Some little piggies go to market. Some little piggies stay at home. Andy Theyers helps us work out if the little piggies are buying roast beef - or going "Wee wee wee" all the way home. isotoma.com/the-stack/st...

Remember kids. A website is for life, not just for Christmas

Last month Max Verstappen secured the fastest F1 lap. And Isotoma talked about... - Status of Titanic's swimming pool - Risks of outsourcing cybersecurity functions - Unlocking the history of our homes - Pathetic motorways - Best place in Britain for quality of life isotoma.com/the-stack/se...

Just as Jaguar Land Rover resumes production line activity, it looks like Japanese drinkers may be the next to suffer. www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/a...

We love a challenge. IWSR brought us a can / bottle / barrel shaped one and we drank it up! As a global leader in market analysis for the alcohol industry, IWSR needed a user-friendly application fast enough and scalable enough to cope with dauntingly varied data sets. isotoma.com/our-work/iwsr/

Isotoma recently signed up to an EV salary sacrifice scheme, so we're always interested in new developments in the market. Kerb chargers sound like a great idea, but is it really a 'game changer' if a parking space outside your house can't be guaranteed? www.bbc.com/news/article...

Are you and your LLM friend on a one-way ticket to Lazy Town? Never one to shy away from a chinwag, Andy Theyers had a chat with his bot and the results were interesting... isotoma.com/the-stack/ma...

We all dodged a bullet https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/we-dodged-a-bullet/

First there was phishing, then quishing; now we need to be on the look out for splitting and nesting. Beware, the once helpful QR code has gone rogue. www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hackers...

Ever wondered what kind of life your 13th century self would have lived? Ponder no more. Now you can use The National Archives currency converter to work out how many squirrel skins your peasants wage would afford you. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-con...

Last month at Isotoma HQ we battened down the hatches, watched The World Humanoid Robot Games and chatted about... - AI cheatsheet - Are we evolving into anteaters? - Trump's internet 'kill switch' - Unknown origin of Elara Voss - Margaux Blanchard's media trickery isotoma.com/the-stack/au...

The wait is almost over. Python: The Documentary premieres today. Will you be watching it?... Watch the trailer here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBq...

We love a stat at Isotoma HQ. We also love animals. So the annual London Zoo weigh-in is a true delight. Polly the giant Galapagos tortoise stole the show earlier with a scale wobble. Join the live feed here for the latest action: www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cz...

Loving the em/en dash discourse. Work with Isotoma, we've been caring about this stuff for *decades*. Yes, there is a typographic *and semantic* distinction between en dash, em dash, hyphen, and minus sign. Come fight us if you think different!

Bids at the ready. Some absolute corkers in this WHSmith archive auction. timed.chorleys.com/auctions/937... What would you like the hammer to close on?

Last month's Isotoma water cooler chat: - The Jock-Nerd / Prep-Goth test - A love for owls via subliminal learning - Wheels fall off transport company thanks to weak password - Self-driving fleet of Lego trains - Lawsuit reveals service desk gave out passwords isotoma.com/the-stack/ju...

Great from @ftrain.bsky.social as always: "AI is [...] a technology that promises to bring order, perhaps “total” order [...]. But everything around it is incredibly messy, the absolute opposite of what the tech industry says it is like"

Do you need a friend? Question is, does anyone need a friend like this? friend.com

This is fascinating, and well worth a read right through. We're yet to come to a clear picture of the impact of AI tools ourselves - perhaps we should be asking the question more formally?

The month of June was England's warmest since records began in 1884. The world also experienced the largest data breach in history. At Isotoma HQ, we wished our aircon was as efficient as our cyber security, and distracted ourselves with these Slack channel stories: isotoma.com/the-stack/ju...

The vet med team at University of Glasgow will be presenting a paper about our curriculum mapping tool, Sofia, at the 2025 Veterinary Education Symposium next month. Great to see stories of Sofia out in the wild! virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/74477/...

Remember the heady days of 2024? A time before the words 'vibe' and 'coding' were used together. #vibecoding - Love it. Bring on the vibe! - Loathe it. it's the new DIY. - Or just plain meh. This too shall pass. How does the term make you feel?...

On reading @mikebutcher.bsky.social 's post announcing he was parting ways with TechCrunch Doug and Andy couldn't help but give out a little sigh. Was it the loss of the society pages of Web2.0? No. It reminded them both that back in 2008 Mike and TechCrunch called them "Internet veterans".

Last month 166 million viewers watched Austria win the Eurovision Song Contest, with a tune about love. At the same time Microsoft announced that their love affair with Skype was over. Our one true love is software development, but we also quite like these stories: isotoma.com/the-stack/ma...

Co-op, M&S and Harrods are the latest high profile companies to suffer cyber attacks. Ian Stuart, CEO of HSBC UK, comments on the increased severity and frequency, stating that it is now a case of when, not if, businesses will be targeted: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Why do we do comprehensive threat modelling? For exactly this reason... www.theregister.com/2025/05/14/r...

We've had Horrible Histories and Horrible Science. Now The Economist brings you Horrible IT Projects. Or more accurately, why so many go so horribly wrong. www.economist.com/business/202...

April saw the passing of Pope Francis, Trump's tariff war, celebrity space exploration, and biotech boffins reanimating dire wolves. At Isotoma HQ, with full gravity and no office wolves to contend with, our Slack channel featured: isotoma.com/the-stack/ap...

Has the warmer weather inspired you to start a holiday reading list? Well, if you're more of a 'paper' than 'paperback' person then @terriblesoftware.org has just the thing: The 7 Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/t...

Timesheets are generally regarded as a necessary evil. It's a while since we first shared our thoughts on the dastardly time-tally, but the sentiment still holds true. Do you accurately allocate or wing it? isotoma.com/the-stack/ti...

March saw Charli XCX dominate the Brit Awards. The Anora love story was triumphant at the 97th Academy Awards. And the 'Best Ever Accidental Group Chat Addition' award was handed to the US government. Meanwhile at Isotoma HQ we were chatting about: isotoma.com/the-stack/ma...

We hear a lot about achieving work/life balance. Some are taking that further, blurring the lines, by bringing workplace techniques into life at home. isotoma.com/the-stack/th...

Does your tech stack up, or is it time to make a change? It's important to know where your business is on the innovation curve. isotoma.com/the-stack/th...

Today is World Backup Day. Apparently 21% of people have NEVER made a backup. Shocking! We guarantee that running a backup is one thing you'll never, ever regret. For more info and shocking stats: www.worldbackupday.com/en

Time to share another piece of Isotoma HQ artwork. And given that Public Service Broadcasting are performing in York next week, this feels like the perfect time to nod our space helmets to wondrous pop historians @psbhq.bsky.social

Last month saw the odds of an asteroid impacting Earth in the next eight years deviate wildly. So we chose to distract ourselves from potential impending doom with these titbits... isotoma.com/the-stack/fe...

Isotoma senior devops engineer Andrew Plummer talks us through business continuity and balancing likelihood with investment. isotoma.com/the-stack/ma...

What lovely feedback to get on a Friday!

We came. We saw. We talked tech. This morning's Tech Forum event, hosted by City of York Council in partnership with HSBC, resulted in a room full of people all keen to use technology to drive growth and innovation in their businesses.

As we slither into the Year of the Snake, here's the Isotoma look back over the month of January. isotoma.com/the-stack/ja...

Roses are red, violets are blue. We're talking tech, and so can you. Get Valentine's ready. Join Doug at the next Tech Forum on 13 February. He'll be presenting alongside HSBC’s Head of Technology Sector & Growth Lending, Roland Emmans. www.tickettailor.com/events/cityo...

A combat rating of 'Dangerous' was bragging rights. Classic space game Elite was the holy grail for those of us of a certain age, ahem. And now the source code's available fully commented for the first time. Finally we can work out what that bit of assembly was doing! elite.bbcelite.com

Plato: Our need will be the real creator. And this week we learnt that the necessity to find a workaround to the US chip ban was the mother to DeepSeek R1's invention. Oh the irony. Ben Thompson considers the ripples, far and wide. Someone fetch the popcorn.... stratechery.com/2025/deepsee...

Lots of wisdom from a master programmer. Like all crafts, there is a lot more to programming than just writing code. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/mastering-...

An expensive firework? Rather pretty? A conscious uncoupling? Surely not a 'rapid unscheduled disassembly’?! How would you describe the latest test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket? (We're just rather pleased the Martians won't be needing a digital detox anytime soon) #SpaceX #Starship #Mars

Forget Ted Talks, Doug Discourse is the way forward! Isotoma's CTO, Doug Winter, will be joining HSBC's Head of Technology Sector and Growth Lending, Roland Emmans, at the next City of York Council Tech Forum on 13 February. Tickets are free, but limited. www.tickettailor.com/events/cityo...

We owe you a Christmas cracker. So let's open the December round-up with the winner of Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024's funniest joke: "I was going to sail around the globe in the world's smallest ship but I bottled it." - Mark Simmons isotoma.com/the-stack/de...

Sometimes feel you conduct your life without method or conscious decision? Great. Then maybe you can beat the bot. We've been playing with CalmCode's inverse Turing Test. Have a go and see how you fare. calmcode.io/blog/inverse... #BeatTheBot #HumanVsRobot

November retrospective: inside the Isotoma Slack channel While the rest of the UK was debating Gregg Wallace's extra 'g' - among other superfluous aspects of the former Masterchef judge, we've been discussing: isotoma.com/the-stack/no...

An address is more than just a location. If a person becomes homeless they also lose means of identification. But there is a solution... #TheIsotomaStack #TechForGood #homelessness isotoma.com/the-stack/pr...