The Curious Engineer

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Terence Eden’s Blog

shkspr.mobi/blog

Regular nonsense about tech and its effects 🙃

GeneralTech news / industryFrontend / CSS / browsersSecurityTV / film

’95’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
3,718 from 29 Jun 1993 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
about daily (276 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/atom/

Latest

October 2026

  1. Book Review: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ★★☆☆☆
  2. Gadget Review: SoundPEATS CC3 Pro Bluetooth Headphones ★★★★⯪
  3. Book Review: You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] - Andrew Hankinson ★★★★☆
  4. Theatre Review: Opera UnTouched's "The Telephone" ★★★★★
  5. Gadget Review: LiberNovo Omni - the USB-C powered office chair ★★★★⯪
  6. Book Review: Get Ahead of Being Dead by Evie King ★★★★☆
  7. More phishing messages via Booking.com and Novotel
  8. Gadget Review: Mokin 17 Port USB-C Tower ★★☆☆☆
  9. Book Review: Quackery - A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang ★★★⯪☆
  10. Una Watch TOTP - MFA on your wrist!
  11. Book Review: Are You *Really* The Doctor? by Matthew Hutchinson ★★★⯪☆
  12. Book Review: Africa Is Not A Country - Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin ★★★★⯪
  13. The Internet of Very Cheap Things
  14. Book Review: The Thousand Deaths of Romeo and Juliet - Caroline Finch ★★★★★
  15. I paid people to try and follow my README
  16. Some quick thoughts on Unit Testing ActivityPub
  17. Concert Review: London Voices - Video Games Go Choral ★★★★☆
  18. Theatre Review: Hay Fever at Wyndham's Theatre ★★★★⯪
  19. Una Watch - SDK and Writing Your First App
  20. [RSS Club] Changes to the RSS and Atom feeds
  21. My Pitch for the New Season of Doctor Who
  22. Gadget Review: Una Watch ★★★★☆

September 2026

  1. Are you a smartwatch "power user"?
  2. Book Review: Bobiverse Books 1-3 by Dennis E. Taylor ★★★☆☆
  3. Gig Review: Public Service Broadcasting's Race For Space at Alexandra Palace ★★★★⯪
  4. No errors, no warnings, no gods, no masters - HTML Purity is a Fetish
  5. Some thoughts on HTML's proposed previewsrc attribute
  6. Are LLMs still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks?
  7. Book Review: How to Build a Space Station by Jonathan Morrison ★★★⯪☆
  8. Theatre Review: The School for Wives - at Riverside Studios ★★★★★
  9. How to get a DOI for your blog posts
  10. [RSS Club] Sorry for breaking your feed readers!
  11. Esoteric HTML - ismap vs CSS
  12. The expectations of privacy in driverless cars
  13. ActivityPub - How to send an updated user profile to Mastodon and the Fediverse
  14. [RSS Club] Sneak peek at new DOI functionality
  15. Put an AV test at the start of your slides
  16. ActivityPub - Is it worth defending against replay attacks and message/signature time skew?
  17. The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
  18. Book Review: The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories by Ken Liu ★★★★☆
  19. A reasonably practical guide to validating RFC 9421 HTTP Signatures for ActivityPub in PHP
  20. Book Review: ActivityPub by Evan Prodromou ★★★★⯪

August 2026

  1. Review: Ruined Theatre's A Midsummer Night's Dream ★★★★☆
  2. ActivityBot is the recipient of an NLnet grant!
  3. A simple "copy this code" button in JavaScript
  4. "iT woRKs BeTter in THe aPp!!"
  5. Book Review: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon ★★★★☆
  6. Gadget Review: Thermal Master P3 Macro Lens ★★★★⯪
  7. Theatre Review: Cats at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre ★★★★☆
  8. Why do audience members choose specific shows at the Edinburgh Fringe?
  9. Death to px, long live ch!
  10. Book Review: An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong ★★★☆☆
  11. Asymmetric Agents
  12. And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
  13. Thoughts on visiting the Edinburgh Fringe as a newbie
  14. Book Review: Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth ★★★⯪☆
  15. Edinburgh Fringe: Target Audience ★★★★★
  16. Edinburgh Fringe: Stand-up Philosophy ★★★⯪☆
  17. Edinburgh Fringe: Waiting for Wonka ★★★⯪☆
  18. Edinburgh Fringe: Doris, Dolly and the Dressing Room Divas ★★★★⯪
  19. Edinburgh Fringe: The Musical Mystery Caller ★★★★★
  20. Edinburgh Fringe: Miscast Sondheim ★★☆☆☆
  21. Edinburgh Fringe: Hot Flush – A Bold, We’re Old(ish) Burlesque Show ★★★☆☆
  22. Edinburgh Fringe - Eleanor Morton: The Mermaid ★★★⯪☆
  23. Book Review: Coding Literacy by Annette Vee ★★⯪☆☆
  24. Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody ★★★★☆
  25. Edinburgh Fringe - James Rowland: Team Viking ★★⯪☆☆
  26. Edinburgh Fringe - Garrett Millerick: We Tried it Your Way ★☆☆☆☆
  27. Edinburgh Fringe: When Vincent Met John ★★★★★
  28. Edinburgh Fringe - Justina Seselskaite: Settled ★★★★☆
  29. Edinburgh Fringe: Handel Nine German Arias ★★★⯪☆
  30. Edinburgh Fringe: Hamlet The Musical ★★☆☆☆
  31. Edinburgh Fringe: Afronauts ★★★★☆
  32. Edinburgh Fringe: Noted ★★★⯪☆
  33. Gadget Review: Soundpeats UU2 POP Clip2 Earphones ★★★★⯪
  34. Edinburgh Fringe: 15 Minutes of Shame ★★★★⯪
  35. Edinburgh Fringe - Kat Ronson: Millennial Girl ★★★★☆
  36. Edinburgh Fringe - Michael Brunström: William Tell vs the Algorithm ★★★☆☆
  37. Edinburgh Fringe - Rachel Creeger: Ultimate Jewish Mother 2026 ★★★★★
  38. Edinburgh Fringe: Smut Slam ★★★☆☆
  39. Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody! ★★★★★
  40. Edinburgh Fringe: 4 Aussies For Aussies - The Raging Bull ★★⯪☆☆
  41. Against Doomerism
  42. [RSS Club] I got an NLnet grant!
  43. Metadata for AI Generated Outputs
  44. Gadget Review: T2 Max plug-in Thermal Camera ★★★⯪☆
  45. Gig Review: Belle & Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister at Margate Dreamland ★★★★★
  46. Book Review: The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker ★★★★☆
  47. Gadget Review: HIKMICRO D02 Thermal Camera ★★★★★

July 2026

  1. Are political journalists always wrong?
  2. Google Calendar "Unable to launch event" - caused by missing DTSTAMP
  3. Book Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman ★★⯪☆☆
  4. Some Quick Thoughts on EMF Camp 2026
  5. Book Review: Foreign Fruit - A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh ★⯪☆☆☆
  6. Scattered thoughts on social geolocation
  7. Public Transport - Don't Make Me Think!
  8. Book Review: A City on Mars - by Dr. Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith ★★★★⯪
  9. Gadget Review: Thermal Master DV2 - Infrared Birdwatching Scope ★★★★⯪
  10. I'm a USB-C Maximalist
  11. [RSS Club] Half a million steps is about 10 marathons
  12. Another Ridiculous Interrail Holiday - 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks
  13. Game Review: Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime ★★★☆☆
  14. A bug which only affected left-handed users
  15. I'm just so bored of AI
  16. Combined 1D and 2D Barcodes
  17. This blog is written in en-GB

June 2026

  1. Book Review: Fake Creativity by Blake Loch ★★★☆☆
  2. Book Review: The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer ★★☆☆☆
  3. Review: Gamrombo PS5 controller - including Linux set up ★★★★☆
  4. Auth0 PHP - manually authenticating JWT idTokens
  5. Cybersecurity for the paranoid business traveller
  6. Which Copyleft Licence is Suitable for an SVG?
  7. Book Review: The Great When by Alan Moore ★★★★☆
  8. Two Way TV - product photos of 1997's hottest gadget
  9. [RSS Club] What happens to old posts?
  10. Did Frank Sinatra really think "Something" was a Lennon/McCartney song?
  11. Gadget Review: TP Link EH210 Ethernet Splitter (USB-C) ★★★★★
  12. Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio ★★★★★
  13. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name?
  14. There's still no point in gigabit broadband
  15. Book Review: Accessible Communications by Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis ★★★★☆
  16. London Data Store Relaunch
  17. Using FourSquare's API to post location checkins to social media

May 2026

  1. Who are the actors in the UK's 2015 passport?
  2. The UK Government's Low Value Purchase System is a Waste of Time
  3. Gadget Review: Chuwi Minibook X N150 + Linux ★★★★☆
  4. PHP - simple way to send HTTP headers before a script ends
  5. Which age-gates should be skill-gates and vice-versa?
  6. Whale Fall
  7. [RSS Club] Let's meet up AFK
  8. Book Review: Terrible Worlds: Destinations by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★★★
  9. GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source
  10. UK Government Kicks Out Palantir
  11. Stupidly Simple SVG Sparklines
  12. Find blog posts with missing featured images - and missing alt text - without a plugin
  13. [RSS Club] A Sneak Preview of Upcoming Posts
  14. Book Review: The Names by Florence Knapp ★★⯪☆☆
  15. I've found just the right paper for my Bottom Hole problem
  16. RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google
  17. [RSS Club] Where are you from?
  18. Vertically Aligning Roman Numerals in Code
  19. NHS Goes To War Against Open Source

April 2026

  1. Let's Get Digging!
  2. Theatre Review: Hadestown ★★★★★
  3. You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catch
  4. Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories?
  5. Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts
  6. [RSS Club] How do you preserve an RSS feed?
  7. Better TTS on Linux
  8. Book Review: Up - A scientist's guide to the magic above us by Dr Lucy Rogers ★★★★★

Every year

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