https://tommorris.org/ Recent content on tommorris.org Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:22:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2026/turn-it-off-and-run-upskilling-for-the-ai-age/ Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:22:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2026/turn-it-off-and-run-upskilling-for-the-ai-age/ The government have made a website where you can learn how you were prompting it wrong. https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/irrelevant-is-better-than-fake-testing-a-legal-ai-tool/ Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:00:40 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/irrelevant-is-better-than-fake-testing-a-legal-ai-tool/ Professional AI tool is marginally better than consumer AI tool. That’s not saying much, sadly. https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/what-does-the-government-think-an-algorithm-is/ Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:26:08 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/what-does-the-government-think-an-algorithm-is/ Please do not click on any tags or links. They may or may not be illegal content recommendations. https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/til-track-changes-in-emacs-with-highlight-changes-mode/ Sat, 26 Apr 2025 19:44:26 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/til-track-changes-in-emacs-with-highlight-changes-mode/ Getting Emacs to tell me what I haven’t yet made worse. https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/the-adolescents-are-alright-so-are-the-common-people-lets-make-tech-good-for-them/ Fri, 11 Apr 2025 19:00:46 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/the-adolescents-are-alright-so-are-the-common-people-lets-make-tech-good-for-them/ Some meandering British socio-technical vibe checking, with reference to Adolescence, Black Mirror, Roblox and Balatro. https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/beware-government-ministers-hyping-technologies/ Tue, 14 Jan 2025 15:23:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2025/beware-government-ministers-hyping-technologies/ My dotfiles are actually an explosion of disruptive radical technical innovation, I’ll have you know. https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/copyright-anti-circumvention-ai-hypothetical/ Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:47:20 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/copyright-anti-circumvention-ai-hypothetical/ Does anti-circumvention law offer a route to legally challenging unwanted LLM web scraping? https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/testing-the-firefox-alternatives/ Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:14:18 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/testing-the-firefox-alternatives/ Let’s try LibreWolf, Floorp and Zen until Mozilla decides they want to make a browser again https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/a-world-run-by-tools/ Thu, 01 Aug 2024 12:43:45 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/a-world-run-by-tools/ Computering is a series of bad life choices: here are mine. https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-wikidata-sparql-getting-item-and-subclasses/ Sun, 14 Jul 2024 13:10:12 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-wikidata-sparql-getting-item-and-subclasses/ Zigzag your way through the hundred million item graph with this one neat trick etc. https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-setting-default-browser-on-macos-using-nix/ Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:38:26 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-setting-default-browser-on-macos-using-nix/ Switch your browser around, declaratively. https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/lies-damn-lies-and-business-cases-for-ai-hype/ Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:52:58 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/lies-damn-lies-and-business-cases-for-ai-hype/ Wherein we learn that people who are sold on a technology are sold on a technology, and that’s about it https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-using-nix-run-to-lint-oneoff-python-scripts/ Mon, 08 Jul 2024 15:33:40 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-using-nix-run-to-lint-oneoff-python-scripts/ Linting and autoformatting crappy little scripts as if they were proper software https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/staying-cool-with-openstreetmap/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 13:36:17 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/staying-cool-with-openstreetmap/ Choose an OSM tag, make it cool https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/a-little-nix-fix/ Sat, 02 Mar 2024 14:49:50 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/a-little-nix-fix/ A meandering wander around the scary magical future of package management. https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-makefile-inheritance-and-overriding/ Mon, 30 Jan 2023 13:11:50 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-makefile-inheritance-and-overriding/ Mingled Makefiles for a multirepo milieu. https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-emacs-write-string-to-file/ Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:28:47 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-emacs-write-string-to-file/ Put some Hello World in a file. https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-emacs-text-encoding/ Tue, 03 Jan 2023 10:24:38 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-emacs-text-encoding/ A short guide to string encoding in elisp. https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-meta/ Tue, 03 Jan 2023 10:23:59 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2023/til-meta/ Brief notes on the matter of sharing brief notes about the inner guts of technology. https://tommorris.org/posts/2022/writing-better-api-documentation/ Wed, 29 Jun 2022 16:35:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2022/writing-better-api-documentation/ Over many years working on API integrations, I’ve seen a whole lot of ways that the experience could be less frustrating. This isn’t a definitive list but a personal collection of a few recurring problems with documentation I’ve seen in different REST APIs that could be avoided. Explain what a field does Consider API documentation like this: String[] tags - “This field contains tags for the post.” This is not helpful. https://tommorris.org/posts/2022/possible-vulnerability-sainsburys-nectar-website/ Wed, 16 Mar 2022 15:57:40 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2022/possible-vulnerability-sainsburys-nectar-website/ In February, I discovered a potential vulnerability in the Sainsbury’s and Nectar website. Sainsbury’s is one of the UK’s main supermarkets, and Nectar is the loyalty card programme they own in partnership with a bunch of other retail brands like Argos, Esso and British Airways. The vulnerability is not that exciting and I have no way to know whether it is possible to misuse it without breaking the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which I obviously don’t want to do. https://tommorris.org/posts/2021/iterm2-url-matching-is-pretty-neat/ Sat, 20 Mar 2021 08:45:03 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2021/iterm2-url-matching-is-pretty-neat/ For many years, other developers told me about iTerm2 and I ignored them. I really shouldn’t have. The stock macOS Terminal was fine, I thought. What a mistake. There’s lots to love about iTerm2, including the ability to script it in Python. But a really amazing quick win is the support for Triggers. Triggers allow you to set a regular expression that gets acted on every time they appear in the terminal. https://tommorris.org/posts/2021/too-sarcastic-for-the-twitter-joke-police/ Thu, 18 Feb 2021 10:33:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2021/too-sarcastic-for-the-twitter-joke-police/ For the first time in almost fifteen years, my Twitter acount got suspended. Here’s the backstory: my friend Dom and his wife Heather decided to put on a surprise “lockdown holiday” for their lovely daughter Scarlett. They put photos up of it as a Twitter thread. As with a lot of the weirder things Dom gets up to, it ended up getting press coverage on the BBC News website. And said press coverage was then reposted to the BBC News Twitter feed. https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/never-trust-a-time-machine-made-by-a-computer-company/ Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:53:41 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/never-trust-a-time-machine-made-by-a-computer-company/ A fun discovery: if you have two Macs, one running Catalina and the other running Big Sur, you may struggle to back up the Big Sur machine to a network share on the Catalina machine because Catalina formats Time Machine volumes as HFS+ and Big Sur expects Time Machine network shares to be APFS. Catalina can write HFS+ Time Machine backups to an APFS volume, but not vice versa. The only reason I now know this is because I’ve read an excellent discussion in the Ars Technica review of Big Sur, not because Apple actually told me this might be a problem. https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/using-ast-parsing-for-deriving-iam-rules/ Tue, 19 May 2020 10:55:00 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/using-ast-parsing-for-deriving-iam-rules/ A nostalgic prelude Anyone remember building web apps in the old days? Write a PHP script, FTP it up to a server, hit refresh. No having to juggle React, npm, RubyGems, version locking, incompatible versions of Python or Ruby or Java or whatever. No Ansible, no Chef or Puppet, or Docker containers, or Terraform, or Kubernetes. If you came from that world, when Amazon launched AWS back in 2006, the whole idea of infrastructure that you could spin up and down as you needed it was a fairly tantalising prospect, but then you dived into it and the sheer amount of complexity ended up making you pine for the old days of FTPing a PHP script up to a $5/mo LAMP server. https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/thats-not-what-the-law-says/ Wed, 08 Apr 2020 08:10:00 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/thats-not-what-the-law-says/ It should be fairly apparent to anyone who has lived through the Brexit referendum that the attention spans of both politicians and journalists in the UK is quite limited even at the best of times. The UK’s handling of the legalities of the COVID-19 crisis shows this in spades. What are the rules? For England, the rules are set out in The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restriction) (England) Regulations 2020 (UKSI 2020 No. https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/hart-contracts-not-smart-contracts/ Thu, 06 Feb 2020 07:20:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/hart-contracts-not-smart-contracts/ I was recently re-reading H.L.A. Hart’s “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morality”, the opening salvo in the never-ending, intergenerational Hart-Fuller debate, and his description of the “core and penumbra” approach to reasoning about rules is a perfect illumination of the error behind so-called smart contracts, blockchain-based self-enforcing quasi-contractual agreements. From page 606-607 of Hart: …the “Realists” made us acutely conscious of one cardinal feature of human language and human thought, emphasis on which is vital not only for the understanding of law but in areas of philosophy far beyond the confines of jurisprudence. https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/nhs-data-commandments/ Tue, 04 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2020/nhs-data-commandments/ Back in 2018, the British government published a document on the World Wide Web. This happens fairly often. In fact, they have a whole publishing platform for this. I started writing a post critiquing this document, as I felt it was a poorly considered idea. Before I got around to publishing it, the document disappeared from the Internet. Life went on. I was busy, and there are always many more blog post drafts that don’t ever get written or published. https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/essential-reading-on-the-mit-media-lab/ Sun, 08 Sep 2019 10:41:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/essential-reading-on-the-mit-media-lab/ The revelation in the last week or so that convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein had financial connections with MIT’s Media Lab has led to the lab director, Joi Ito, to resign. The Media Lab is certainly not the only connection between Epstein and academia: his links with, and funding of, various top scientists have been known for a while, and are quite extensive. I should note in passing that the one person who comes out of the Media Lab/Epstein scandal with his honour left completely intact is Ethan Zuckerman. https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/qr-codes-cloud-functions/ Fri, 07 Jun 2019 21:45:40 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/qr-codes-cloud-functions/ In a blog post I almost missed earlier this year, Jeremy Keith points to an interesting use case for print stylesheets, namely putting QR codes on the printed versions of, well, just about anything on the web. Jeremy rightly lamented Google’s deprecation of the Charts API. The existing Charts API is a simple service that lets you throw data at a URL and it renders it server-side into an image… and Google have decided that this is far, far too boring and old fashioned and it must now be done client-side. https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/apple-id-s-two-factor-and-app-specific-passwords-leave-a-lot-to-be-desired/ Wed, 08 May 2019 22:33:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/apple-id-s-two-factor-and-app-specific-passwords-leave-a-lot-to-be-desired/ Apple’s two-factor authentication and app-specific password implementation is bad. Let’s have a little tour. How it works The general idea behind Apple’s 2FA is sound if not perfect: instead of giving every crappy mail and calendar app you use your main password, you give it an app-specific password. To do this, you need to have two-factor authentication turned on. Apple’s two-factor authentication protocol doesn’t use TOTP or HOTP codes like pretty much everyone else—it uses your other Apple devices, with a fallback to SMS/voice code verification. https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/facebook-instant-articles-why-hiding-urls-hinders-careful-reading-of-media/ Mon, 01 Apr 2019 14:26:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2019/facebook-instant-articles-why-hiding-urls-hinders-careful-reading-of-media/ Today, I saw a story doing the rounds on Facebook about a group of pro-Brexit buffoons attempting to block an Aldi supermarket warehouse as a protest against Britain’s failure to depart from the EU. Which is all very amusing and everything, but I was immediately a little sceptical (as you should be if you read a news article on Facebook that tickles that bit of your brain that makes you go “I’m right and everyone else is stupid”), so I clicked (tapped? https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/instamuseums/ Thu, 20 Sep 2018 11:15:55 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/instamuseums/ Pop-up “Instamuseums” are a thing, according to this video from Vox and this article by Sophie Haigney in The New Yorker: people will queue around the block and pay $40 for the privilege of taking photos of themselves alongside works of installation art specifically designed for social sharing at places like the Museum of Ice Cream in New York. I’ll spare you extensive thoughts on influencer culture, and instead say this: this kind of degradation of any actual discernible point to museums was an entirely predictable consequence of arts policy. https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/quietism/ Thu, 13 Sep 2018 20:52:37 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/quietism/ Techne If you are reading this, I have a new personal site. My previous site was down for a very long time: initially, the server had gone down because log files had grown too large and I hadn’t set up a proper log rotation system that discarded the old log files. Then I tried to upgrade the server, because the OS was massively out-of-date (thus opening up possible security vulnerabilities), and in the process I broke it. https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/hello-world/ Thu, 13 Sep 2018 18:28:04 +0100 https://tommorris.org/posts/2018/hello-world/ Greetings humans. https://tommorris.org/posts/2015/open-plan-offices-are-basically-terrible-in-every-way/ Tue, 15 Dec 2015 14:31:00 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2015/open-plan-offices-are-basically-terrible-in-every-way/ There’s a growing consensus in the scientific literature that open plan offices damage the mental and physical health of employees, destroy their morale and generally make their work lives less pleasant. Let us first look at some studies. Evans and Johnson, 2000: Forty female clerical workers were randomly assigned to a control condition or to 3-hr exposure to low-intensity noise designed to simulate typical open-office noise levels. The simulated open-office noise elevated workers’ urinary epinephrine levels, but not their norepinephrine or cortisol levels, and it produced behavioral aftereffects (fewer attempts at unsolvable puzzles) indicative of motivational deficits. https://tommorris.org/posts/2015/why-primary-identity-documents-matter-and-why-the-dvla-is-incompetent-at-it/ Wed, 05 Aug 2015 14:56:33 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2015/why-primary-identity-documents-matter-and-why-the-dvla-is-incompetent-at-it/ I’ve been grumbling on Twitter about the DVLA. A long time ago, I applied for and received a provisional driving license with the intention to learn to drive. That provisional driving license expired (I had other things to do besides take driving lessons), so I renewed it recently. The license I had included a number of errors. Firstly, it had the wrong date of birth and it also had the wrong address. https://tommorris.org/posts/2014/on-showing-urls-and-why-security-and-usability-will-always-have-a-rocky-relationship/ Sun, 04 May 2014 17:26:04 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2014/on-showing-urls-and-why-security-and-usability-will-always-have-a-rocky-relationship/ Jeremy and Jake are debating the merits of Chrome’s plan to hide away the path segment of the URL. I have only a few things to say: If Firefox starts hiding the path of the URL I’m looking at, I’ll find whatever extension, plugin, haxie or user script I need to make it stop. It’s bad enough that it hides the protocol from me. I want to see what page I’m on. https://tommorris.org/posts/2009/how-to-quit-vim-easy-mode/ Wed, 20 May 2009 14:55:05 +0000 https://tommorris.org/posts/2009/how-to-quit-vim-easy-mode/ [Ctrl]-L gets you back into normal mode, then you can :q! or whatever as usual. Just posting it here so that Google and future generations of frustrated Vim users can find it. I learned about vim -y today, and it is actually a pretty neat thing if you want to be able to basically give a Vim input to a newbie. Of course, GVim or MacVim (for Windows/Linux and Mac respectively), or indeed Cream, may be more appropriate for newbies who happen to have GUIs available.