Notes

Just give us back Clippy, you cowards.

(Seriously though; human-like avatars is not it.)

I have just realised that Giles has published yet another great resource! First there was Doing presentations, then Doing weeknotes, and now, Doing open.

A welcome surprise too is to see our own team’s work being given the Turnbull Seal of Approval!

When Giles came in to do some training on agile comms and working in the open, he ran through an enormous Rolodex of best practice for this stuff. I remember thinking “I want our stuff in that Rolodex!” and now we are.

The PlayStation Access podcast has me completely stumped, thinking about which games haven’t been remade, but I would want them to be.

Loads of my favourite old games have already been remade.

• Tomb Raider has been remade – with the Anniversary Edition – and remastered with updated graphics, last year
• Command & Conquer and its sequel, Red Alert, have been remastered – though I’d love to see Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 given the same treatment
• The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker was given the “HD” treatment on the Nintendo Wii U, although it would be nice to see it re-released on the Switch
• I’m not entirely sure if this counts but loads of Mario and Luigi games have been ported and rereleased on newer generations of console, bringing them from GameCube, Wii and Wii U to the Switch and now Switch 2; the most obvious of which is Mario Kart 8
• The Batman: Arkham series was remastered for PS4 and still looks great
• Bioshock go a facelift as part of the “Complete Edition”, updating it from PS3 to PS4
• Broken Sword has been lovingly and beautifully redrawn, frame for frame, in the recent remasters
• Even some of my more niche loves, like Theme Hospital, have kind of been remade with spiritual successors like Two Point Hospital

It’s really hard to think of classic games that I loved that still are yearning for a remake or remaster.

And the other shoe drops!

For weeks Meta has been relentlessly advertising, on billboards, bus stops, podcasts and across online media, that “no one can see what you do on WhatsApp, not even WhatsApp”. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so it’s safe.

I found this a peculiar campaign to run. It clearly wasn’t targeted at any particular social group. WhatsApp has strong market penetration in the UK. Why did they choose this moment to go big on an issue I don’t think Joe Public would even have been thinking about?

Ads.

Ads were coming.

That’s why.

It’s now easier than ever to find services that meet the rules in the UK digital identity and attributes trust framework, as our new GOV•UK register has now entered public beta.

This is a huge leap forward compared to what we had before; no more weird spreadsheets!

I’d love to know what you think of this new service and what you’d like to see us add to this service as we continue to develop it over the next year.

At the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes, we maintain the register of digital identity and attribute services. In this post, I explain how we do that today and how we’re planning to do it once legislation comes into force.

This book of Game Boy box and game art looks divine.

I’ve immediately added it to my wishlist, along with half-a-dozen other books from this publisher.

I’ve written a new post for our “Enabling digital identity” blog, focusing this time on our certification process.

Today I’ve stumbled upon Lynn Fisher’s website. It is awesome.

The graphics and illustrations. The colour scheme. That gorgeous, elongated typography that’s fully responsive to the window size. Chef’s kiss.

I love finding websites like this and the people behind them. Incredibly beautiful websites created by wonderfully talented people. There’s so much to learn from looking at, tinkering with and building upon other people’s code.

It’s not just Lynn’s core website that’s superb either; look at this enormous array of work and projects she has going on too.

Apparently Lynn refreshes the design from top to bottom annually; here are all the archived designs. I’d encourage you to look at this one. Do it on a desktop, and try resizing the window. Mind-bending.

I can’t wait to see what Lynn cooks up next so I can learn from it!

This week, the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes has published an update to the UK digital identity and attributes trust framework as a pre-release.

Services cannot get certified against this new, 0.4 or “gamma” trust framework just yet. That’s because there are no conformity assessment bodies currently accredited to evaluate services against this version.

We have published the pre-release so that:

1. conformity assessment bodies can start the process of accreditation, and
2. service providers have advanced notice of changes and can start to prepare their services for future certification

When it is possible to get certified, we will publish a final version of the 0.4 trust framework (replacing the pre-release). We expect certification will be possible from 2025, subject to accreditation having taken place.

You can find out more about what’s new in the 0.4 trust framework on the OfDIA ‘Enabling digital identity’ blog, and read the full publication on GOV.UK.

I do not want to spoil the story told by Cabel in their talk at this year’s XOXO Festival.

Watch it all the way to the end.

Trust me. You won’t regret it.

We think inclusion is imperative. Everyone who chooses to use a digital identity should be able to do so.

That’s why we’re monitoring how accessible and inclusive the digital identity and attribute services certified against the government’s trust framework are.

Katie Sunley writes about the findings from our first inclusion monitoring report on the OfDIA “Enabling digital identity” blog.

As part of the announcement of the new Office for Digital Identities and Attributes “Enabling digital identity” blog on GOV.UK, I’ve written one of our introductory posts, explaining what we mean, in OfDIA, when we talk about “digital identity and attributes”.

If you want the latest from the blog, you can register for email alerts or subscribe via RSS.

One of the things I think our digital service team is doing well at the moment is getting ahead of accessibility issues before they happen.

The whole team has been swotting up on WCAG 2.2. Every planning meeting, and every design crit were asking ourselves “is that going to be accessible?” before we start typing code.

We’re using the GOV.UK Design System we have access to fully-worked up, tested code, which is leading to fewer mistakes.

We’ve been iteratively auditing parts of our service (and not waiting until the end, as some had advised we should!).

And, of course, we’ve been testing with users who have a range of disabilities.

Are there still bits that need tweaking? Yes. But as Hidde indicates, things have been orders of magnitude easier to fix because we’re thinking about accessibility from the start.

Hi Joe! Looks like you fixed it 👏

This downward trajectory doesn’t feel especially surprising to me. Sony have been openly telling people this console is on its way out; which is wild, considering it’s only been practical to get one in the past 18 months without scalping.

I have one – the hardware rocks! It certainly doesn’t feel end of life to me.

You know what might help convince people to keep buying games consoles though? Investing in new games and IP, rather than doing the exact opposite of that and laying off your development staff.

When I was watching the semi-finals and grand final of this year’s Eurovision this week, I kept saying there was something weird going on with the frame rate.

I put it down to a bad BBC iPlayer stream, and it turns out I wasn’t imagining it. There was a weird frame rate.

I’m so used to seeing 60 or even 120 frames per second content now that it made the low frame rate presentation of this year’s Eurovision all the more jarring.

I hope they revert back to normal next year.

p.s. I’m not sure why, but your author information (name, website, etc.) didn’t come through with the Webmention. I found the IndieWebify.me service to be helpful to iron out a lot of my own bugs (it took a long time to figure out!).

Hi Joe. Thanks for participating in this little test!

Thanks for spotting the 405 error. I was sending the mentions into the void at the wrong endpoint! It should work now.

This is so unbelievably nerdy. I love it.

I now see why I keep losing at Mario Kart!

I have spent probably too many hours playing this game. I enjoyed it so much I recall it getting me into trouble with my parents when I snuck onto the family computer and turned off a different game my dad was playing just so I could be a tycoon!

I had no idea of its wider impact. It’s inspired people to get into rollercoaster design as a profession and diversified the industry a bit in the process.

I wonder if my other favourite game of the 90s had a similar impact.

I’ve never managed to get into the habit of weeknoting; but Giles’ excellent Doing Weeknotes guidance has inspired me to give it another shot!

More, soon.

I like the way you’ve put your backlog of blogposts and website tweaks on your to do list.

I might steal that idea!

The latest edition of the Own Your Web newsletter chimes perfectly with what I’ve been trying to achieve by adding more short-form blogging formats to my website.

Not every blog post has to be an essay. Sometimes, you just want to share a link, and maybe add a quick comment.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting it to be, but I think I like it! It’s been a worm in my ear all day.

I’m fairly sure the synth chord progression is sampled from this Pet Shop Boys track.

Fascinating to see how the EU Digital Markets Act is starting to have real world impact on the products we use each day.

The mental overhead of juggling between messaging apps is brain space that I could do with getting back. I can’t wait to move all my messaging into one app. Oh, the glorious simplicity! That is, if they manage to execute, and if all my other messaging apps also choose to interoperate.

At this rate, I’m going to have to get an “I agree with Giles” t-shirt.

Corporate “e-learning” doesn’t respect people’s intellect or, perhaps worse, their time.

They’re not even that information dense. Most of the content could fit on a single side of A4.

Come to think of it; I suspect most people would be happy to read a stack of 1 page policies and then sit the stupid tests.

This post has prompted me to update my own RSS feeds. It’s been a long time since I’ve given them an overhaul.

I’ve recently been adding new post formats to the site: replies and comments, boosts and sharing, quick notes and lists. My RSS feed, though? Just plain old blog posts.

Not any more. You can now subscribe to more than a dozen feeds from my site with lots of different post formats. All of them are available on the feeds page, and RSS readers should auto-detect all of them too.

If you’ve got a website, do as Robb suggests: expose your RSS!

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment: video games are getting too damned big.

I don’t need hundreds of repetitive and frustrating side quests. Just give me the main storyline, make it thrilling, and don’t make it so long that I lose interest.

Cocoon was a recent, excellent example of this. It was only 6 hours long but every minute of it was brilliant, and ended just when it needed to.

@Jonathan Yes, it did trigger a webmention! It shows up on the original post as expected.

It didn’t trigger it properly though 🙁

The post content has come through, but it’s missing the ‘author’ so it shows up as an anonymous message. (I’ve tracked you down via the webmention.io backend.)

In case it helps, I used the IndieWebify.Me service to check that my post mark-up was working. This is what it shows for your post; you’re missing a bit of mark-up.

@starrwulfe Thanks! I’ve not used Wordpress in a long time, but my website source code is all freely available on Github if you want to take a dive through.

This Sass file contains the styles for the webmentions elements of the site.

Thanks for flagging. Should be fixed now!