Technology

Software development is moving from the era of the craftsman to the era of the flat pack.

I have recently been on the look out for a simple journaling/note capture application.

There is currently an explosion of creation, triggered by AI opening it up to those who previously didn’t have the skills to do it.

This blog has seen a recent up-tick in views and that would normally be a good thing. However this up-tick has been a bit unusual.

I rarely use Google Search now.

In the past it was a cornerstone of my Internet usage. Like most people I would go to Google and type a search term, browse the results, skipping the ads, and then …

I was recently driving around the M25 when Google surprised me with a route suggestion.

I am in the UK and my Internet connection is provided by Virgin Media - there I have admitted it.

What if code libraries in future contained no code?

In this article it discusses a …

Sometimes a thought comes to you and you want to capture it quickly but it is not always obvious what is the best way to do that.

Could the history of YouTube indicate the path that AI is going to be follow for the generation of applications?

Sometimes you come across a video that brings back memories.

This will become out of date quickly but a useful guide for which models to use for which tasks and which to …

RSS is a technology I have relied on for years.

Chris Woodruff produced an excellent series of posts to introduce the C# developer to the language of Rust.

Software is in a massive transition phase where it is now possible for non-developers to produce software that was previously the remit of professional developers.

In a recent article Seth Godin identifies that the sorting of information into directories had a big impact. He gives the …

My son hit an error on his Xbox that stopped him logging in.

I have been asked numerous times to write a small application to solve a specific problem for someone.

When you work in technology it is tempting to bring in the new exciting technologies that claim to make your life easier, run faster and bring you rainbow unicorns every day.

Finding a good available domain name for a project, product or company is hard but there is one web tool that I have found is more successful than others.

We use the technology Apache Kafka as a key element in the implementation of the distributed ledger we have developed.

Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn’t been used in over forty …

Ed Roberts is a forgotten person in the history of home computing but played a huge role in getting us to where we are today.

Back in the mists of time if you wanted to take a photograph you would have to use a camera that you had to carry with you.

Sometimes it is handy to save a webpage for later and there are lots of ways to do it.

It is very difficult to develop a simple piece of software and keep it simple.

I hadn’t updated my blog for a while so I thought I would write a short post about The Keeper Test. That is when all the images suddenly stopped …

A lot of coding jobs can involve fairly “normal” tasks - create a page, write to and read from a database, add a new field to this screen. These tasks have been done numerous times by …

My dad is pretty tech-savvy (he was an electronic engineer) however he was having problems with how long it took his Windows PC to become usable.

Turbo Pascal is 40 years old and it had a big impact on the direction of my career.

There is a quote “A backup is not a backup unless you have recently performed a restore from it”; I got to find this out the hard way.

The role of the software developer is set for a major upheaval over the coming years.

I rely on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep me up to speed on what is happening in the world.

Nearly every technology can be used for good and bad. Quite a bold statement but something I believe is true.

It is possible to see a (heat)map of all the photos you have taken in Google Photos.

I noticed the other day that my wife’s laptop was showing seconds in the time in the taskbar but my laptop was not; a very handy feature to have.

I thought it might be useful to document how I use Obsidian.

I have started using Obsidian a lot. One of the things that I really like is the ability to add community plugins to add functionality as …

I am not a photographer. However I like thinking that I can take a good photograph.

Lex.page was one of the first AI assisted editors available.

I have tried to avoid writing about AI as everyone seems to be doing it however I have found one site that is pretty usable and actually seems to work quite well.

Sometimes you come across a post that is so brilliantly put together you have to share it - and I am not talking about any of my posts.

One of the things that has deterred me from doing much personally in the cloud has been the potential cost.

I am dabbling with .NET Maui and developing an application for Android. Tied to that I have just changed laptop. On my previous laptop I had Windows 11 Pro but the new one has Windows 11 Home.

I thought it was worth documenting my current setup for this blog. Most of it is automated and it costs me nothing to host it.

When I was at school they had a building which was mainly for the use of those doing their O Levels (the old name for what is now GCSE examinations). There were only two reasons I would get to go to …

Could studying the habits of seagulls lead to better cloud computing approaches?

It turns out the first pictures taken from space were not initially planned.

It definitely feels like Twitter is slowly dying.

I have used Twitter for years, definitely more as a consumer than a publisher. During this time I have refined the accounts I follow to provide a …

Most mobile apps, and websites to an extent, seem to be driven by how much they can get the end user to use or engage with them; the more usage the better.

I occasionally stop getting Gmail notifications on my Google Pixel 2XL android phone. I later find that I have a whole bunch of emails that I had missed. I am not sure what causes it however I have …

Using Gmail on Android it is possible to support multiple email accounts. The normal way you can change which account you are looking at is by pressing on the account picture in the top right hand …

I have tried numerous to-do applications in the past; from the very simplest to the all-singing, all-dancing applications and they have never stuck. I used them for a week or so and realised a month …

This short clip is pretty remarkable. A young woman lost most of her sight due to a brain tumour. All she has left is a small blurry circle in her right eye. With the use of some AR goggles and some …

There is often a work culture that you should be busy all the time - if you are a programmer you should always be typing and producing code. Programming is a mental process and so requires thinking. …

This article uses a really neat analogy with Tetris for illustrating the impact of technical debt. Leaving gaps is akin to leaving technical debt in the code base and makes subsequent changes more …

We had a discussion at work about “throw away” code. One of our developers was very against developing any code that would be thrown away afterwards. He referred to this as a waste. In my …

This is a pretty amazing demonstration of animating an aspect of a 2d photo. This even includes pulling out bodies and animating them moving away from their original scene.

Nearly every technology that has been developed has been used for both good and bad. Developments that look like they could have a massive impact on civilization have usually also spun off a side …

Just a reminder of the starting point for setting up SSH with Github so I don’t have to keep looking for it each time.

This has a great summary of what to do when things go wrong when using Git. Added here so I know where to look in moments of panic.

The background to why the famous “three finger salute” was chosen to be so difficult to do.

I have worked with various flavours of “Agile” over numerous years. These have ranged from the very formal where everything is done by the book to more ad-hoc versions where different …

This article documents developments over the last ten years at all layers of the network stack. It also highlights how vulnerable the current Internet is.

This paper is a discussion around the issues faced by distributed systems when dealing with time, ordering and failures. This is particularly relevant with the work I am doing at the moment designing …

This is a summary of a number of consensus algorithms currently being used in the Blockchain space. The most common at the moment is Proof of Work however this is slowly being replaced by other …

This is here for future reference - a very good set of guidelines for REST APIs.

There are some amazing things happening with image processing at the moment. I remember my graphics class at university 25 years ago and the primitive, by comparison to now, image processing …

I love the way this article explains some of the key issues with designing distributed systems and how to solve them. It uses the illustration of a theme park and the rides - very clever and a fun …

I don’t own, and have no intention of owning, a MacBook as I own a touchscreen Windows laptop however this approach to make it support touch is genius. They use a mirror at the top of the screen …

It is very easy to make assumptions about a subject you know well and others may not. You will have knowledge you have learnt over time that you perceive is so simple or obvious that others should …

There seems to be no single clean definition of what “Blockchain” actually means. There are a lot of woolly statements, several of which are clearly either wrong or too narrowly focused. …

Ubissoft have introduced a tool that “uses AI” to identify potential coding issues when the developer commits code. They claim it can detect a significant number of errors and even suggest …

A project was struggling to deliver in time and the project manager resolved it by reducing the team size where the typical approach is to increase the team size. This decision was based on the …

This is an excellent study on why developers are so important to a platform. At the moment we are developing a platform and we have been trying to get this message across to the business side of the …

A very simple introduction to how Bitcoin works … using a stuffed penguin!

This was an excellent podcast on the ethics behind some of the decisions being made about technology today. The whole talk is excellent and thought provoking however for me one part (about 27 minutes …

Intel have just announced a new set of smart glasses that don’t look stupid. Admittedly the functionality is a lot more limited that other offerings however these look a lot more normal than …

I had a very unusual setup for the network for my office. The office is situated a floor above and at the opposite end of the house to where the main router is located. A fully wired connection is not …

This article defines the difference between a professional developer and an amateur as:

There are a lot of stories around how Blockchain could revolutionize every industry. This is a nice summary of some of the companies that are trying to make this happen and the way they are trying to …

This is an interesting post from Rob Conery, someone I’ve followed for quite some time, and his …

This blog is being powered by a static content generator called Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages. Getting Hugo up and running was relatively easy. …