| November 22nd, 2019

Extending Apple’s homekit through Homebridge by Matt Haughey (A Whole Lotta Nothing)

I’ve been doing a lot of weekend house projects lately. I started with hours on YouTube watching videos on how to wire up wall switches because I wanted to control more lights on my network. …

Homebridge sounds like something I should try out sometime; HomeKit has quickly become my favourite way to control devices in my home… but device support is seemingly getting rarer (especially here in the UK)

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Chris M.

| November 22nd, 2019

Cool WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) tips and tricks you (or I) didn't know were possible (hanselman.com)

It's no secret I dig WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and now that WSL2 is available in Windows Insiders Slow it's a ...

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Chris M.

| November 21st, 2019

Google crackdown on political ads 'will have minimal impact in UK' (the Guardian)

British advertisers rely more on keywords than microtargeting tools, according to source

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Chris M.

| November 21st, 2019

Professionalism in the Age of the Influencer (John August)

*On October 24, 2019, I presented the Hawley Foundation Lecture at Drake University. It was an update and reexamination of a 2006 [speech on professionalism](() I originally gave at Trinity University

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Chris M.

| November 21st, 2019

It's my job, and yours. | CSS-Tricks (CSS-Tricks)

The role of ethics in our modern web space has been on my mind for the past few years and I suspect it will occupy my thoughts increasingly as I move

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Chris M.

| November 20th, 2019

Bitwarden (baty.net)

I’ve been using 1Password for years without too many issues. It’s a nicely designed and implemented app with a long history. I really had no reason to look elsewhere. However, there’s been a lot of noise lately about them taking $200 million in VC money. I’m not that concerned. They’ve grown and want to grow faster, so fine. It did, however, make me take a quick look at the alternatives, just in case.

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Chris M.

| November 20th, 2019

Iran Has Shut Off the Internet - Schneier on Security

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Chris M.

| November 20th, 2019

‘Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart must be released immediately’: Amnesty International condemns conviction of Catalan leaders (CommonSpace)

The human rights organisation disputed the Spanish Supreme Court’s definition of ‘sedition’, the charge facing exiled Catalan minister Clara Ponsati

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🔖 Why Scotland will be so pivotal at the 2019 general election

Chris M.

| November 8th, 2019

Why Scotland will be so pivotal at the 2019 general election (newstatesman.com)

Not many politicians deploy withering scorn as effectively as Nicola Sturgeon. At this week’s First Minister’s Questions, challenged by a Conservative opponent on whether she was prepared to put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street after the general election, she let loose: “I don't know if it will come as a shock to anybody but let me nevertheless announce this: I think the leaders of both UK parties are completely and utterly useless.” This doesn’t, of course, mean Sturgeon won’t support “useless” Corbyn’s entry into No.10, but be in no doubt: it would be the means only to a second Scottish independence referendum, after which England would be left to lump a far-left Labour government as, she hopes, Scotland strides into the brave new world of statehood. Now there’s an election around the corner, Scotland suddenly matters at Westminster again. If the Tories can hold on to the 13 seats they won north of the border in 2017 it could play a crucial part in giving Boris Johnson the overall majority he so desperately needs. If the SNP can wipe the Tories out — or come close to it — then a hung parliament seems more likely, a Corbyn premiership becomes a possibility, and another referendum on Scotland’s departure looms closer. Whatever happens, 12 December is likely to be a bad night for Scottish Labour. The party’s Westminster heartbeat is already weak, and could be about to fade to the faintest whisper. Labour won seven seats in 2017 — up from just one in 2015 — but stands to lose most of them next month: Glasgow North East, Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath, Rutherglen & Hamilton West, and Midlothian are all held with majorities of less than 1,000, and seem likely to fall to the SNP charge. Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill and East Lothian both look vulnerable. Ironically, only Ian Murray, having fought off a deselection attempt by Corbynistas, appears unassailable in Edinburgh South. Labour’s London leadership appears already to have written off its Scottish wing, openly talking about doing deals with the SNP. The departure of Ruth Davidson seemed to spell bad news for her remarkable revival of the Scottish Conservatives. But neither the SNP nor neutral observers expect the Tories to do as badly as previously predicted. They will probably lose Stirling, which has a majority of 148, to the SNP, and a few others besides. But they could well hold on to the more Brexit-friendly seats in North East Scotland that they stole from the Nats last time round. “They have dug in in these places, and they will be hard to win back,” admits a senior SNP campaign source. The SNP is keen to play down assumptions it will come close to sweeping the board across all 59 seats. Expectation management, perhaps, but party insiders say they expect to move from their current 35 to high 30s or perhaps early 40s. Pollsters reckon they’ll do a bit better than that, and could push up to the high 40s on a good night. Whatever the outcome, it will tell us much about Scotland’s direction of travel. The SNP are used to winning in Scotland — it is becoming hard to remember a time when they didn’t win — but party insiders say they are less interested in the absolute numbers this time round. “Every election has a dominant question,” says one, “and it feels that in Scotland it’s something more fundamental than the numbers this time. It’s not even about whether there should be an indyref or whatever immediately. This is about what the UK is — it’s asking Scots to consider whether the shithouse of the past few years is ok with them or if they want to do something different. “The UK is driving down a road Scotland doesn’t want to go down — an extreme Labour Party under Corbyn or his successor or a more extreme version of the Tory party than we are used to. The Britain folk voted for in the 2014 referendum is disappearing. So, what do we do about it?” There is much excitement among independence supporters that this snap election offers a chance for the SNP to claim a fresh mandate for a referendum, and that it could take place next year. Sturgeon will play along with them for a while, but she is wary of driving too hard, too fast. She did that before the 2017 election, in the wake of the Brexit vote, and was heavily punished by an electorate that felt manipulated. Rather, for her and her colleagues December 2019 is a staging post on the way to the next devolved election in 2021. The latter is the one that will establish whether or not Scots want a referendum, and will also be something of a surrogate for that referendum itself. For all the hype, in Scotland next month the election is largely about keeping the kettle on the boil.

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Chris M.

| November 1st, 2019

iOS 13.2 Is Overzealously Killing Apps in the Background (Daring Fireball)

Link to: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1189899504562122752

I’ve been running into this a lot today; Airplaying videos from Safari to my Apple TV would stop working if the screen locked, and trying to bring up 1Password through the integration with the system fails around 80% of the time. Sometimes the app in the background would crash, and the rest of the time 1Password just wouldn’t appear.

As nice as some parts of iOS 13 are, it is by far the buggiest version I’ve used yet.

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🔖 Facebook allows prominent right-wing website to break the rules

Chris M.

| October 29th, 2019

Facebook allows prominent right-wing website to break the rules

This is the online version of the Popular Information newsletter. You can get independent accountability journalism in your inbox every week. Sign up here: The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Its toxic content is also fantastically successful on Facebook, with each story reaching more people than any other major media outlet. A Popular Information investigation reveals some of this success is attributable to a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.