Viewing profile — spjwebster

My eldest is currently taking her GCSEs, and for the English Literature exam this week she had to write an essay on A Christmas Carol. Whilst helping her, I couldn't help but reali…

Yours is definitely the spud gun I remember, and I suspect that's true for most folks of a particular age from the UK: a small die cast red gun and a monster potato to feed it ammu…

A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The p…

I wonder how many niches still use slide rules today. I'm currently training for my private pilot license, and many of the calculations for flight planning are still done using wha…

Makes me smile too. Around 2008 while I was at Yahoo! I built a standalone library called Dhaka (literally stuck a pin in a map and used the place name as the project name) that di…

Having written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this. For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after…

At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as ball lightning. It was late winter in the South Wes…

To be fair, on-foot gameplay (née "space legs") has been on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable planets and S…

I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foo…

I can highly recommend the book - Why We Sleep - mentioned at the top of the video. It goes into quite some depth on the reasons for and mechanics of sleep in a way I found approac…

Stripe give you a `funding` property on a card source [0], which at least in the UK distinguishes between debit, credit and prepaid cards somewhat reliably. 0: https://stripe.com/d…

I recently lost more of my life than I care to admit to Zachtronics' more graphically pleasing follow-up Shenzhen I/O [1] that I think I first heard about from HN [2]. The backstor…

tails.com | Front-end & Full Stack Developers | Richmond, London | ONSITE, full time tails.com is a tech-centric startup, using the power of technology combined with applied nutrit…

The official python debugger is called pdb, so this is following convention. Moreover, bdb and gdb have coexisted since the 80s without causing much confusion. I think we'll surviv…

I've had very much the opposite experience with Fitbit, twice. 1. I had an old FitBit Ultra that stopped syncing to the base station. They sent me a replacement base station but th…

It is when they decide which order to process debits and credits in to maximise their fees: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/commitment-high-street-banks-ret...

It was slightly more insidious than that - they were processing debits before credits, and charging a fee for insufficient funds if your balance dipped below zero (or below your ov…

From the article you linked to: "At the end of 2015, the combined market share for IE8 (8.95 percent), IE9 (6.67 percent), and IE10 (4.18 percent) was 19.80 percent," Sure, use fle…

FWIW, towards the tail-end of my time at Yahoo! I played a bit part in a team working on a more modern open source PHP-based version of the template localisation system that was at…

Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take. Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system cal…

ALAS covering this vulnerability: https://alas.aws.amazon.com/ALAS-2015-473.html As usual, the Elastic Beanstalk team (with their forked yum repositories) are lagging behind on a f…

I did some research on this a few years ago [1], and Steve Souders recently re-ran the test with the latest http archive data [2]. Given the percentages, I'm still not convinced th…