Rob Lang
brainwipe.bsky.social
Rob Lang
@brainwipe.bsky.social
Lead healthcare web dev, PhD in AI, amateur game dev, aspiring gravel cyclist, ex-RAFAC gliding instructor and drone racer.
🗺️ Bing Maps no longer has the Ordnance Survey overlay. In the UK that was the USP of Bing Maps. Now there is absolutely no reason to visit Bing Maps.

Ordnance Survey is a government organisation, I've already paid for the data collection, feels mean that they now want me to pay for it again.
November 29, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Reposted by Rob Lang
And it's up! All together now...

🎶 Somebody told me
the user provider
should use an adaptor
to proxy the query
factory builder... 🎶

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p03o...
November 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
✏️ Blog: Using GnuPG and Bouncy Castle in .NET for some delicious asymmetric payload encryption.

Needed to work this out for work, leaving here as a public aide memoire. brainwipe.github.io/2025-11-19-g...
PGP in .NET with GnuPG and Bouncy Castle
In this blog we are going to encrypt and decrypt some text using PGP. Keys will be asymmetric and made by GnuPG (GPG) but the act of encrypt and decrypt will be…
brainwipe.github.io
November 20, 2025 at 10:29 PM
So many companies keep adding complexity to their products, endlessly growing that it becomes so complex that the basics get screwed. Cloudflare can't even serve a Proxy or DNS right now. That's like basic shit.

Trello (Atlassian) also adding so much faff to what was a perfect product.
November 18, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Cloudflare: bet you it's DNS. It's always DNS.

And yet there's no concerted effort to fix it - just load it up with more features.
November 18, 2025 at 12:59 PM
I know I'm old and all that but it's still astounding to me that I can have a native linux terminal window in Windows without all that cyg-win works-alright-except. WSL is cool. And then I can run docker containers in that there sub system. That's also really cool.
November 11, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Rob Lang
What you’re witnessing is a populist assault on the BBC.

This is not an institutional scandal in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an attack on public service broadcasting.

iandunt.substack.com/p/extra-edit...
November 10, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Reposted by Rob Lang
website: hey we need all your data for security
person: for security?
website: for security yeah
person: and is it gonna leak
website: of course it's not gonna leak do you think we're idiots

website: so hey promise not to get mad
November 3, 2025 at 12:37 PM
It's DNS. It's always DNS.
October 29, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Post hog ergo propter hog
#aws
October 20, 2025 at 10:27 AM
It's DNS, of course it is. It's always DNS. The world needs to replace DNS because it's utter shit.

health.aws.amazon.com/health/statu...
View the overall status and health of AWS services using the AWS Health Dashboard.
health.aws.amazon.com
October 20, 2025 at 10:27 AM
The internet appears to be broken. Can someone switch it off and on again? At least Downdetector can tell us it's bad: downdetector.co.uk

All the sites I'm responsible for are still up but 🫂 going out to my tech brethren that are having a hard time right now.
Status overview
downdetector.co.uk
October 20, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Spent an afternoon going through all the company's to assess business+operational+technical risk due to AI. Some are well documented and have sub processors listed etc. Others have only marketing BS. None publicly explain the risks and mitigations.
October 16, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Future people are going to look back at F12 dev tools, setting breakpoints and running ad-hoc code in the console and wonder why everything didn't just fall apart.
October 9, 2025 at 9:33 AM
I'm not saying that healthcare data exchange standards are a worry but also this:
September 23, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Amazon's help LLM "Q" can be useful but sometimes it hallucinates features that sound reasonable but don't exist, like "add instance to existing cluster" on a headless cluster.

The replies *did* have a solution that worked. 1/2

#aws #devops #llm #ai
September 23, 2025 at 9:23 AM
Follow this account, it's hilarious!

Also 10 minutes walk from my front door. ♥️ And I've been drunk in that building but before it was MERL. 😉
We're 300 followers away from 70,000. 300 more would be really nice. But you know what would be even better? 300 plus 30,000.

Bluesky: help a museum out
August 14, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Tried connections for the first time because of @josemonkey.com

Quite fun, happy to have got it.

Connections
Puzzle #788
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟦🟦🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪
August 7, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Once in a while I'm reminded of a senior manager who, when faced with a looming deadline, wanted to cut out all the QA. When we pointed out that there would be bugs in prod as a result, he asked dead-seriously:

"Can you code without putting bugs in?"
July 23, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Built in app LLMs seem to have a cycle:

1. There's a meeting summary "wow, that's amazing!"
2. Ah, but there's important detail missing
3. QA <> Kuwait 😂
4. Spent 30 minutes laughing at it
5. Leave it switched off

From actual Slack experience this morning.
July 16, 2025 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Rob Lang
I just published a blog post about the OpenCLI initiative. I think it's time we had a way to standardize CLI automation!

Feedback, suggestions, and thoughts are more than welcome.

patriksvensson.se/posts/2025/0...
Introducing OpenCLI
Patrik Svensson's blog
patriksvensson.se
July 8, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Friends have been to see Linkin Park so I thought I'd give Hybrid Theory a listen again after many years and it's all killer. Such a fantastic album - and a debut too.
July 4, 2025 at 9:18 AM
The more I read the NHS Plan, the more excited I get. There's a lot of good stuff in there.
July 3, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Movie you've watched more than six times using GIFs (hard mode: no Star Wars, Star Trek or LOTR)
June 26, 2025 at 6:45 AM
Missed opportunity for #AWS to have a sense of humour.
June 6, 2025 at 10:37 AM