That Time I Accidentally Invented Twitter


A proposal to micro-blog via text.

A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back […]

Continue reading →

I have 4% 2FA coverage


A long list of 2FA tokens.

Last year, when doing some digital spring-cleaning, I realised that I had 800 different passwords. I tried going through them, removing long-dead websites, closing old accounts, and deleting anything incriminating. I now have 891 accounts. Arse. I also went through my 31 different 2FA accounts. Getting rid of old employers' email tokens, failed crypto wallet […]

Continue reading →

Book Review: Utopia Five (Panopticon Book 1) - A.E. Currie


Whose world would you kill for?

My name is Lee and I was born on the 8th January 2025 - the day the Panopticon was turned on. In 2053, Earth is a changed place. City states make their own laws and we’re all watched over by the ever present drones. I reckon the new Earth is a utopia. We’re still alive […]

Continue reading →

The State of SIP


Choose a SIM for this call.

How well does SIP work on a modern Android phone, with no 3rd party apps? I'm trying to give up my mobile phone contract. As part of that, I'm switching my voice calls to VoIP providers. For family and friends, that usually means WhatsApp, Skype, Signal and other consumer apps. For work, Hangouts, Zoom, and […]

Continue reading →

Why didn't Phonewords take off in the UK?


A black and white photo of an old rotary dial phone.

The first thing I did when getting to the USA as a kid, was to find a payphone where I dutifully called 1-800-STARWARS. I'd grown up with American media. Phonewords - where your phone's dialpad spells out words - were ingrained in my psyche. But the UK never had anything like that. In 2003, a […]

Continue reading →

Check your biographic privilege


Web Developer with a job (has a great big beard). Web Developer without a job (is clean shaven).

A friend and I were having a good old grouch-and-moan session over a couple of beers. We were being snide and petty about all the people who'd ticked us off that week. "And another thing!" I proclaimed, "Have you seen their Twitter bio? It's all 'Forbes 30-under-30' and 'Global Speaker' and 'Best Selling Author'! Bah! […]

Continue reading →

Giving up on phone contracts


Table showing my mobile usage. 5 minutes, 4 texts, 1 MB.

Another weird economic casualty of COVID19. I'm not wearing out my socks and shoes. I cancelled my train season ticket. And now, I'm giving up my mobile contract. For a decade, I worked in the mobile industry - and always had an unlimited SIM card. Rejoining the real world, some years ago, was a bit […]

Continue reading →

Movie Review: aTypical Wednesday


A movie poster which reads Fuck Therapy.

A young man embarks on an adventure with another patient at his therapist's office, who he visits every Wednesday. This is, probably, a feel-good movie. No, it's a buddy movie. Well, actually, it's a romantic comedy. Or, possibly, a satire on race-relations in America. Definitely a bleakly hilarious road-trip. J. Lee's debut as a movie […]

Continue reading →

Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets


The Twitter logo.

Twitter has a nifty new feature which allows you to schedule the publication of a Tweet. But, crucially, it doesn't let the reader know when the message was originally written. How can you, as a publisher, prove that you wrote a scheduled Tweet at a specific time? Here's one method. Write a Tweet which contains […]

Continue reading →

Book Review: Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain


Painting of a 17th Century woman. She holds a finger to her lips.

It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the […]

Continue reading →