Father of three, seasoned web developer (Django, Vue, Astro, etc), Ubuntu Member, photographer and woodworker. This is my blog, covering a raft of topics, mostly technical.
A few years ago I’d have been happy if my children wanted to follow me into a career of programming, but the longer I spend with LLMs, the less future I see in it for any of us. How should we advise our children for their futures?
The BBC Microbit is a wonderful introduction to both programming and electronics, but MakeCode’s Blocks make some ideas quite hard to express.
Foreign money is interfering in UK elections again, but I can’t remember it ever being this obvious.
A testament to Open Source tenacity, is this Free CAD software Good Enough™ to compete with the big boys?
Why’s it so much harder to publicly opine in your forties?
Tobacconists hate him.
As Microsoft hammer in the last few nails, I ask the question: what will people use to download Chrome?
This site is now powered by a static site generator called 11ty. It’s awesome! I’ll try to explain some of my favourite things about it and reasons you might prefer it to stalwarts in the SSG arena.
While I was busy aging like soft cheese, someone killed-off* RSS.
It used to be everywhere, now it’s gone; hidden or dead. How do you kids stay up to date with the websites you like? Do you know what RSS does? How are websites supposed to advertise update-subscriptions?
In finally dropping IE11 support for my last few projects, I’ve been able to use raw CSS —not somebody else’s framework— and it’s lovely to see how far CSS has come.
Suzie was a cat and I was her human. And that’s how things were for 15 years. This is an obituary for the best cat I’ve ever known, bar none.
Use django-multifactor to make your Django websites extra-secure by requiring a secondary authentication factor. Disclaimer: I made this.
Schools often aren’t the most clued-up when it comes to understanding privacy and security, but the companies and service providers that that work with them —and take on all sorts of child data— really need to watch what they’re doing.
Nobody should be handing out my daughter’s fingerprints to strangers, right?
As we continue to shovel piles of crappy abandoned devices onto our networks, why aren’t we monitoring and curtailing what these devices do on our networks? Why don’t we care any more? Have we given up on network security?
My better half is a junior doctor. She works insanely long hours and cares completely for her patients. When you can see how much it costs somebody as conscientious as she is to walk out on strike, it’s all the more frustrating that press coverage so spotty, confusing and often insulting.
The underlying issue is so simple: There aren’t enough doctors.
Five words to chill the heart. Becki from E&L, the people who insure my cameras, wrote to me today to let me know the outstanding news that I get to pay more money for something I never asked for.
Governments want to intercept all terrorist communication but… they can’t. You can talk online with perfect secrecy if you know what you’re doing. Their solution to this is banning strong encryption. Most people have probably switched off but this will affect you (and won’t stop terrorists).
We have seen a sharp increase in the number of PearOS questions appearing on Ask Ubuntu. The reason it doesn’t work any more is because it’s an abandoned project that is based on a version of Ubuntu that is now also dead. It has more holes than a colander and will all-but-guarantee your system gets compromised.
If you’re leaving your media centre behind while you travel this Christmas, you needn’t go without your media. Follow these steps to access all your TV and movies on an Android device over a nice, secure SSH connection.
If you asked developers to describe Python you might hear: easy, dynamic and slow; but a recent impromptu game of Code Golf showed me that Python can actually be pretty competitive, even against compiled languages like C and C++ when you use the right interpreter: Pypy.
Every web developer loves to wail on Internet Explorer but we need to act now if we want to stop the history of IE6 repeating itself with IE8. The longer we don’t, the longer we agree to limit ourselves to not using new and exciting features that make the internet better and our lives easier.
Cooking sous vide can revolutionise the way you think about food but commercial water baths are expensive. Spend your pocket money on a DIY sous vide that does the job better. Start cooking like the professionals.
SSH is the de facto remote access technique for Ubuntu and Linux servers and yet some of the defaults you’ll get from sudo apt-get install ssh can be downright dangerous in the wrong circumstances. This article will steer you around the biggest pitfalls to keep your server’s front door well protected.
I’ve seen more than a few Ask Ubuntu users struggling with how to batch rename their files. They get lost in Bash and find -exec loops and generally make a big mess of things before asking for help. But there is an easy method in Ubuntu that relatively few users know about: the rename command.
Who actually checks the permissions of applications they’re installing? A little while ago a Paypal update stalled because it required extra permissions. This is what happens if an app you have already installed wants more power. I was more than a little surprised with what I found.
Single-purpose kiosk computing might seem scary and industrial but thanks to cheap hardware and Ubuntu, it’s an increasingly popular idea. I’m going to show you how and it’s only going to take a few minutes to get to something usable.
You might already have Ubuntu Desktop installed and you might want to just run one application without stripping it down. This article should give you a decent idea how to convert a stock Desktop/Unity install into a single-application computer.
So it’s that time of year again, it’s my ex-smoker-versary. Okay I’ll come up with a better name for next year but for now you’ll have to make do with my reflection on smoking and why it’s really not that hard to quit, as well as a few silly numbers.
A couple of years ago some FFmpeg developers decided they didn’t want to live under the tyranny of the project leaders and forked the project into Libav. That’s all fine except that for two years Ubuntu has erroneously been calling them the same thing. And they’re not.
I’ve just read through Rick Spencer’s argument for rolling releases in the Ubuntu Devel mailing list but I’m frankly less convinced than I was before.
Django is awesome but there’s one job that can be a bit trickier than you’re used to: moving from one database to another.
I’ve noticed a growing trend when you click an external link on Facebook from a desktop computer: you’re asked to log in. While this might seem like it’s only a minor inconvenience, in the long run this could be extremely dangerous.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been a nicotine-dependent smoker. The unpleasant sort who can’t go for an hour without really craving a cigarette, getting irritable when they can’t have one. I recently quit but the strange thing is, not smoking is the easiest bit in this process.
Personal Packaging Archives are a popular method for sharing software not yet in the main repositories. You might be using one to gain a particular update you need. But how can you quickly get a list of all the PPAs you’re using?
I’ve been a full-time Ubuntu user for about five years and I don’t own any consoles. If you approached me three or four years ago and asked which games I played, you might have received a rather defensive reply. High quality games were few and far between, that is, until May 2010 when things changed forever…
Long time users of XBMC and Boxee on Linux will probably be aware of a very annoying bug that essentially uses an entire CPU when just sitting at menus.
I thought I could go without Wikipedia for one day and I was wrong. Less than an hour into the day and I needed to look something up. I could go and look it up somewhere else but I like Wikipedia!
There are few things more tedious than waiting for a delivery. One of those is waiting for a delivery, seeing the van turn up and just drive off without delivering the item. Worse still when the driver says it was your fault.
It’s happening again. Ubuntu is on its deathbed. Pundits and community members are exchanging blasts of statistics and in the crossfire people are getting dubious. Well I’ve one thing to say to Ubuntu community members…
Let’s say you want to improve Ubuntu by contributing a patch but if that project is covered by the Canonical Contributor Agreement, you’ll need to sign over some of your rights. People have been arguing about this for a while now but why does Canonical need it in the first place?
/var/lib/dpkg/status corruptionApt and dpkg are wonderful tools when they work. However, like most tools, if you chuck rubbish at them, they’ll stop working. Here’s a quick guide to overcoming the most common break in /var/lib/dpkg/status.
Landscape is a great tool but at its current price and integration with the costly Ubuntu Advantage service plan, uptake will be slow.