Computing

2024-10-07: Google's creators envisaged that advertising-funded search engines are a bad idea (but made one anyway)

2024-10-07

Introducing canvas: A new interface for OpenAI’s ChatGPT that’s designed for better “collaboration” when coding or writing.

2024-10-06

Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh: Never really thought about customising my command line much before but now I’m probably going to waste half of tomorrow doing so.

You Can’t Own The Social Web: Would the ‘Social Web Foundation’ better be thought of as an Activitypub trade group?

The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted: There’s plenty of good stuff out there even if - or perhaps especially if - you’re in a position to boycott the big social media sites.

2024-10-04: 📚 Finished reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

2024-10-03

Apple is Silently Removing VPN Apps from Russia’s App Store: Presumably at government request, limiting the ability to access uncensored information and privacy of Russian internet users.

2024-10-02

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System: Mildly terrifying episode of Veritasium showing how easy it is to hack almost any phone via exploiting the SS7 system.

2024-09-29: Elon Musk's free speech 'principles' lose to his economic interests once again as he capitulates to Brazil's Twitter demands

2024-09-28

Moving to Pika: In which a post about changing blog hosts turns out to be full of commentary on coping with the exhausting conditions of modern existence.

2024-09-28: Honestly it’s probably a losing battle, but if you want to try then organisations like CNN and …

2024-09-27

NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology advises that it’s counterproductive to make users set passwords with specific composition rules or change them regularly.

2024-09-24: Somewhat bewildered at what’s going on between the ultra famous web content management system …

2024-09-18: 10015 is a useful website containing a ton of quick little web tools that handle a set of fairly …

2024-09-18

Using LLMs to Simplify your Writing: Using LLMs as a personal writing editor seems like one of their more benign uses if you’re happy to fact-check the results - and this idea is one my colleagues probably wish I’d take up.

2024-09-16

Analytics for the personal web: What would the ideal web analytics system for a personal website look like?

2024-09-11: Save videos, photos and audio from your favourite sites with Cobalt

2024-09-08: UniGetUI is a handy GUI for Winget and other Windows package managers

2024-09-06: A friend gets in touch to let me know that it’s not necessarily scary AI cyber-brains that are …

2024-09-03: More events in what is starting to feel something like a global backlash against some of the big …

2024-09-01: Telegram is only end-to-end encrypted if you solely use 'secret chats'

2024-08-27: Windows has a keyboard shortcut for opening LinkedIn for some reason

2024-08-15: Disabling my webcam from being a 'sound, video and game controller' fixed my Windows 11 laptop having no sound

2024-08-06: In news that chills me to the core, Hazel, a software engineer, has been keeping around 7,500 tabs …

2024-08-03: TIL: The US' current cybersecurity legislation, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is an evolution of …