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Life in Info tech

See that face? It’s a little bit Mona Lisa, little bit not. She’s got something under the hood, sometimes not a lot… hey, that rhymes! But that is an accurate pictorial of life in the IT world over...

Can ChatGPT Recognize Handwritten Digits?

TLDR: No. No it cannot. This was admittedly a fairly stupid experiment on the face of it. ChatGPT is a decoder-only model. It shouldn’t be able to perform an image recognition task. But then again,...

Sorting and Dating 11ty Posts by Name

Organize and automate your 11ty blog's post structure with ISO dates and some quick JavaScript.

Dear past me, use the flags

Dear past me, I know you’ve just launched your first desktop application. It’s a nightmare isn’t it? Well you’re in for a bigger one. Your boss calls you, and they need a new feature immediately. Y...

The Comfort Crisis

As with many things in life these days, it all started with an episode of the Peter Attia podcast. In this edition, our nation’s most Badass Doctor was interviewing a guest I initially dismissed as...

Apple HomeKit and Linux SystemD

If you’ve ever dreamt of controlling your Linux applications or running commands directly from your iPhone, I’ve got some exciting news for you. I’ve been tinkering around and have come up with a s...

Debian Linux 12.1 released with Security Updates

Debian Linux project announces the first update of the Debian project's stable distribution, Debian 12 (codename "bookworm") named Debian 12.1. This update mainly addresses security issues and sign...

Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone

Laniakea Books is a publishing house in London, England, which publishes public domain books only. Public domain books are books which their author has relinquished all copyrights and allows everyo...

Examining My Biases via My Fiction

About four months ago, I seriously started eating disorder recovery, working with a new therapist and a nutritionist.  I’ve also taught my class on how to be an ally to people with eating disorders...

Setting up VSCode for Ansible Lightspeed AI in Ubuntu 22.04 desktop

Red Hat launched the Ansible Lightspeed Code Assistant Generative AI with IBM Watson Code Assistant in May 2023. This preview is now available to all Ansible users, allowing them to explore the tec...

Radicals Are Losers

Radicals, at least the core base of them, have to, by definition, be losers. People usually only take stances for changing society, especially fundamentally changing society, if they see a problem ...

The Gardener's Trap

Humanity has convenience and choice to such a point it borders on vice. Humanity assumes, due to said convenience and choice being an easy-to-digest abstraction over the complex reality of the worl...

I gave up on statistics

For a very long time it has been almost essential to track traffic on your site and peek on the analytics. But what if you... don't?

Strong focus

I have a strong opinion on how strong your focus indicators should be. They should be strong!

Moving into a New Data Centre with Equinix MA5

We’d been operating out of the Equinix MA2 Reynolds House data centre in Manchester for many years - it was our first POP/colocation site which we originally came to when it was called IFL2. Howeve...

Brute-forcing the NYT Digits game

You’re given a list of integers and a target number. You can add, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers, and you can use the result for future operations. Once you have used a number in an operatio...

Maintaining the past

One of the nasty parts of having a long internet presence is that you have all those old things still around. So, I preserved a quirks mode test page.

Craft your own serverless observability platform

How do you build your own observability platform? And should you?

External links with the least HTML

These days we have the need to display links to external sites with an accompanying icon. Typical implementations involve adding lots of extra elements under the hood. Is there a way to get it done...