Mark Watkinson

Imgur has blocked the UK, but not because of the Online Safety Act

The BBC reports 'One password is believed to have been all it took for a ransomware gang to destroy a 158-year-old company and put 700 people out of work.' Well, that and a total failure of IT policy.

Using LibreWolf as my main browser

Revisiting AI for software development tasks in 2025

Experience with and recovery from COVID in late 2024, in terms of athletic ability, resting heart rate, heart rate variance and sleep quality

End of year thoughts on a selection of new music released in 2024

Fun in the sun at the Stratford-upon-Avon Big Half Marathon, and a significant PB

Fun with noise cancelling headphones

Lessons from the CrowdStrike outage

Amazon has not proved a reliable retailer for expensive items

Google and Microsoft's use of AI is not currently in users' interests

Or: Why I'll be running Stratford Half Marathon next year instead

Installing Arch on my old laptop

Moving to Manjaro Linux

Getting aggregated data out of Garmin

Lemmy is a federated discussion forum

And why I don't think handheld Windows devices like the ASUS ROG Ally are a threat to the Deck

Quick and dirty save game syncing on the Steam Deck, for games not covered by Steam cloud

ChatGPT is incredibly impressive but it's easy to poke through the facade

Making your applications more reliable by keeping track of long running database transactions

Understanding the lazy nature of IEnumerable to make your code more efficient

The surprising demise of one of the better jobs boards

Using ADO.NET Data Readers for fun and/or profit

Optimizing the UI responsiveness of Angular applications slowed down by unnecessary component change detection

Extracting individual words from a sentence without spaces, in JavaScript/Node

Thoughts on managing inevitable quality issues in dependencies in the Ionic/Cordova/Capacitor ecosystem

Setting up Google Drive integration for an Android app is not an obvious process, but it's relatively straightforward.

An approach to handling database deadlocks in high transaction systems in Node.js

MySQL's ST_Distance_Sphere function is used to calculate distances between points on a sphere. Unfortunately, it's missing from MariaDB, but it's relatively easy to implement as a stored function

Using MySQL's spatial data types for processing real world location data, in terms of latitude/longitude or GPS coordinates

Android recently pushed a faulty update to the WebView component, which broke a surprising number of popular apps that you might expect to be native

Using spaCy from Node.js, or running arbitrary Python programs from Node, is surprisingly easy