Latest posts
- Why is it so hard to passively stalk my friends' locations?Apr 15, 2026@edent
I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…
- Android now stops you sharing your location in photosApr 13, 2026@edent
My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…
- Cheapest way to keep a UK mobile number using an eSIMApr 11, 2026@edent
I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case I need it to log on to something. I don't want to faff around with physical SIMs, so I went looking for the cheapest way to keep my number for the longest time. There are a whole bunch of providers…
- [RSS Club] Why do you use RSS rather than Atom?Apr 10, 2026@edent
This post is exclusive to feed subscribers. Enjoy! This whole experiment is called RSS Club - but perhaps it should be called "XML-based distributed feed club"? I've been playing about with local-only and privacy-conscious view tracking. I can see how many people click on my stories from HN or Google or anywhere else. I also decided to add the number of times a story is viewed by someone…
- Book Review: Small Comfort by Ia Genberg ★★☆☆☆Apr 09, 2026@edent
I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation. It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of …
- Theatre Review: Avenue Q ★★★★★Apr 08, 2026@edent
I'll admit, I was a little sceptical about returning to Avenue Q. I saw it on its original West End run back in… OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD! FUCK! Where did the time go? It's always hard to know how much to update a show. Does it need constant reinvention to stay in the zeitgeist or can it be pickled forever as a classic? "I wish I had taken more pictures" was something that utterly resonated with …
- Did WordPress VIP leak my phone number?Apr 07, 2026@edent
As discussed in my last blog post, the scumsuckers at Apollo.io have been giving out my personal details. Not only did they have my email address, they also had a copy of one of my phone numbers. I asked them where they got it from and they said: Your phone number came from Parsely, Inc (wpvip.com) one of our customers who participates in our customer contributor network by sharing their…
- [RSS Club] Banana for scaleApr 06, 2026@edent
This post is exclusive to RSS feed subscribers. Enjoy! I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while, so I decided to make it. This is "Scan Slowly And See". The code is made by cloning some of the banana's spots. Do let me know if the QR code works for you 🍌 …
- Someone at BrowserStack is Leaking Users' Email AddressApr 05, 2026@edent
Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address. A few weeks ago I signed up for BrowserStack as I wanted to join their Open Source programme. I had a few…
- Welcome to RSS Club!Apr 04, 2026@edent
What if I told you there was a secret social network, hidden in plain sight? If you're reading this message, you're now a member of RSS Club! RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃 If I've done everything right, this page isn't visible on the web. It can't be found by a search engine. It doesn't share to Mastodon or appear syndicated to Ac…
- Book Review: Superintelligence - Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom ★★★★⯪Apr 03, 2026@edent
When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …
- Concert Review: London Philharmonic - Pictures at an Exhibition ★★★★★Apr 02, 2026@edent
A delightful and emotional rendition of three rather different works. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Three Screaming Popes" was a chaotic cacophony. Wild, bizarre, inventive, and seemingly driven by excess. A fascinating performance, although not one I'll put on in the background. Turnage himself took to the stage to bask in the applause. Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1. Reading the story behind the …
- Random File FormatApr 01, 2026@edent
This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster. At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download. Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the moov atom at the end of the file was missing. I wondered if it would be possible to make a file format which was…
- Gig Review: Vitamin String Quartet at The Barbican ★★★★★Mar 30, 2026@edent
There is no such thing as the Vitamin String Quartet. They're an ever-changing line-up of musicians who have found an excellent schtick; modern songs played like classical music. Somehow they've parlayed that into over 300 albums, covering thousands of artists, and dominating the soundtrack of Bridgerton. The concert is titled "The Music of Billie Eilish, Bridgerton, and Beyond" - it's all…
- OpenBenches hits 40kMar 28, 2026@edent
Back in November 2023, our crowdsourced website of memorial benches reached 30,000 entries. At the start of March this year, I was delighted when long-time contributor jrbray1 added this gorgeous memorial, taking us up to 40,000 benches catalogued: You can read more about Dr Judy John and her work on biodiversity. Using the power of advanced machine learning, it is possible to plot the growth
- Adding human.json to WordPressMar 26, 2026@edent
Every few years, someone reinvents FOAF. The idea behind Friend-Of-A-Friend is that You can say "I, Alice, know and trust Bob". Bob can say "I know and trust Alice. I also know and trust Carl." That social graph can be navigated to help understand trust relationships. Sometimes this is done with complex cryptography and involves key-signing ceremonies. Other times it involves byzantine XML RDF.…
- Book Review: If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop ★★☆☆☆Mar 24, 2026@edent
Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories. Some of the…
- Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts!Mar 22, 2026@edent
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that whoever was in charge of predicting call volumes had recent suffered a…
- I'm OK being left behind, thanks!Mar 20, 2026@edent
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…
- Finding the right Bottom Hole paperMar 18, 2026@edent
On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of Waiting for Godot Bottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, Vyvyan and the People's Poet Eddie and Ritchie wait to see what the cruel hand of fate has dealt them in this week's episode "Hole". At one point, Captain Edrison Peavey Edward Elizabeth Hitler pulls out a newspaper to read. It may surprise you to know…