I'm Left Handed

NOTE: Please update your feed for this blog

Adblocking People and Non-adblocking People Experience a Totally Different Web

I’ve just spent the past hour writing a blog post about why on earth certain websites have autoplaying videos that must cost them a fortune in bandwidth. And then it dawned on me. Video ads! I’ve been browsing the web with an adblocker for so long that I’d totally forgotten about the existence of ads being spliced into video content. Ah, silly me. But just to be sure ads were the…

Reddit decides to allow COVID-19 misinformation

A few anti-vaccine subreddits have popped up on Reddit over the past months. And in response, a selection of other subreddits are calling on Reddit to remove these subreddits - which are often full of misinformation - from the platform. Well, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (spez) has responded , essentially with ‘no’: Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. He does on to…

The $5 VPS

The $5 VPS is amazing. Sure, the specs you get for that five bucks has been stagnant for a few years now, with both Linode and DigitalOcean offering you 1 vCPU, 25 GB SSD and 1 TB of bandwidth. But it’s still a great deal. I remember the dark days when I relied on ‘shared hosting’. With companies like A Small Orange offering just 500 MB of storage and 5 GB of bandwidth for $7/mo…

The Apple Era

I realised something today. The world is riddled with complicated questions with even more complicated answers. And it can feel crippling at times. But when it comes to computers, phones, smart watches, smart headphones and tablets there’s a simple answer to the question of what to buy: Apple. We’re living in the Apple era. The Apple brand is universal and unparalleled. Their output is…

Author Ben Schott on COVID-19 and New York City

If it’s too soon to know the meaning of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to know the meaning of Covid-19. But since we still greet sneezes with the 14th-century Black Death prayer ‘Bless you’, it’s possible a few new norms will emerge. Some predict the decline of business travel, others the demise of handshakes. It seems more likely that every household will, from this day hence, maintain a…

'Corbynism Will Outlast Jeremy Corbyn'

Corbyn’s personality was always lacking. He wasn’t unlikeable, but was also not likeable either. And now he’s finally no longer leader of the Labour party . His slow, drawn-out political death has been completed. But Tom McTague in the Atlantic argues that Corbyn’s ideas will outlive the man himself, much in the same way Barry Goldwater did in the 1960’s on the…

'Why the internet didn’t break'

A nice little explanation of why the internet was always going to be just fine during the COVID-19 crisis despite the massive spike in demand. But the main takeaway from the article is that there could be 42 million Americans without broadband. And that’s not good enough: Three weeks ago, everyone’s point of reference for high-speed broadband networks was the one-way delivery of video…

'They Were Opposed To Government Surveillance. Then The Coronavirus Pandemic Began.'

Good follow up read in BuzzFeed.News in the same vein of the Maciej Cegłowski article I linked to yesterday. Is the coronavirus the kind of emergency that requires setting aside otherwise sacrosanct commitments to privacy and civil liberties? Or like the 9/11 attacks before it, does it mark a moment in which panicked Americans will accept new erosions on their freedoms, only to regret it when the…

'DJI Won the Drone Wars, and Now It’s Paying the Price'

[DJI CEO, Frank Wang] is perhaps the most private tech CEO of them all, shunning all but a handful of media requests over his 14 years as DJI’s boss and figurehead. He stoodup a planned interview for this story twice, leaving his representatives to apologize and explain that they just never quite know what the man will do. In fact, the rumor going around DJI’s press office is that Wang might not…

China wants to create a whole new goverment-controlled internet

At the gathering, held at the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency that establishes common global standards for technologies, they presented a simple PowerPoint. It didn’t bother with much detail on how this new network would work, or what specific problem it was solving. Instead, it was peppered with images of futuristic technologies, from life-size holograms to self-driving cars.…

Developers: Show Users What You're Working On

Today I stumbled on the website for a blogging engine called Blot that I’d never heard of before. The general design of the site and the fact that it ‘turns a folder into a blog’ made me think it was probably created by some dude about five years ago and is now probably long abandoned. But while it turns out that it is about five years old and is also made by just some dude it most certainly isn’t…

How will coronavirus effect...

the recreational drug market? Will cross border drug movement increase and how will production change? dog ownership? Now is a good time to have a dog. From both the human and canine perspectives. people with mental health issues? Being stuck indoors is going to massively alter even the mostly mentally strong. climate change? Will the world start to focus on it more? travel post-virus? Will there…

Symptom of COVID-19 may be loss of smell

“Almost everybody who is hospitalized has this same story,” said Dr. Marco Metra, chief of the cardiology department at the main hospital in Brescia, where 700 of 1,200 inpatients have the coronavirus. “You ask about the patient’s wife or husband. And the patient says, ‘My wife has just lost her smell and taste but otherwise she is well.’ So she is likely infected, and she is spreading it with a…

Toilet Paper Shortages in 1940 and 2020

I’m currently reading The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson. It’s great (I might post some more extracts in the coming days) and it feels like a particularly appropriate read during the ongoing coronavirus crisis as the book focuses a lot on the the day-to-day realities of the Blitz, which all too often are starting to vaguely resemble…

'Apple Acknowledges Personal Hotspot Issues'

MacRumors : In an internal document distributed to Apple Authorized Service Providers this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple has acknowledged that some iOS 13 or iPadOS 13 users may experience issues with Personal Hotspot. I have had nothing but problems with Personal Hotspot for a long time. Long before iOS 13. And that’s actually a big problem because when I turn it on it’s because…

'Comfort food sales rise amid coronavirus self-isolation orders'

In the week that ended March 14, popcorn sales were up 48%, pretzels up 47% and potato chips up 30% compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data cited by the outlet. “People are retreating back into comfort habits,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Bartashus. # I think this is less about these items being ‘comfort food’ and more about them having a long shelf life.…

'No, coronavirus isn’t going to break the internet'

Wired : In response to concerns about networks not being able to cope with the demands being placed on them, BT has said it has “confidence” that it will be more than able to cope with people spending more time at home. The group says the highest peak its ever seen in demand hit 17.5Tb/s – during coronavirus there’s been a 35-65 per cent increase in daytime traffic but the highest peak has only…

'Netflix to Cut European Traffic by 25% Due to Coronavirus'

Reuters : Netflix said on Thursday it would reduce its bit rates across all its streams in Europe, in effect cutting traffic on its European networks by 25% to preserve the smooth functioning of the internet during the coronavirus crisis. The move came after talks between European Union industry chief Thierry Breton and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Breton had a day earlier urged the video streaming…

Rishi Sunak's 80% + Universal Basic Income

Today the UK declared the closure of cafes, pubs, restaurants, nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, gyms and leisure centres. And to help the employees of the affected industries the Chancellor of the Exchequer - Rishi Sunak - announced that the government will pay 80% of their salary for the foreseeable future so that they neither lose their jobs or struggle too much financially. It’s a bold and…

Seneca's Morning Routine

I’ve been re-reading “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work” recently. It’s a wonderful collection of the daily routines of some of historys most iconic people. One person not in the book though? The Stoic philosopher Seneca . So here’s his morning routine according to his Letter LXXXIII . He begins his day with some exercise.…

'Why Britain’s Coronavirus Strategy is Literally One of the Most Insane Things in Modern History'

Did you see a small problem between the British government’s definition of herd immunity…and what it actually is? Herd immunity is — the real thing — what happens after enough members of a population have been vaccinated. It’s not…just letting an entire nation be rampaged by a lethal virus for which there’s no vaccine. […] The human species never developed “herd immunity” to polio or…

COVID-19

Short article over at the Specator: Why Britain Isn’t Opting for a Coronavirus Lockdown Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Officer, explained that the aim is to try and delay the peak of the disease and then stretch it out over a longer period so the NHS is better able to deal with it. […] Chris Witty, the Chief Medical Officer, stressed that one of the reasons the UK was not moving to…

The Flashing Webpages

I’ve noticed more and more websites now only loading images on a page when you scroll to down to them. It’s called ‘ Lazy Loading ’ and I hate it. I’m all for saving bandwidth and improving page loading times but this trend is incredibly annoying. Scrolling down a page once ‘loaded’ should be smooth. But instead images flash at you as they load while you…

.txt

I have a bad memory. If I don’t jot something down then I’m going to forget it. Even if it’s a task that I need to do in just ten minutes time I still jot it down. And I’ve used a plethora of tools for this task. But several years ago I just settled upon individual text files for each task. Simple. But this turned my plain text folder into an out of control, bloated…

The Banality of Restrained Musical Genius

I’ve spent the morning listening through The Beatles' first four albums for the first time in a long time. It’s amazing how you can feel how talented they are but also how boring it all so often is. Four albums of 8/10 pop songs all around two minutes in length. Songs so good, but so similar, that they all sort of blur into one another. It’s actually tiring to listen to…

Creepy Pepys

Interesting article on Samuel Pepys and some of the more seedy elements of his diary. I still haven’t gotten around to reading his famous diary yet, but I was broadly aware of his creepiness, and he would often spring immediately to my mind when I’d hear someone say “men use to be much more gentlemanly and chivalrous back in the day”. However I didn’t realise he went…

Minor MacBook Pro Refresh

Apple has announced a slightly updated MacBook Pro. Jason Snell (Six Colors) : These updates don’t bring any changes to the exterior of the MacBook Pro — it’s the same base design introduced in late 2016 — but they do bring 9th-generation Intel processors with up to eight cores to the MacBook Pro for the first time. There’s also been yet another tweak to the controversial butterfly keyboard Apple…

12 Steps To Drink Well and Not Get a Hangover

I turned 27 this year. And almost overnight I started to get bad hangovers whenever I drank more than a beer or two. Gone were the years of my next day invincibility. So I’ve been forced to develop a system. It helps me. Maybe it can help you too, my fellow old people. Step 1 - You might still feel like crap Accept the fact that you’re going to have to slightly write off a day after…

'Security Lapse Exposed a Chinese Smart City Surveillance System'

Today in Cyberpunk China: Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. […] The exposed data contains enough information to pinpoint where people went, when and for how long, allowing anyone with access to the data — including police — to build up a picture of a person’s day-to-day life. […] The database also…

'Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley'

From the New York Times : For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home. He walks five miles to work. He eats one meal a day and has said that on the weekends when he fasts from Friday to Saturday, “time…

ARM Macs This Year?

Intel have been dragging their feet when it comes to advancements in laptop-class CPUs for a while now. And it’s costing the Mac dearly. The iPad Pro is a more powerful device than most MacBooks! So for a few years it’s been rumoured that Apple is going to switch to ARM processors like their iOS devices. In my head this was still a year or two away. But maybe not. Tim Cook : For our…

Some Quick Thoughts on Apple News

I know the tech world is currently busy covering Apple News+, but I’ve recently just been trying out plain old Apple News recently for the first time. Here’s some random thoughts. I actually think it’s a decently designed app. It does nothing outstanding, but it displays stories and their texts simply. It does its job. The main thing I’m not a fan of design wise is the time…

The New York Times Gets It

I don’t read much news, but fairly often one of my RSS reads will link to an article from a newspaper. And this has become a little anoying in recent years as many newspapers now put their online content behind a paywall due to their dwindling physical paper circulation. Which I understand. But as someone who reads just a couple of articles a month from each publication it makes little…

Amazon Prime Video

There’s a nice little article by Alex Sherman at CNBC on Amazon Prime Video , beginning with this interesting rumour as to why the Lord of the Rings TV show rights went to Prime Video: But money alone wasn’t going to separate Amazon from the pack — Amazon’s $250 million offer wasn’t even the highest bid for the show’s rights, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ultimate selling…

Remembering Podcasts

Podcasts have a big problem: remembering them. Many of the podcasts I follow are overflowing with ideas, knowledge and references that I will almost certainly never remember to look into further. A big reason for this is because like a lot of people I listen to podcasts in the background whilst doing something else. 95% of my podcast listening time is spent whilst I’m either walking, running,…

I Put My Dad on Linux and Everything Went Fine

Oh the joys of giving tech support to your parents for their crappy computer. I suffered for years with this and so did my poor Dad. It was the classic cheap PC + Windows combo of pain. The laptop display looked like it was 512 × 342 and it lost an average of one keycap a month. And then there was the usual Windows woes. Slowness, old school viruses, antivirus viruses, free-to-play games…

Don't Skip Chapter 8

I was reading Austin Kleon’s list of his 15 favourite books of the year when his description of “ The Importance of Living ” by Lin Yutang stood out (in bold ): I learned about this 1937 bestseller while reading Will Schwalbe’s Books For Living. It’s basically a book about the ancient Chinese art of chilling out and living a good life. (One thing: If you pick it up, just skip chapter 8 and Lin…

Recipe: Tortellini chicken soup

I’ve owned a slow cooker for quite a few years now, but I’m not actually a huge fan. A lot of the recipes I’ve tried have been more miss than hit. But this slow cooker creamy tortellini, spinach and chicken soup is fantastic. Give it a go! Notes : Actually follow the recipe! The balance and amounts are just right. Tear the chicken well at the end. I didn’t and the pieces were too big. Don’t…

Evernote Still Sucks

Soon it will be two years since I wrote this about Evernote moving to the Google Cloud. I sounded hopeful. In my head the move was just the start of the beginning of the resurgence of Evernote. Instead it has continued to stagnate. I can’t remember any new features being added - other than a few UI tweaks - and both the Mac and iOS apps remain buggy and terribly slow. Oh and the browser extension…

How to Watch US Netflix in the UK

NOTE: This article is now out of date and likely will not work. The US Netflix catalogue has famously been superior in quantity and quality to the UK one for a long time now. And while it’s not as bad as it once was the US library still remains superior, with a far better movie collection and TV shows like The Office (US) . But until fairly reccently someone in the UK could easily access US…

The Setup of 2016

I’m a big fan of The Setup . It’s “a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done.” So in the spirit of it, I’ve decided to do my own. And plan on doing one each year to keep track of how my ‘setup’ changes. You can see my 2013 and 2014 one too. What hardware do you use? My main computer is a 15-inch…

Overly Organised Tags

I have two digital brains for storing stuff: Pinboard and Evernote . Pinboard is a bookmarking site, so I use it store anything at a web URL that I may want later. Evernote is a notetaking application and is for anything that I will probably want later, including personal data like receipts, notes, and book excerpts. Both of these services fill up with information very quickly, so rely heavily on…

The Loss of What.cd

The music torrent tracker What.cd closed today. The details are still not clear. At first it seemed French police seized the sites servers hosted with OVH and took it offline. But now it seems that the sites admins got word of a potential raid so shut down and deleted data before they were seized. Ars Technica : “The facts are pretty skimpy right now,” What.cd’s representative…

The Newsletter Popup Plague

If you’re an iPhone user the popup on below will almost certainly have gotten in your way many times. It isn’t a spam or malicious popup, but it is just as annoying. Thankfully a year or so ago it became so common and such a menace that considerate iOS developers started to remove it from their apps and it is much less prevalent today. But now there is a new plague. This time on the…

Evernote in the Cloud

As I type this Evernote is on my second monitor to my left. It’s been there all day during which it’s been referred and added to many times. I live in Evernote. But despite that I don’t love it. In fact it seems during the eight years I’ve been using it, I like it less and less each year. Well this may start to change soon as Evernote recently announced that they are moving…

Replacing DuckDuckGo !bangs with Alfred

I recently switched back to using Google as my default search engine after several years of favouring DuckDuckGo . Duck’s search results were sadly just not good enough compared to Google’s. However, one thing it beat Google on was its ability to directly search a website using something called a !bang . So rather than searching ‘youtube van morrison tupelo honey’, with a…

Typing

Around about a year ago I suddenly realised that I’d been typing away on QWERTY keyboards for well over a decade (since around 2000, aged 10), and that during that time I’d been ‘ chicken pecking ‘ the whole time. And with the further realisation that I’m likely to be using keyboards for many, many years, I decided it was time to learn how to type properly. I first replaced my Apple chiclet…

The Setup of 2014

I’m a big fan of The Setup . It’s “a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done.” So in the spirit of it, I’ve decided to do my own. And plan on doing one each year to keep track of how my ‘setup’ changes. You can see my 2013 one here . What hardware do you use? Me and my 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro…

Alcohol

How wonderful and terrible it is that my drug of choice, alcohol, is positioned perfectly in the world I inhabit. There are thousands of these buildings called ‘pubs’ and ‘bars’ dedicated to the consumption of it. Every supermarket I go to stocks vast quanties and varieties of it at a financial loss just so they get me through their door to buy food on the way out of it. My…