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  No Javascript Day https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/11/no-javascript-day/ I'd like to propose that web designers around the world spend one day this year browsing the web with JavaScript disabled. I'm tentatively calling this "International No Javascript UseR Experience Day" or INJURED for short. A few weeks ago, a reader of my blog complained that all they saw was a blank screen. As Liz Conlan pointed out, my CSS was making the whole page invisible. My WordPress theme has a f...

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  EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/ Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to...

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  Gadget Review: Thermal Master DV2 - Infrared Birdwatching Scope https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/gadget-review-thermal-master-dv2-infrared-birdwatching-scope/ The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their DV2 camera to review. As their name suggests, this is a thermal / infrared camera - they've specifically designed this for bird watching and animal spotting. Let's put it through its paces and see how it compares to the competition! Straight away you can see it is different from...

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  Book Review: A City on Mars - by Dr. Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/book-review-a-city-on-mars-by-dr-kelly-weinersmith-and-zach-weinersmith/ I'm pretty sure this book is a psyop designed to demoralise a generation of starry-eyed dreamers. It is obviously written by the same people who told us not to land on Europa. A malignant energy designed to limit the scope of human ambition and thwart our plans to colonise the universe. The problem is, I can&#3...

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  Public Transport - Don't Make Me Think! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/public-transport-dont-make-me-think/ In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in comput...

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  Scattered thoughts on social geolocation https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/scattered-thoughts-on-social-geolocation/ I want to be able to share my location with my friends on social media. Twitter (RIP) had a way to attach an optional location to a post. Facebook still lets me check in to venues. But neither ActivityPub (Mastodon) nor AT Protocol (BlueSky) allow me to do that. I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on...

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  Book Review: Foreign Fruit - A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/book-review-foreign-fruit-a-personal-history-of-the-orange-by-katie-goh/ I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well. For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of facts from Wikipedia. Occasionally various origin...

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  Book Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/book-review-dungeon-crawler-carl-by-matt-dinniman/ To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys. The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people...

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  Google Calendar "Unable to launch event" - caused by missing DTSTAMP https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/google-calendar-unable-to-launch-event-caused-by-missing-dtstamp/ For several years, Google's product help forums have been littered with people trying to download a .ics event from their email, only to receive the error "Unable to launch event" when trying to add it to Google Calendar. It doesn't happen with all iCal attachments, only some. Here's how to fix it....

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  Are political journalists always wrong? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/are-political-journalists-always-wrong/ I've mostly tuned out of reading the news. But, once in a while, a headline will be shared on social media and I'll momentarily stare into the abyss. There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able...

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  The UK Government's Low Value Purchase System is a Waste of Time https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/the-uk-governments-low-value-purchase-system-is-a-waste-of-time/ It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy something...

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  Who are the actors in the UK's 2015 passport? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/who-are-the-actors-in-the-uks-2015-passport/ I got nerdsniped by a bloody Reddit post! In 2015, the UK Government launched a new passport design. It immediately attracted negative press for its designers' "sexist" decision to feature more men than women. The government has been accused of sexism over the new UK passport design, which commemorates the achievements of two women but seven men. It&#3...

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  Using FourSquare's API to post location checkins to social media https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/using-foursquares-api-to-post-location-checkins-to-social-media/ What is this, 2016? I like sharing my location with my pocket friends sometimes. If I'm in a cool bar that they know, perhaps they can recommend a drink. If they live nearby, maybe they want to come for dinner. Not everyone has FourSquare's SwarmApp, so it is handy to automatically share its updates with other people. Of...

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  London Data Store Relaunch https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/london-data-store-relaunch/ It has been sixteen years since the launch of data.london.gov.uk. Back then, it was a trailblazer as one of the first major cities to release Open Data in this way. Now, over a decade later, it is more than a mere repository; it is a celebration of Open Data and the way it can improve Londoners' lives. So, time for a refresh front and back. As well as a bunch of back-end updates, the front-end has been...

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  Book Review: Accessible Communications by Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/book-review-accessible-communications-by-lisa-riemers-and-matisse-hamel-nelis/ My mate Lisa has written a book! Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done conv...

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  There's still no point in gigabit broadband https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/theres-still-no-point-in-gigabit-broadband/ Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation rel...

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  Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/book-review-the-names-by-florence-knapp/ 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...

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  The Unintended Consequences of Gamification https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/10/the-unintended-consequences-of-gamification/ This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the screenshots have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. We'd launched Drive To Improve which put a "blackbox" in drivers' cars and gamified their safe driving. I’ve recently taken part in the DriveToImprove Beta. My car now has a small devi...

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  Find blog posts with missing featured images - and missing alt text - without a plugin https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/find-blog-posts-with-missing-featured-images-and-missing-alt-text-without-a-plugin/ WordPress has the concept of "Featured Images". They are the images which show up when you share a blog post on social media or, on some themes, as the "hero" image. How can you quickly and easily find any posts which don't have a featured image? For this, I use WP CLI...

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  Stupidly Simple SVG Sparklines https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/stupidly-simple-svg-sparklines/ A sparkline is a little line-graph with no axes or other unnecessary details. They're useful for getting quick understanding of what the data is showing. They're also really easy to create programmatically. This uses the SVG "polyline" which takes a list of x,y co-ordinate pairs. But can you spot the small problem? <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox=...

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  UK Government Kicks Out Palantir https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/uk-government-kicks-out-palantir/ The UK Government, for all its faults, is pretty good at publishing contracts it has awarded. That's why I get depressed when I see rage-bait nonsense about how companies have been award "Top Secret" deals. Right now you can go to https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk and search for whichever bête noire has you riled up. You might want to argue that the company is corrupt, inc...

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  GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/gds-weighs-in-on-the-nhss-decision-to-retreat-from-open-source/ Within the UK's Civil Service you occasionally hear the expression "being invited to a meeting without biscuits". It implies a rather frosty discussion without any of the polite niceties of a normal meeting0. In general though, even when people have severe disagreements, it is rare for tempers to fray. It is even rarer...

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  Book Review: Terrible Worlds: Destinations by Adrian Tchaikovsky https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/book-review-terrible-worlds-destinations-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/ What's better than one Adrian Tchaikovsky novella? Three Adrian Tchaikovsky novellæ! Or is it "novellii"? Either way, a delightful triptych of stories on a common theme. On the surface, they're about travelling to a new destination (Space! The Future! For-Copyright-Reasons Not Narnia!) Except, deep down, they're...

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  Whale Fall https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/whale-fall/ Somewhere, in the endless blue ocean, a gigantic mammal shudders as it takes its last breath. Thanks to science, we know that all dogs go to heaven, but all whales descend through the murky depths until their carcasses litter the seabed. Imagine a giant dying. You can't. They are huge and endless. A towering presence which, so it seems, has always been part of our world. They dominate and are indomitable. It is simply unfathomable tha...

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  Which age-gates should be skill-gates and vice-versa? https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/which-age-gates-should-be-skill-gates-and-vice-versa/ In the UK, it is illegal to buy alcohol if you are under 18. Similarly, in most countries, you cannot vote until you have reached a specific age. These are age-gates. You do not need to prove your competence to drink, vote, smoke, or get married; you just need to be old enough. Some things have skill-gates. If you want an amateur radio licence in the UK...

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  PHP - simple way to send HTTP headers before a script ends https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/php-simple-way-to-send-http-headers-before-a-script-ends/ Suppose you want PHP to keep processing after it has sent back an HTTP response. Normally, this doesn't work: <?php header( "Location: https://example.com/" ); // Long operation. sleep(10); die(); Try it yourself. You'll have to wait 10 seconds before you get back < HTTP/2 302 < location: htt...

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  Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/11/now-witness-the-power-of-this-fully-operational-fediverse/ How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes. Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be...

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  NHS Goes To War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/ 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...

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  Book Review: How To Kill A Witch - A Guide For The Patriarchy by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/book-review-how-to-kill-a-witch-a-guide-for-the-patriarchy-by-claire-mitchell-and-zoe-venditozzi/ After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women0 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 W...

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  Reprojecting Dual Fisheye Videos to Equirectangular (LG 360) https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/reprojecting-dual-fisheye-videos-to-equirectangular-lg-360/ 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 Wayffmpeg \ -i original.mp4 \ -vf...