Recently updated blogs

I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person who can describe himself as ‘one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today’ without …

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsān): تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه الله وكان حافظا بلسان القوم ويقال …

A century of motorways This month marks 100 years since the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada from Milan to the Lakes.On 21 September 1924, if you were lucky enough to be living in Milan and wealthy enough to own a motor car, you might have driven your machine through the busy cobbled streets of the city to Viale Certosa, where the north western suburbs gave way to …

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse. At the time, I wrote a very long blog post about the whole experience. It was a fascinating …

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 …

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 …

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 →

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