A WT.Social profile. I have no idea if it’s going to last or if I’ll decide to consign it to the void.
Tag: Tech
Archive Team
An interesting little talk from the early days of Archive Team.
Cleaning Up
A Deep Space Nine sizzle reel, remastered using machine learning. The linked version without the Youtube compression artefacts is really rather impressive.
There’s lots of media out there that, either due to cost or just that HD elements never existed, will never be remastered for modern displays. Blackadder, Red Dwarf, early Doctor Who; all of these could be rejuvenated for the 21st century.
The Poo Bit Adder
It looks like some clever chap as build a fully functioning four bit adder inside an unmodded Cities: Skylines. The best part of this simulated circuit is that it’s partly powered by simulated in-game poo.
The Power of Telemetry
The online backup company Backblaze – of which I am a reasonably satisfied long-term customer – makes statistics about the hard drives they use public. A chap called Ryan Smith took this telemetry and, with a little data wrangling and some educated guesses, worked out large parts of their business model – including important elements of their asset replacement cycle.
Telemetry is creepy. Turn it off.
Backlinks
This is kinda cool; the rather agriculturally-named BacklinkShitter datamines the Common Crawl dataset to find out who links back to your site.
This should show the links to Chrisrcook.com and this should show the links to this page!
The Camera Always Lies…
This is non-trivially creepy. While the impressionist is a professional, the actual face swap appears to have been done by an enthusiastic amateur and so, with more time and resources, could probably be improved.
Blessed by the gods of SSL

After putting it off for some time, I have now set up Let’s Encrypt on this little toy web server and it all seems to work! Now to see if it keeps working…
400 Bad Request

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
The number of request header fields exceeds this server's limit.
Does anyone else get this? I seem to have broken the BBC website. I don’t seem to get it anywhere else and it doesn’t happen all the time but, when it does, I don’t seem to be able to get that chrome session to ever load that page.
It’s worth noting that I’ve never seen this with FireFox, so it might be either a browser issue or an issue with the two plugins I use (HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock Origin).
Easter Eggs
An Apple focused history of software Easter Eggs. It’s a nice watch over your morning tea.