Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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Why Security Engineering needs a Hacker Mentality
Security engineering is about a lot of things, but the best security engineers show the 'hacker mindset' characteristics of curiosity and imagination. Here's an example of how I found an XSS vulnerability in a forum, mostly by accident, and how curiosity was the key.
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Ten Weird Games
This blog post's been sitting incomplete in my drafts since last decade. I think it's finally time to share with you... ten weird games (and game adjacent media) you should see.
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Cold Giraffe
My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me.
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Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook
I keep hearing from developer friends who are 'expected' by their employer to demonstrate that they're using AI, even for tasks at which the AI is demonstrably a suboptimal choice. So - as a joke - I came up with a git post-commit hook that makes it look like they're doing so, even when they're not.
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What can you do with a software privacy polariser?
Samsung's 2026 phones will feature a dynamic privacy filter, blacking-out parts of the screen selectively from shoulder-surfers. I'm so curious about the capabilities of (and API for) this technology: what could I make it do?
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F-Day plus 12
It's been only twelve days since our house flooded (it feels like a lot longer!), and progress is slow on getting damage assessments and medium-term accommodation planning sorted.
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Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People, by Alex Horne
I recently read Taskmaster: 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was... underwhelmed.
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Fake Herons
This morning, I saw a real heron and a fake heron, and it made me think of a police officer I photographed myself while geocaching with a few years ago. Let's talk theoretical psychology!
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Hello World by Hannah Fry
It took me a while, but I finally got around to reading Hannah Fry's "Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine", and it was really good!
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6-12 Months
"How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?" I asked, warily.
"Six to twelve months?" guessed the loss adjusters. -
Run your own WireGuard VPN
I stopped paying for VPN services a decade ago and I haven't looked back. When I 'need' a VPN service, I just spin one up on cheap VM services, and then I throw it away when I'm done. It's cheaper and more-customisable... and if the UK goes ahead with an idea to age-gate VPN services, it might soon become more-convenient too.
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F-Day plus 3
It's only been three days since we had to evacuate our rapidly-flooding house. Here's some horror pics.
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The calm after the storm
This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.
Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we'll be living for the near future.
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LGBT+ History Month
Here in the UK we celebrate LGBT+ History Month in February. This year, I'd encourage you to look at the history of queer rights in the UK, and use it to celebrate what we've achieved so far... but more-importantly, as a reminder that there's more to do (especially lately).
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Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS
Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.