gig Theatre Review · 250 words
The "…by Candlelight" concerts have a simple premise - come to a cathedral or church to hear top West End talent sing your favourite singer's songs, backed by a live band. This is a cut above your usual tribute act - they aren't trying to do impressions of the act, they're stamping their own energy onto beloved songs. It works! Mostly. This concert was in a West End theatre so the (electric) c…
Continue reading →favicon HowTo HTML php · 3 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~302 times
In theory, you should be able to get the base favicon of any domain by calling /favicon.ico - but the reality is somewhat more complex than that. Plenty of sites use a wide variety of semi-standardised images which are usually only discoverable from the site's HTML. There are several services which allow you to get favicons based on a domain. But they all have their problems. Google Exposes…
Continue reading →Movie Review · 600 words
Our friends Annie and Dave run the podcast "Will You Still Love It Tomorrow". The premise is great - take a film that you love but you haven't seen for ages, and see if it still holds up. They asked me and Liz to nominate a film to discuss with them. What's something that we loved but last saw 20ish years ago? We suggested The Story of the Weeping Camel. It is my go-to answer when someone asks …
Continue reading →IETF ReDeCentralize standards web · 16 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~1,977 times
I've gotten sufficiently annoyed with a trivial problem that I'm preparing to write an IETF RFC. Yeah. That's how ticked off I am! Every site that I sign up for asks me to upload an avatar to represent myself. Whenever I change my photo, I have to log in to a hundred sites and change it there. Perhaps they could all use Gravatar - but that's a centralised service and doesn't work with wildcard…
Continue reading →Book Review NetGalley · 300 words
Brother Mauro, an older monk, and Nicolo, a young, striving merchant are called by the Pope to traverse the treacherous political, religious, and mercantile terrain of medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire to seek out the powerful Presbyter John, a mysterious king in the Far East who has promised to put his wealth and vast armies to the service of the pope's crusade. I don't understand why…
Continue reading →css HTML Web Development webdev · 1 comment · 400 words · Viewed ~373 times
There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a website to another. Just like an app!!!! A decade-and-a-half later, and CSS has caught up (mostly). No more JavaScript, just spec-compliant CSS. Well, …
Continue reading →Amazon drm ebooks kindle python · 5 comments · 900 words · Viewed ~6,737 times
A few days ago, someone called PixelMelt published a way for Amazon's customers to download their purchased books without DRM. Well… sort of. In their post "How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked" they describe the process of spoofing a web browser, downloading a bunch of JSON files, reconstructing the obfuscated SVGs used to draw individual letters, and running O…
Continue reading →blog github · 2 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~444 times
This is a quick GitHub action to get alerted every time your website is mentioned in a GitHub issue. Doing it manually You can search GitHub for a URl, and sort the results with the newest first, like this: https://github.com/search?q=%22shkspr.mobi%22&type=issues&s=created&o=desc Using the API GitHub has a fairly straightforward API - although it uses slightly different parameters. …
Continue reading →Book Review history · 1 comment · 500 words · Viewed ~220 times
This is a marvellous and depressing book. Marvellous because it finely details the history, atrocities, and geopolitical strife of unfettered capitalism. Depressing for much the same reason. Dalrymple takes the thousand different strands of the story and weaves them into a (mostly) comprehensible narrative. With this many moving parts, it is easy to get confused between the various people,…
Continue reading →theatre · 6 comments · 1,950 words · Viewed ~355 times
I go to see a lot of theatrical productions. While most shows are good, the audience experience is usually dreadful. I'm not just talking about cramped seats and disgusting toilets (although they play a part) but that theatres haven't cottoned on to the idea that theatre is an immersive experience which can't be replicated by watching Netflix. There's an excellent article in The Stage about the…
Continue reading →css HTML · 5 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~844 times
"If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid." I want to draw some vertical bar charts. I don't want to use a 3rd party library, or bundle someone else's CSS, or learn how to build SVGs. HTML contains a <meter> element. It is used like this: <meter min="0" max="4000" value="1234">1234</meter> Which looks like this: 1234 There isn't much you can do to style it. Browser manufacturers seem to …
Continue reading →Book Review · 200 words
This is a curious and mostly satisfying novel. It bills itself as a satire, but it is rather more cynical than that. A kid has been stabbed and the worst instincts of humanity descend. Race-baiting police, vote-grubbing politicians, and exploitative journalists. I can't comment on the accuracy of the satire of the press - but it feels real. It's full of the hungriest, nastiest people who will…
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