Blog

I recently created every.horse, a website cataloging every .horse domain. It serves no particular purpose. How? A Python script runs on demand that: requests the zone file for the .horse TLD from ICANN’s Centralised Zone Data Service API parses out all unique domains, removing the extraneous DNS-related data converts this into a list of domains that can be included in an HTML page This is then included in a single-page served up by a Jekyll instance running on a Raspberry Pi at my home. ...

This website is hosted on a small RaspberryPi nestled behind my TV. It’s a mildy autonomous and moderately self-correcting setup, though susceptible to, say, being unplugged if I need to vacuum. If my Internet Service Provider changes my IP address, it corrects the DNS record and ensures people can still find it. If I shut it down, move house, and fire it up again, it’ll vaguely sort itself out and be serving this website in relatively short order. ...

I have two concerts booked from Before. They have been postponed a number of times for nearly two years - prodded gently forward like a hand-basket on the floor in a supermarket queue. I will almost certainly cry at my first concert back. I was pre-emptively rejected for a job I didn’t apply for. The first I knew of it was an email stating that my application had been rejected. Shortly after this, an email stating that the rejection was a mistake and they’d be happy to take my application - which I had not made - forward. It turned out to be a good friend who mentioned me to an internal recruiter as a potential applicant and the machinery all kicked in. Still. Pre-emptively rejected. That’s new. ...

Jeremy Deller's piece, "Hello, today you have day off", 2013. Sometime around 2010, I found the perfect work routine. I would get up early, run, and shower. I’d leave the house and grab the Central Line from Shepherd’s Bush to Tottenham Court Road. On the way I’d get a coffee, which I’d drink while I travelled while reading or listening to music. I’d be in the large, empty office that smelled of drab, sterile carpet and blank halogen lighting by 8:05am. I’d get my second cup of coffee and settle down to read the RSS feeds of around 130 websites1. I learnt a lot, and the diversity and scope of what I read helped widen my understanding of the world - open it to new voices and perspectives and fields and approaches. It opened my eyes wide before a day of code and tech. It made me a better person. There are few things of which I am certain but this is one. In retrospect, that, then, was just the right amount of Online. ...

I recently resigned. It is a strange sensation, applying for jobs after 2 years of pandemic and with a general kind of burnout. Hearing a question like, “What’s your biggest strength?” feels absurd, like being asked what your favourite album is by your dentist while they pry 3 molars from your mouth. I am taking a break from ’timelines’, though I don’t know what that means exactly. It has been oddly easy, though I am surprised by small autonomic betrayals of my own body. I will start some software and, in the slow moment it begins loading, my fingers will skitter away, launching a browser and auto-completing ’twi-’ before I even realise that I’ve been betrayed. ...

The following are some thoughts about the AMBIENT PRIVACY project. I originally undertook this project as a way to examine my part in the ‘surveillance capitalism’ - the growing trade in personal information given in exchange for digital services. In this post I won’t analyse the content of the queries themselves - what was asked, when, and how it reflects on the technology itself. Methodology First, a little bit of background on how I actually indexed and documented the full archive. I downloaded all of my Voice Search & Assistant metadata from Google Takeout under the “My Activity” section and processed the resulting files (audio mp3 files and a JSON metadata file) using two programs I wrote1. The first was written in R, a data-processing language, which I used to flatten and clean up the metadata file, as well as generate the specific waveforms for each audio recording. ...