Shkspr.mobi
Shkspr.mobi
Terence Eden’s Blog
Regular blogging by Terence Eden.
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Tags: blogging
GNU Terry Pratchett
12.3.2025 18:23Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Erik<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> My sister has an escalating scale for summoning her kids </p><p>1. Given name <br>2. Given name plus family name<br>3. Full name including their middle names <br>4. Name in Irish</p>
12.3.2025 17:56Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Zoe<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> Teenage nicknames aside, I've only ever gone by Ben.</p><p>Like you, I used to get fullnamed by parents when I'd misbehaved. They don't get to do that now, as it's become a spousal privilege (or maybe burden?).</p><p>I'm always surprised how many people I know, though, who's "name" is actually their middle name because they don't like their first (I'm the other way, I don't like my middle name - really silly reason, but the dislike settled in at an impressionable age).</p>
12.3.2025 17:25Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Ben Tasker<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> great post, Taras!</p>
12.3.2025 17:22Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Andriy UtkinAnd there I was, assuming that the formal form, because unusual, was your active preference and never considered abbreviating
<a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
I went by Daniel, which was my given name at birth, for my entire childhood, but when I left home to go to university they already <em>had</em> a Daniel on the same floor of the halls of residence as me, so I became Dan. And it just kinda... stuck. So by the time <a href="https://danq.me/2007/03/08/q/" rel="nofollow ugc">I wrote out a deed poll to change my surname, 18 years ago this week</a>, I figured I'd shorten my first name, too, to what everybody was calling me anyway. And that's how I ended up with what's probably one of the shortest names you've ever come across. It makes filling forms nice and fast... except when I have to work around well-meaning-but-flawed minimum length validations, sigh. Now, the only person who still calls me by my birth name is my mother. I don't mind. And frankly: she gave birth to me, so she can call me whatever she likes.
12.3.2025 15:39Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Dan Q<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> <span><a href="https://mathstodon.xyz/@Scmbradley" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Scmbradley</span></a></span> My dad went to seminary and all his friends who also dropped out from there (or something) permanently adopted their monk names.</p><p>So dad was called John by his parents, but *everyone* else knows him as Larry, because he was gonna be Brother Lawrence of the Sacred Heart (or something)</p>
12.3.2025 14:52Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Owen Blacker<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> I've been lucky, in that "Hugo" isn't really abbreviable. On the other hand, I had to grow up being "Hugo", which wasn't ideal.</p><p>Could have been worse. I was nearly Bartholomew, which would have been *terrible* growing up alongside the start of the Simpsons.</p><p>And the story behind my brother's middle name (Cecil) is... convoluted, but awesomely weird.</p>
12.3.2025 14:47Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Hugo Mills<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> Alex, full name Alexander Willmer. No middle name, but I use AAW on old-style arcade leader boards.</p>
12.3.2025 14:44Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Alex WillmerI can't shorten Ian any further ( although some people often manage to stick an extra 'I' in there - so sometimes I'll introduce my self as 'Ian with one eye'). And, with no middle name, I often wondered if my dad thought that birth registrations were priced by the letter! <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
12.3.2025 14:25Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Ian WattSometimes short formal names get lengthened. John becoming Johno is a good example. Also some shortenings are just confusing. I am known as both Richard, Rich and Dick, but also Margaret becomes Peg, Henry becomes Harry or Hal, and John becomes Jack. <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
12.3.2025 14:14Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Richard MortonSame. I'm 'Doug' to pretty much everyone and I explicitly tell people not to call me 'Dougie' which I *hate*. But my passport, driving license, and NHS app all say 'Douglas'. FWIW I think you should consider revert to 'Tezza'. After all, why retire early if you can't reclaim some of your youth?
12.3.2025 14:02Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Doug BelshawI have a colleague called Perry. The Terry/Terence thing implies the existence of Perence. This would be an excellent name.
12.3.2025 13:45Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Thomas "Tom" NewtonI always introduce myself as Robert but a surprising number of people then call me “Rob”. I don’t mind (or notice, half the time) but I simply don’t answer to “Bob”. <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
12.3.2025 13:42Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Robert AtkinsI have in the past had entire conversations about a mysterious chap named Terry who sounded suspiciously like a fella I knew named Terence before the penny dropped
<a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
Anyway and also, I know that's a regex you've got there, but now I'm imagining a Terencery, which is sort of an outdoor zoo with a lot of you in there <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
12.3.2025 13:35Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Russell GarnerRussell and Russ has that same serious/play divide to me. My favourite people are the ones who somehow get it and default to the latter. I don't tell anyone the rules (I'll have to delete this) but all the interesting people end up there somehow without a word having been said <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/terencery/" rel="ugc"></a>
12.3.2025 13:34Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Russell Garner<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> my parents go as far as sometime calling me by an even longer version of my given name. I answer to bob, Rob or Robert. When I started Uni is when I chose bob. i keep on havign to remember that you have a real name which is isnt edent.</p>
12.3.2025 12:51Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by bob<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> my uncle didn't like his name, so when he went to university he just told everyone he was called a completely different name. Some of his friends from those days still know him by that name. Everyone in our family calls him one shortened version of his actual name, and his wife uses a different one.</p>
12.3.2025 12:43Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by scmbradley<p><span><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent" rel="nofollow noopener ugc">@<span>Edent</span></a></span> i prefer David, but most people seem to call me Dave, especially if they haven't met me in person yet. I'll answer to just about anything, there's one group of people that know me as Reverend Dr Meagen. I sign my emails David and reply to whatever they call me.</p>
12.3.2025 12:43Comment on Ter[ence|ry] by Dr David MillsMy name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain. British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry. And so, for most of my childhood, I was Terry to all who knew me. There was a brief dalliance in my…
12.3.2025 12:34Ter[ence|ry]It is always nice to meet someone in a pub who says "I've written my first book!" - so, naturally, I picked up Katie's novel as my next read. I'm glad that I did as it's a cracking crime story. It starts slowly, with a brilliantly observed satire of office life. The gossip, banal slogans, venal senior managers, and work-shy grifters are all there and jump off the page. You'll have met all of them if you've ever spent a moment in a modern open-plan office. It swiftly picks up the pace with a…
10.3.2025 12:34Book Review: The Man In The Wall by KJ Lyttleton ★★★★☆I've been thinking about fun little artistic things to do with QR codes. What if each individual pixel were a QR code? There's two fundamental problems with that idea. Firstly, a QR code needs whitespace around it in order to be scanned properly. So I focussed on the top left positional marker. There's plenty of whitespace there. Secondly, because QR codes contain a lot of white pixels inside them, scaling down the code usually results in a grey square - which is unlikely to be recognised…
9.3.2025 12:34A Recursive QR Code404 Ink's "Inklings" series are short books with high ideals. This is a whirlwind tour through the ramifications of the rapid digitalisation of our lives. It provides a review of recent literature and draws some interesting conclusions. It is a modern and feminist take on Seeing Like A State - and acknowledges that book as a major influence. What are the dangers of static standards which force people into uncomfortable boxes? How can data be misused and turns against us? Rather wonderfully…
8.3.2025 12:34Book Review: Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman ★★★★☆What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his younger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…? This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if that side of it is any good - it's all longing looks, furtive glances, and "what if"s. It was charming …
7.3.2025 12:34Book Review: Hive - Madders of Time Book One by D. L. Orton ★★☆☆☆In many ways it is refreshing that Ben Elton hasn't changed his act at all over the last 44 years. Go back to any YouTube clip of his 1980s stand-up and you'll hear the same rhythm, vocal tics, and emphasis as he does today. Even his politics haven't shifted (much) with identical rants about feckless politicians and the dangers of bigotry. What's lost is the sense of topicality. Hey! Don't we all look at our phones too much?! Gosh! Isn't Daniel Craig a different James Bond to Roger Moore?!…
6.3.2025 12:34Review: Ben Elton - Authentic Stupidity ★★★☆☆Experimental and unconventional theatre is rare in the prime spots of the West End. There's a sea of jukebox musicals, film adaptations, standard Shakespeare, and Worthy Plays. Theatreland runs on bums-on-seats - doesn't matter what the critics say as long and punters keep paying outrageous prices for cramped stalls in dilapidated venues. Elektra is uncompromising. It is the sort of play the average customer might have heard of in passing, but hasn't made a significant dent in modern…
5.3.2025 12:34Theatre Review: Elektra ★★★⯪☆Malcolm Croft (under the pseudonym Catherine Nappington) has produced a compendium of cat illustrations from ancient manuscripts. It's then peppered with a variety of regurgitated facts and captions of a sub-Facebook levels of humour. There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by commentary which wouldn't be out of place on a disused Tumblr blog. There's also a lot of discussion…
4.3.2025 12:34Book Review: Medieval Cats - Claws, Paws, and Kitties of Yore by Catherine Nappington ★⯪☆☆☆Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no good for a security specification. Multiple implementations are great, multiple interpretations are…
2.3.2025 12:34Towards a test-suite for TOTP codesThe Web Crypto API is, thankfully, nothing to do with scammy cryptocurrencies. Instead, it provides access to powerful cryptographic features which were previously only available in 3rd party tools. So, is it possible to build a TOTP code generator without using any external JS libraries? Yes! And it is (relatively) simple. Here's the code that I've written. It is slightly verbose and contains a lot of logging so you can see what it is doing. I've annotated it with links to the various…
1.3.2025 12:34Using the Web Crypto API to Generate TOTP Codes in JavaScript Without 3rd Party LibrariesLast year, I reviewed a Four-Colour eInk Name Badge - the ManyTag HSN371. The hardware itself is perfectly fine, but the Android app isn't great. It is complicated, crash-prone, and not available in the app-store. After some back-and-forth with the manufacturer, they agreed to send me their Android SDK and documentation. Sadly, the PDF they sent me was riddled with errors and the software library is also a bit dodgy. So, with the help of Edward Toroshchyn and a hefty amount of automated…
28.2.2025 12:34ManyTag Colour eInk Badge SDK - Minimum Viable Example for AndroidThis is three excellent plays in one. First, a ghost story. Second, a tribute act. Thirdly, a meditation on the nature of comedy. In many ways, it is the complement to Inside Number 9 playing next door. Cooper, Morecambe, and Monkhouse were dead to begin with. Perhaps you grew up watching them live at the Palladium, or on grainy VHS tapes, or in microbursts on TikTok. But they got their last live laugh several decades prior to today. Nevertheless, their comedy lineage remains. Every…
27.2.2025 12:34Theatre Review: The Last Laugh ★★★★★WordPress does not respect an admin's preferred date format. Here's how the admin list of posts looks to me: I don't want it to look like that. I want it in RFC3339 format. I know what you're thinking, just change the default date display - but that only seems to work in some areas of WordPress. It doesn't change the column-date format. Here's what mine is set to: So that doesn't work. Instead, you need to use the slightly obscure post_date_column_time filter Add this to your theme's …
26.2.2025 12:34Change the way dates are presented in WordPress's admin viewMy friend Manuel has sent me his latest book to review - and it is a corker. The best thing about this book is that it doesn't waste any time trying to convince you that Accessibility Is Good™. You're a professional web developer; you know that. Instead, it gets straight down to brass-tacks and gives you immediate and useful examples of what to do. You could read the book linearly - but it is much more suited to dipping into. Want to know exactly how to do something? There's almost certainly a…
25.2.2025 12:34Book Review: Web Accessibility Cookbook - Creating Inclusive Experiences by Manuel Matuzovic ★★★★★If you use Multi-Factor Authentication, you'll be well used to scanning in QR codes which allow you to share a secret code with a website. These are known as Time-based One Time Passwords (TOTP). As I've moaned about before, TOTP has never been properly standardised. It's a mish-mash of half-finished proposals with no active development, no test suite, and no-one looking after it. Which is exactly what you want from a security specification, right?! So let's try to find some edge-cases and…
24.2.2025 12:34The least secure TOTP code possibleTake a look at these two QR codes. Scan them if you like, I promise there's nothing dodgy in them. Left is upper-case HTTPS://EDENT.TEL/ and right is lower-case https://edent.tel/ You can clearly see that the one on the left is a "smaller" QR as it has fewer bits of data in it. Both go to the same URl, the only difference is the casing. What's going on? Your first thought might be that there's a different level of error-correction. QR codes can have increasing levels of redundancy i…
23.2.2025 12:34Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower-case letters?A friend mentioned that they were going to a Proust book club where they'd be discussing Swann's Way, the first volume of the masterpiece. "Well," I thought, "That sounds like a fun challenge!" It was not. I picked up the Standard eBooks version translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and started my journey. It starts with a young man having a wet dream and then, in excruciating detail, describing the process of waking up. The writing starts as dreamy but quickly becomes obtuse. The story (such…
22.2.2025 12:34Book Review: In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust ⯪☆☆☆☆I went into this as a cynic and came out a grinning maniac. Look, it is basically "Stomp" but for kids. It's a join-in pantomime where four babbling fools play with junk in a recycling centre to make music. Oh, sure, you could analyse it as being a blend of Commedia dell'arte and modern dance, but it is closer to Minions. All cartoon violence, generic-Euro-mumble speech, and tunes that they'll recognise when they're older (but the parents will love). The kids in the audience were constantly…
21.2.2025 12:34Theatre Review: Trash ★★★⯪☆The purpose of table manners is to stop us killing each other. That's the rather provocative assertion in Margaret Visser's excellent deconstruction of why we have such elaborate and infuriating rituals around eating. It starts, naturally enough, with a chapter on human sacrifice. It is grim, violent, and soaked in blood. A delightful amuse-bouche this isn't! But it makes the case that this is (part) of the origin of our modern table manners. We no longer need to appease the gods and secure a …
20.2.2025 12:34Book Review: The Rituals of Dinner - The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners by Margaret Visser ★★★★⯪This post will show you how to programmatically get the cheapest possible price on eBooks from Kobo. Background Amazon have decided to stop letting customers download their purchased eBooks onto their computers. That means I can't strip the DRM and read on my non-Amazon eReader. So I guess I'm not spending money with Amazon any more. I'm moving to Kobo for three main reasons: They provide standard ePubs for download. ePub DRM is trivial to remove. Kobo will undercut Amazon's prices! …
19.2.2025 12:34Automatic Kobo and Kindle eBook Arbitrage⬆️
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