I think I lost my voice
Why’s it so much harder to publicly opine in your forties?
Oli's Blog
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.
Save £23,265 with one weird trick!
Tobacconists hate him.
Goodbye Internet Explorer
But what will people use to download Chrome?
Turning my sites up to Eleven-ty
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.
Wait! What happened to RSS?!
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?
CSS layouts are so much better than they used to be
I’ve been doing this web thing a while, and 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 been lovely to see how far CSS has come.
Did I ever tell you about Suzie?
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.
Easy multifactor authentication in Django
Use django-multifactor to make your Django websites extra-secure by requiring a secondary authentication factor. Disclaimer: I made this.
Be careful with my kids’ biometrics
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?
When did we stop caring about basic network security? We need to act before it’s too late.
Another day, another crippling botnet attack from yet another army of conscripted IoT devices.
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?
Our doctors are striking for patients, not money
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.
“Your Policy Just Got Better”… Did it E&L? No, it just got more expensive.
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.
I’m not sure why I’m so surprised…
Breaking the Internet won’t stop terrorism
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).
PearOS is dead - Don’t install it, stop using it immediately!
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.
Streaming Kodi over the Internet
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.
Python isn’t always slower than C
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.
It’s time we buried Internet Explorer 8
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.
How to build a DIY sous vide water bath for £25 in 25 minutes
Cooking sous vide can revolutionise the way you think about food but commercial water baths are expensive. For mere pocket money, you can throw together a DIY sous vide that does the job better than some off-the-shelf units. It’s time to start cooking like the professionals.
Putting the Secure in SSH; hardening your shell server against most attacks
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.
Bulk renaming files in Ubuntu; the briefest of introductions to the rename command
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.