bearblog

The Anker PowerConf C200 is a well-regarded budget webcam.

In an effort to improve comfort and reduce running costs, a couple of years back I obtained a set of Tuya Zigbee Smart Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRVs).

London is in a housing crisis.

Recently there have been several spells of unusually hot weather in the UK (including one day in July with a temperature of 41 degrees Celsius, substantially above the previous record of 37 degrees).

I like to run with the foxes, when the city is dark and quiet, when the warmth of the day ebbs away and the coolth of the night approaches, when the path is empty and when the other people recede into bubbles of their own conscience.

As somebody who quite often scrolls down to the comments section on YouTube (for my sins), I’m often faced with the innovative tactics that spammers use to get their comments through Google’s automated filtering and detection systems.

Nobody understands the economy.

Bottle Deposits, i.e. a government-mandated deposit placed on disposable drinks containers refundable upon return to the place of purchase, are a popular environmentalist policy worldwide.

hCaptcha is a reCAPTCHA clone that has been growing in popularity over 2020 and 2021, in particular due to Cloudflare’s conversion of their nag screens from Google’s reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha.

It’s getting to be the end of 2021 - so it’s a good time to look through some of the things I bought over the year, and reflect on how they’ve turned out.

Last week I opened up VS Code, ready to get to work on a project.

Ads are annoying, right?

Following on from my post yesterday about an edge case in YouTube, I thought I’d write about a class of edge cases perhaps even more strange that I’ve been exploring recently: Search engines are a fact of daily life for most of the population nowadays.

Nowadays YouTube is a great place to listen to music, because everything is there.

Recently, I was involved in a discussion about AB-1346, a routine decision of the California Legislative Assembly.

Email privacy is dead, confirmed for the umpteenth time.

Wayland is a thing.