The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to "Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom …

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of ContentsBackgroundGetting a DOI the easy wayLet's Go Rogue!Automatic Submission of New ContentManual Submission of Old ContentGetting the DOIGenerating your own DOIMaking the DOI…

You're part of the Groovy Gang because you're a member of RSS Club! These posts are only available on my RSS and Atom feed. This post is not available in the shops, on the web, via FTP, or anywhere else. So, yeah, sorry! My last post apparently broke some people's RSS readers. I had a code sample which said ＜marquee＞ - despite being properly escaped, some feed readers double-decoded it and tur…

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps. Back in the bad-old-days, there weren't many good…

Do riders in autonomous vehicles think that they are in a private space? Here's a fascinating story from California where an robotaxi was redirected from its intended destination and, instead, delivered its misbehaving passengers to the police. The 15-year-old passengers were riding in a driverless autonomous car around San Mateo Monday afternoon. The teens drank alcohol inside the Waymo taxi…

Let's suppose you've updated the description of your ActivityPub account from "World's Number 1 Taylor Swift Fan" to "This account is now a Nickleback Truther". How do you let the rest of the Fediverse know that you've changed your allegiance? By default, most Mastodon instances won't periodically poll your account information just to see if you've updated it. So how does the information get…

If you're reading this, you're part of RSS Club! A top secret society of cool people who subscribe to my feed. This post is not available on the web or via email. I've been playing about with Rogue Scholar. It's an open-access publication which allows blogs to get a persistent Digital Object Identifier. If I've set everything up correctly (not a given) then all new posts on this site will be…

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of…

Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to tell me why I'm wrong. Here's my thinking: Table of ContentsCausesIs that a problem?What are we…

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a scam. Most people just mark as spam and move on with their day. But a significant number of people …

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic Earth-bound stories to the the most extraordinary flights of fancy. One story might be set in a…

If you're reading this, you've probably been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to parse and decipher the new HTTP Signatures sent by Mastodon and other Fediverse servers. This is a basic and somewhat incomplete guide to accepting these signatures. I'm sure there are various gotchas, but it works with the signatures I've seen in the wild. Shut Up And Show Me The Code! OK, wow, no…

As part of my grant from NLnet to improve my Fediverse bot project, I'm spending time making sure I understand all the fundamentals of ActivityPub. The problem with Internet standards is they're scattered all over the place. Abandoned forums, half-maintained wikis, mailing lists with obscure rules, and monolithic blocks of text. Sometimes you just want one book which collates all the info and…

The whole point about Shakespeare is that you can set the play on an intergalactic space station or an American high school and keep virtually the rest unchanged. What happens when you transpose Dream from a proscenium arch to a living wood? As the sun sets over the trees, what sprites will come out to entertain us? Ruined Theatre brings a brilliant cast of seasoned West End performers to strut…

Back in February, I applied for NLnet's Next Generation Zero grant. They were looking for Fediverse projects to help rewild the social media landscape. Or, as they describe it: Reclaim the public nature of the internet Small and medium-sized R&D grants between 5.000 and 50.000 euro, with the possibility to scale up. I run ActivityBot - it is a single-file ActivityPub server suitable for…

Next to all the code samples on this blog is a little "copy" button. That makes it easier to grab any of the code I've shared. The HTML and JS is delightfully simple: <button onclick="navigator.clipboard.writeText( this.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('code')[0].textContent );" title="Copy code" >⧉</button> The navigator.clipboard.writeText needs a user interaction to w…

The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar. I had a URl. I had my Google™ Pixel® phone running the latest Android© 17 with an updated calendar a…

This is a charming and zeitgeisty novel which has a strong start and fulfils the promise of its blurb. What if your autonomous vacuum cleaner was sentient and was very sad about your wife's death? It pays obvious homage to the Brave Little Toaster, 100 Acre Woods, Beauty and The Beast, and hundred other what-if-your-toys-came-to-life stories. Along the way we discover what it is like to be a…

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their latest camera to review - and it is a bit different to all the others I've tried. Whereas previous cameras are good for bird watching, or wildlife spotting, or finding leaks at home - the P3 has a manual macro lens and is specifically designed for getting close-up and personal with your electronics. Yup! See just how hot your CPU is getting…

Cats is so silly! In the olden days, after a wild animal was slaughtered, the tribe's shaman would wear the skin and re-enact the hunt. As he became one with the beast, the people slowly understood the ways of nature. Cats is a similarly spiritual experience wherein we watch androgynous sylphs gyrate across the stage and believe (if only for a moment) that the human has become feline, all in…

On our recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was bemused by just how little effort performers put in to finding out why people had selected their show. Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is ridiculously expensive with some performers paying tens of thousands of pounds. The way performers recoup the costs of performing is by getting people to pay to see a show. Acts are spending huge amounts…

Pixels are a lie. Even if you think you're drawing something with "pixel perfect" accuracy, your monitor is lying to you. There is no grid of platonically perfect squares. In CSS, pixels are a double lie: Note that 1px doesn't necessarily equal one physical device pixel. On HD displays, it may span multiple physical pixels. Similarly, 1cm in CSS often doesn't correspond to one hundredth of SI…

This is a detailed examination of the various senses possessed by animals. Some will be intimately familiar to you - like sight and sound - whereas some will seem strange and uncanny - like magnetic detection and electro-sensing. Some straddle an almost understandable space like echolocation or tetra-chromatic vision. This isn't a game of Top Trumps where all the animals are ranked by power.…

One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal agent to find you a restuarant in town, tonight, for a hot date, catering to your dietary preferences, …

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the…

This was my first ever time at The Fringe™. Here are some scattered thoughts looking at the good, the bad, and the annoying aspects of this madly extravagant exhibition of talent. We saw 23 shows together, and one separate show each. There were more hits than misses, but the frustration of wasting your time on a bad show is rather heavy when there are literally hundreds of other shows on offer. P…

I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia. It reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent. What can a teenage girl…

Easily the best show I've seen at the Fringe. For plot-related reasons, a television company asks a literary genius to create a "pro-weapons sitcom". It is a fast paced mix of the sitcoms 2012 and Episodes. The jokes come at a steady pace - some attack with the furiousity of bullets, others the the subtlety of a knife in the night. All four of the cast are spectacular. Turning the…

For a pay-what-you-want show this was decent. Three comedians doing sets on the theme of philosophy - followed by a Q&A where the audience poses philosophical conundrums to them. It more-or-less works as a gimmick. Although an early afternoon crowd may have been more likely to ask questions anonymously. I've never seen a Sikh doing an unnervingly accurate impression of Trump before. Daman…

This play is fucked up! Such a brilliant concept - what happened to the kids from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after they were rejected by Wonka? Stuck together in a Big-Brotheresque household, they trauma-dump on each other. New Zealand's Half Trick have shrunk their full-length play into a Fringe-standard 60 minutes. That does make it a little brusque and, simultaneously, a bit…