

BlueSCSI Wi-Fi Desk Accessory 1.2 has been released: wifi_da-1.2.sit (StuffIt 3 archive) SHA256: 984935cc5e3e25102849cd41c52764cb08060d183d48cfb49f9da3eead49aea8SHA1: 980b17f58babb839977b7d714f8556a82bf33c7e Changes in this version: Added an "(Other Network)" option to the SSID list to manually enter a hidden SSID