This is a curious book. It starts out as a look at the security of everyday objects, but quickly becomes a series of after-dinner anecdotes about various security related issues. That's not a bad thing, as such, but a little different from what I was expecting. There's no doubt t … | Continue reading
I've started adding Restaurant Reviews to this blog - with delicious semantic metadata. Previously I'd been posting all my reviews to HappyCow. It's a great site for finding veggie-friendly food around the worlds, but I wanted to experiment more with the IndieWeb idea of POSSE. S … | Continue reading
We flew in early to Kuala Lumpur - the only way to stave off the jetlag was to go hunting for lunch. We made the mistake of trying to walk through the city. What looked like a brisk 30 minute stroll became an exercise in dashing across busy roads in the sweltering heat. My brain … | Continue reading
They say you should never judge a book by its cover. I picked this book solely because of the title. I didn't even read the blurb. Frankly, I'm delighted to have stumbled onto something so good! It's a near-future sci-fi story with an actual bibliography backing up its science! T … | Continue reading
Thoroughly disappointing. It's a rip-off of about a dozen Asimov stories about domestic robots. Robot helps child. Robot gets religion. Robot Misunderstands world. Robot is abused. It baffles me why this was nominated for so many prizes - I guess judges don't read enough old-scho … | Continue reading
The first indication I had that anything was wrong at home was my solar panels's cloud service casually emailing me to say they hadn't generated any electricity that day. We were on holiday - literally on the other side of the planet - and there were reports of snow at home, so I … | Continue reading
This is a tough little compilation to review. It's a collection of mid-1980s stories all grouped around the loose theme of "Cyberpunk". What is Cyberpunk? Well, I'm not quite sure. And neither is the book. Some of the stories are high-tech tales of people fighting the system and … | Continue reading
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more … | Continue reading
If you have a large collection of eBooks, you probably use Calibre - it's simply the best bit of cross-platform software for managing your library. It runs rock-solid on Linux. But a recent upgrade gave me a problem. I started the app and the windows were missing their borders an … | Continue reading
This is a delightfully silly magical romp. Without getting too deep into the spoilers, it is the anti-Potter of books. Middle-aged, feminist, modern witches - drinking wine and kicking arse. And they're all out of wine. I don't think it adds much new to the genre - bitchy witches … | Continue reading
After reading Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire I was keen to read more about my country's history. It's weird that studying history in the UK consists of the Tudors, Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution, and the World Wars. Nothing about how modern Britain came to exist, our … | Continue reading
This is a sequel to Shouting Zeros and Ones - Digital Technology, Ethics and Policy in New Zealand and follows a familiar pattern. It's a series of essays looking at digital issues from a uniquely NZ perspective. There is a fair bit of Te reo Māori (Māori language) in the book. I … | Continue reading
This is a profoundly depressing but utterly necessary read. It charts Fiona Hill's journey from the moribund educational opportunities provided in a dying coal city in England, all the way to her testimony in the Trump impeachment hearings. It is part biography and part political … | Continue reading
My mate Julia has written a book! And, as per the title, it is really good. This is a book about helping you discover if that idea you've had - for a product, feature, book, business, whatever - is likely to catch on. It does this through the lens of understanding users. The Real … | Continue reading
If you've visiting Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, I have two tips for you. Firstly, get there as early as possible in order to avoid the heat and other tourists. Secondly, after climbing a mountain of stairs, marvelling at the wonders therein, and being stared at by hundreds of monk … | Continue reading
This thorough examination of Pink Floyd's epic album is a lushly illustrated coffee-table book. Breezily written and good for dipping in and out of. It gives as a brief history of Pink Floyd and then dives in to every nook and cranny about the making of DSotM. It's chock full of … | Continue reading
This is pitched as the first gay love story from a major Hollywood studio. I don't know how true that claim is - but I do know this is a funny and sweet movie. When I was at University at the turn of the century, there was a guy in our halls named "Big Gay […] | Continue reading
I couldn't find this movie on any streaming service - but I took a flight to New Zealand an it was on the in-flight entertainment. Not the cheapest way to watch a film! Whina tells the true story of Josephina Cooper, a Maori woman fighting for her rights, and the rights of her pe … | Continue reading
This is a perfect movie. It's packed full of little in-jokes and fourth-wall-breaking asides. It is smart, funny, and incredibly well paced. Honestly, it doesn't have a duff moment in it. If you've never seen Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" - I strongly advise you to watch it b … | Continue reading
More on my experiments with silly Punycode domain names. http://↑↑↓↓←→←→ba.tk/ Yup, copy and paste that into your browser and it will resolve. For now, it just redirects to a Wikipedia article. If you can think of a better use for it, please let me know. I wonder how mail clients … | Continue reading
I returned home from holiday to a pile of letters. Mostly junk, a few Christmas cards, and something from the NHS. This is what the envelope looked like: As it happens, I'm not particularly concerned about who knows I had a fairly normal medical procedure. I've blogged a bit abou … | Continue reading
Codeberg is a hip new code hosting site - similar to GitHub and GitLab. And, much like Gits Hub & Lab, users can serve static content through Codeberg pages. Somehow I screwed up my configuration, and when I visited edent.codeberg.page/abc123 I got this error: Now, whenever I see … | Continue reading
Picture the scene. You're in a pub and order, say, a cider or a cocktail. The local pub bore pipes up "What are you drinking that for? Real men drink..." and then names a brand of generic, piss-weak lager that is his substitute for a personality. He's the same guy who insists tha … | Continue reading
During my (brief) stint teaching senior leaders about AI, there was one question that I urged them to learn above all others. What is the acceptable failure rate? For this, I had to teach them two concepts. False Positives. For example, telling someone they have cancer when they … | Continue reading
Uber are undoubtedly a company engaged in extremely dodgy activity. But, on the other had, they're ridiculously convenient. A few months ago, we landed in a foreign country, opened the same Uber app as we used back home, and booked a cab. It just worked. I didn't need to register … | Continue reading
Nat Spiller, an admired climate change activist, has accidentally drowned. That’s the police verdict. But was it an accident? His partner Ellie thinks otherwise. Pam, Ellie’s aunt, draws a reluctant Lauren Fraser into the mystery. It's a bit weird to describe a murder mystery as … | Continue reading
How should I design my personal DNS for all the cool new Federated Services and IndieWeb protocols? Way back in the early 2000s, I started this website - shkspr.mobi. A few years later, I added a blog. I could have used the main domain, or created a subdomain like blog.shkspr.mob … | Continue reading
The headstrap which ships with the Meta Quest 2 is shit. It is a cheap piece of fabric, held together with velcro. It's fiddly to adust and uncomfortable to use for longer than a few minutes. Zuckerberg likes causing you pain. So I purchased the cheapest upgrade strap I could fin … | Continue reading
The Church of England publishes statistics about the numbers of its faithful. These are particularly interesting in light of the recent news that the UK no-longer has a Christian majority. The CofE's statistics are for 2019 - before COVID messed up everything - and I think offer … | Continue reading
Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first … | Continue reading
Way back in the mists of time, I did my secondary-school work experience at the BBC. Specifically, Children's BBC. Every day for a couple of weeks, I'd commute into White City, wander those hallowed halls, sit at a desk, and... You know... I can't remember! I know I got to visit … | Continue reading
It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between … | Continue reading
Problem: My wife and I are going on a long plane journey and don't have seats next to each other. How can we communicate? Constraints: The plane WiFi is ruinously expensive. The in-seat messaging service isn't private. We both have Android phones. Preferences: Open Source. Secure … | Continue reading
Another short story. This time in the form of a screenplay - formatted with screenplay.css. What do the algorithms get up to behind our backs? The Life Script A play for algorithms SCENE I INTERIOR A DULL LOOKING OFFICE. A BLUE LIGHT SUFFUSES THE STAGE. TWO ALGORITHMS SIT ACROSS … | Continue reading
I have never felt less like a human being than while reading this book. I don't mind video-games, I find them mildly diverting. I've never gotten in to massively multiplayer online games (unless you count Twitter). I just don't see what's appealing about them. Why would I want a … | Continue reading
Originally posted as part of HTML Hell's advent calendar. While browsing Mastodon late one night, I came across this excellent blog post called HTML is all you need to make a website. It describes a few websites which are pure HTML. No CSS and no JS. And I thought… do you even ne … | Continue reading
How many times can you go back to the well before it is completely dry? With Kevin Smith, it's always once more. I remember watching the original Clerks about a hundred years ago at university. It was a cheap a daring movie then - and remains a mainstay of what you can do if you … | Continue reading
Winter has come! And with it the risk of power-cuts. Thankfully, we already have a Uninteruptable Power Supply for vital things like WiFi and security. But what about lights? Hurrah for candles! They're not just for birthday cakes, you know. But how do you light candles? I vaguel … | Continue reading
I thoroughly enjoyed the first Red Matter VR game, so I leapt at the sequel when it was on offer. What's it like? Exactly the same as the first. Lots of creepy corridors, a range of puzzles, and a sedate-ish journey. You're exploring an abandoned space-station, looking for clues … | Continue reading
I'm chuffed to bits to announce that I was recently elected to chair the BCS's Open Source community group! The British Computer Society is an august body, and the OSSG have put on some brilliant talks in the last few years. But I'd like to shake things up a little. I want us to … | Continue reading
The inimitable Simon Willison has a brilliant presentation all about managing side projects: It is all good advice. But I gently disagree with the slide which says: Avoid side projects with user accounts If it has user accounts it’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job I get th … | Continue reading
Computer Science has two canonical "hard problems": cache invalidation naming things off-by-one errors Let's talk about how we name unique items in Federated services - for example, posts on a social media service. If you have only one service, it's pretty easy. Every time a new … | Continue reading
Twitter's over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn't a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub1! Anyway, that means there isn't one Mastodon website. There are many. There is only one Twitter. There is only o … | Continue reading
People contact me with all sorts of weird opportunities. Some are fun. Some are not. I've lost count of the number of NFT grifters who've asked me to "revolutionise" the art space. I'm generally not a fan. But I had one chat with someone who wanted to do something intriguing. The … | Continue reading
As long term readers know, I got married dressed as Darth Vader. After keeping my wedding suit in storage for far too long, I purchased a mannequin to display the costume. Ever since then, Vader has lurked behind me in my home office. Looming over my every decision. But a few wee … | Continue reading
I don't know when social media influencers started banging on about Air Fryers. All I know is that they're the new hip thing and that I am easily influenced. Anyway, I saw this on sale and thought I'd take a punt on it. What's the worst that could happen? The technology is pretty … | Continue reading
I recently watched a brilliant documentary about the building of London's CrossRail system. It discussed many of the challenges involved with a "mega project" - and gave a little insight into what went wrong during construction. What struck me though, was how simple it seems to b … | Continue reading
After my blog post about recovering my accounts after a disaster, I followed the most repeated advice: Get two YubiKeys Associate them both with your accounts Keep one off-site in a safe location OK, done! My wife and I spend a very boring evening going through every single accou … | Continue reading