By @edent · WordPress · 1 comment · 250 words
I am a pedant. I like it when validators say "nothing to report". No errors, no warnings, no information messages. My blog is plagued with messages on the HTML validator saying Info: Trailing slash on void elements has no effect and interacts badly with unquoted attribute values. By default, the WordPress function get_the_post_thumbnail() spits out […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gadget PMR446 review usb-c · 3 comments · 750 words
I am easily influenced. At EMF Camp, I saw my friends Skylar and Cameron using some nifty walkie-talkies out in the field. Skye (patiently) explained to me the joys of PMR446 and - because I was quite drunk I hastily bought some radios on Amazon. Hey, they were on special - £30 for a pair! […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Claire North · 1 comment · 200 words
I'm an absolute sucker for Claire North's books. She has an almost supernatural ability to weave an intricate yet satisfying tale, all while leaving the reader hungry for more. Ithaca presents a God's-eye-view of the story of Penelope. It's a fast, furious, and feminist story which plunges us straight into the middle of the Greek […]
Continue reading →By @edent · CyberSecurity shakespeare · 3 comments · 950 words · read ~111 times.
Shakespeare, famously, shunned computers. Like some sort of retro hipster, he didn't write his plays on a laptop, refused to use spellcheck, and didn't register his copyright on the blockchain. Lord, what fools these mortals be! What would Shakespeare's plays have been like if their characters understood basic cybersecurity? Now, it is true that very […]
Continue reading →By @edent · HTML WordPress · 1 comment · 400 words · read ~201 times.
HTML documents have the concept of an alternate representation of the document. For example, a page's header might say: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed"> That tells you there's an alternative representation of the page, what sort of content it is, and where it is located. That's nice. But it's hard for a browser to tell the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · 13 comments · 650 words · read ~271 times.
I recently went up to a conference in a city I'd never visited before. As I was sat on the train up, I wondered if any of the other passengers were also going to the conference. It's a bit socially awkward and creepy to go up to a bunch of strangers and interrogate them about […]
Continue reading →By @edent · autobiography Book Review · 450 words
I've bumped in to Ken Banks a few times over my career - and he has always been a kind, inspiring, and dedicated chap. How did he get that way? This book is part autobiography and part an explanation about how people can find purpose in life. It is refreshingly secular on the latter, and […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI LLM programming · 2 comments · 350 words · read ~558 times.
That's it. That's the post. Fine! I'll expand a little more. Large Language Models are a type of Artificial Intelligence. They can read text, parse it, process it using the known rules of English, and then regurgitate parts of it on demand. This means they can read and parse a question like "In Python, how […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AdBlocking adverts android firefox uBlock · 1 comment · 200 words
Sometimes, you want to stop scripts running only on specific domains. The best way to do that, I think, is with uBlock Origin - a free and fast ad-blocker. On the desktop version, it's simple to block scripts. Click the plugin icon, then click the disable scripts button. But on mobile it's a little more […]
Continue reading →By @edent · copyright DMCA firefox google · 9 comments · 300 words · read ~464 times.
There's a law in the USA called the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Amongst its myriad provisions is the ability for copyright holders to send takedown notices to service providers. If someone has ripped off your content, you can send them a legal letter saying "take that down". People often send DMCA requests to […]
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