RSS Bilingual Reader

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 emails back-and-forth with their support team and finally got set up. A couple of days later I received...

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 0 , 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 ActivityPub. Of course, that also means that I can't receive any comments or feedback about it. I'd love...

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 the discussion. Oh Scronkfinkle, why didn't they listen to you? This book attempts to set out they why and...

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 composition made the performance by soloist Alina Ibragimova even more terrifying than it might have othe...

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 close to impossible to read unless the entire file was intact. I don't mean including a checksum to detect ...

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 crowd-pleasers covering everything from "Take On Me" to the earworm from KPOP Demon Hunters. Venues now k...

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 on an innovative form of data visualisation known as "a graph"! That's the sort of "number go up" that ...

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 . Or you can use the baroque XHTML Friends Network . None of those have been widely adopted. Perhaps i...

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 stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in ...

I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? 0 And was I aware that I could manage my account online? 1 And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? 2 Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that whoever was in charge of predicting call volumes had recent suffered a traumatic brain injury and was unable to count beyond five without pulling their other hand out of their...

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 to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there...

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 that the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". At which...

I couple of years ago, I developed ActivityBot - the simplest way to build Mastodon Bots . It is a single PHP file which can run an entire ActivityPub server and it is less than 80KB. It works! You can follow @[email protected] to see the latest entries on OpenBenches.org, and @[email protected] for a slice of colour in your day, and @[email protected] to see what my solar panels are up to. This is so easy to use. Copy the PHP file (and a .env and .htaccess ) ...

Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a million miles away, the people that made it happen, and the politics which inevitably stymied things. And there is a lot of politics. One of the weakest areas is the political analysis behind the stories. For example, a Soviet Lunar rover is describ...

When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything developed in-house by the state is available under an OSI Approved licence. The UK is generally pretty relaxed about people, companies, and states re-using its code. There's no desire and little capability t...

First up, you should go and watch The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa. It is a brilliant set of performances and a joy to see. While perusing the programme on the National Theatre website I stumbled upon a little bug. The incredible Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ has her name rendered in a most unusual style: It rendered just fine in Chrome - but both Firefox and Safari misrendered some of the accented characters. Here's a minimum viable demo to show what's happening: See the Pen FF Font Render...

Ofgem, the UK's energy regulator, publishes the current energy price cap per region. Note that it is only the current price cap. I couldn't find the complete historic data on their site. So I sent a quick email asking for it which they treated as a Freedom of Information request. Please can you supply me with a complete list of all previous electricity price cap figures? I have searched your website and can only find the current price-cap. Specifically, I would like to know the per kWh price cap...

A couple is facing the devastating prospect of divorce. Their young daughter is understandably distraught. In her fear, she doses both parents with a powerful hallucinogenic drug in the hope that tripping through therapy will save their marriage. Well, OK, that's not exactly what the game's about - but it might as well be! My aim this year is to play more co-operative games with my wife. So she picked up the controller to play as the shrewish May while I steered the lug-headed Cody. Both have be...

I'm sure we have all met a person like this: People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with the same information. It's a crutch. — Ibster ( @ibster.bsky.social ) 9 March 2026 at 09:46 At a recent tech event, I bumped into an old friend and invited him out for dinner the next evening. He proudly showed my the AI ...

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged. So, why is there a new version of the book out and is it worth reading again? As the copyright page says: Earlier versions ...