Latest posts
- Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp ★★⯪☆☆May 09, 2026@edent
This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it. The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence. A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We…
- I've found just the right paper for my Bottom Hole problemMay 07, 2026@edent
A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots, the prop is based on a real newspaper. So I decided to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out…
- RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than GoogleMay 05, 2026@edent
Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not…
- [RSS Club] Where are you from?May 04, 2026@edent
Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very rough idea of where visitors are from. It doesn't deal with people using a VPN, or their mobile roaming to a different country, or rapid changes in IP allocation - but it's good enough for my purposes.
- Vertically Aligning Roman Numerals in CodeMay 03, 2026@edent
I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" => 7, "Ⅵ" => 6, "Ⅴ" => 5, "Ⅳ" => 4, "Ⅲ" => 3, "Ⅱ" => 2, "Ⅰ" => 1 ]; The problem is, the
- NHS Goes To War Against Open SourceMay 01, 2026@edent
The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was so important. That's why I'm beyond disappointed at recent moves from NHS England to backtrack on…
- Let's Get Digging!Apr 29, 2026@edent
As part of my quest to try new things I decided to dig for treasure in my local park. The wonderful folks at DigVentures allow members of the public to assist with archaeology projects in their local area. We arrived on a sunny Thursday to find a couple of areas of Lesnes Abbey cordoned off, with the turf taken up, and a set of tools waiting for us. After a suitable health-and-safety briefing
- Theatre Review: Hadestown ★★★★★Apr 27, 2026@edent
Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience. Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the opening of Hadestown feels like dinner theatre; almost cosy in its intimacy. The first act is so busy - there are a …
- You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catchApr 25, 2026@edent
The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's parse_ini_file() function and it works. But… .env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which
- Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories?Apr 24, 2026@edent
Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base. So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe? No. Firstly, all your Open Source code has already been slurped up. It was all ingested for "training purposes" years ago. If it was moderately interesting…
- Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog postsApr 23, 2026@edent
I'm grateful that my blog posts attract lots of engaged, funny, and challenging comments. But any popular post also attracts spammers. I use Antispam Bee to automatically eradicate a couple of hundred crappy comments per day. Nevertheless, some get through. Here's a particularly pernicious one - it appeared as three comments ostensibly in reply to each other. At first glance these look like
- [RSS Club] How do you preserve an RSS feed?Apr 22, 2026@edent
Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! I was sent this thought-provoking blog post called "The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan)". In it, Martin Paul Eve makes the case that trying to preserve a blog is difficult. I mostly agree with him (although think he's perhaps a little hair-shirted about it) and it…
- Better TTS on LinuxApr 21, 2026@edent
The venerable eSpeak is a mainstay of Linux distributions. It is a clever Text-To-Speech (TTS) program which will read aloud the written word using a phenomenally wide variety of languages and accents. The only problem is that it sounds robotic. It has the same vocal fidelity as a 1980s Speak 'n' Spell toy. Monotonous, clipped, and painful to listen to. For some people, this is a feature, not a…
- Book Review: Up - A scientist's guide to the magic above us by Dr Lucy Rogers ★★★★★Apr 20, 2026@edent
My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of discovery. It's spectacularly accessible. Written in a relaxed and casual tone, it encourages domestic science. I…
- Reprojecting Dual Fisheye Videos to Equirectangular (LG 360)Apr 19, 2026@edent
I still use my obsolete LG 360 Camera. When copying MP4 videos from its SD card, they come out in "Dual Fisheye" format - which looks like this: VLC and YouTube will only play "Equirectangular" videos in spherical mode. So, how to convert a dual fisheye to equirectangualr? The Simple Way ffmpeg \ -i original.mp4 \ -vf "v360=input=dfisheye:output=equirect:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189" \ …
- Book Review: How To Kill A Witch - A Guide For The Patriarchy by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi ★★★⯪☆Apr 17, 2026@edent
After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events? This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the…
- RSS Club for WordPressApr 16, 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 you want this for your own WordPress site, here's what you'll need: A blog post which is only visible in RSS / Atom. Which has no HTML rendering on your site.
- 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…