Please stop using the word umami for a flavour.

I really dislike it when people use unfamiliar words for something, rather than trying to use a familiar word that has more intuitive meaning. (Although worse is business jargon, where a familiar word is used in a completely unfamiliar way: case in point, almost every word used in the “Agile” business process.) This is how …

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Gordon Ramsay’s new show: 24 Hours to Hell and Back.

I’ve only just discovered this show in its second season. It’s similar to Kitchen Nightmares except that hidden cameras are used. But here’s my question: How can the owner of a restaurant not know that their restaurant is being filmed by hidden cameras? If the owner doesn’t know (and several episodes make it appear that …

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Really blocking popups.

Strangely, despite what you would think, most browsers still allow popups—even if you’ve disabled them in the normal UI. With Chrome, you can download one of several different popup blocker extensions. With Firefox-based browsers, you can go to about:config, search for dom.popup_allowed_events, and remove all of the entries there. (This does not prevent new windows …

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