Mike Hall

The Doctor’s conversation with Davros in Remembrance of the Daleks is remarkably concerned with erectile dysfunction.

The speakers for FFConf in a grid with topics: distributed power, inclusivity by design, design systems and web components, privacy and ethics, the good internet, ai brain drain, code and culture and finally: journey to coder.

Pleased to share the final full line up for 2025.ffconf.org

It's a day that you'll come away from inspired and full of ideas.

I won't believe the Doctor Who series 10 soundtrack news until that email from Silva Screen hits my inbox...

Discord users suffer the first high-profile age-verification hack – and it's unlikely to be the last Critics of age verification laws warned this was inevitable

Oh dear what a shock I never saw this coming at all.

Software people!

Samsung devices have this huge custom time input widget. It looks like even Chrome on Samsung uses this time picker.

Can this be disabled? appearance: none seems to be ignored.

Well I wasn’t going to say it

Headline from The Times. “Doctor who made throat-slit gesture to Jews has right to free speech”

RTD must go, if true.

Kinda fitting that “bro”mine is toxic, volatile, and highly dangerous.

Kinda fitting that “bro”mine is toxic, volatile, and highly dangerous.

Off to the great candlelight supper in the sky.

So close to 1 million views on this! My (hot) wife keeps checking in on it and if it crosses that threshold then I'll do a fun live stream with an exciting announcement 👀

youtu.be/Fs6q3FDFlFc

Government targets UK Apple users in new demand for data It is the latest development in a privacy row which has pitted the UK against the tech giant and the Trump administration.

Once again, it’s clear the government does not understand what it is asking for.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Big Digital ID protests in Liverpool. I am happy about this.

Anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and climate change denier Piers Corbyn speaking at that protest. Less happy about this.

Kirk: The Klingons don’t take prisoners, Saavik.
Kruge (about 2 weeks later): I want prisoners!

In fact that’s unfair. Maybe it’s just that later studio executives and producers took the wrong message from the success of ST2.

They look at 2 and see Khan and the Mutara Nebula. When the real emotional core of that film is the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Which continues in 3.

But the ST movies keep telling non-ST-type stories, because ST2 (produced and storylined by someone who didn’t understand and hadn’t seen ST) was so popular.

I think ST3 is far more in keeping with what the original series of ST was, which so often was about the characters and their relationship to each other than it was about defeating a villain.

Kruge, Sybok, Chang, Soren, Borg Queen, Ru’afo, Shinzon, Nero, Khan again, Krall. And the films chase action-adventure, especially ST6 and later, even when ST isn’t really an action-adventure show.

In many ways, ST2 was one of the worst things to happen to ST, because it became the archetypal “good” Star Trek movie, when it’s arguably one of the least Star Trek-y films.

ST rarely had the big singular villain. But post ST2 (4 notwithstanding!) they insist on this singular villain character.

It’s about the emotional fall out of Spock’s death. It’s how Kirk and McCoy especially deal with it. It’s about Kirk trying to do the right thing by his friend.

What it’s not is big space dogfights and action. But then ST rarely was about those things.

A possibly controversial take on Star Trek. Light Saturday night thoughts.

I watched Star Trek III today. And despite the “odd numbered films are bad” rule I really enjoyed it. But what’s interesting about ST3 is that it is a very emotional, character driven film.

Screenshot of a headline: the doctor who says we can improve our vision - at any age

David Tennant as the Doctor wearing 3D glasses.

How about, instead of shipping CSS resets, we could have a meta tag to disapply the user agent style sheet?

Every newspaper headline should be “Labour to deny citizens the right to work”

Every newspaper headline should be “Labour to deny citizens the right to work”

Screenshot. “Starmer says people will not be able to work in UK without digital ID”

Fucking authoritarian bullshit.

It’s another one of those times where it becomes abundantly clear that parliament is full of lawyers and journalists, and not a lot by the way of software engineers. They do not understand the problems, or the solutions they propose.

The UK government's technology policies are ridiculous. Online Safety Act; making people use proprietary software to file tax; trying to force Apple to backdoor their messaging; frotting Big Tech, and getting moist for "A.I.", and now Digital ID.

New digital IDs will make it tougher to work in UK illegally, says Starmer The prime minister says Labour has shied away from illegal immigration concerns, but says the new ID will make

Papers, please.