I have rarely been this bored during a West End Show. Conor McPherson seems to have fundamentally misunderstood what makes an engaging drama and, simultaneously, what makes for an enjoyable "jukebox musical". The writing is like an exaggerated soap opera script which consists sol … | Continue reading
An abandoned warehouse in Deptford hosts one of the most audacious, ostentatious, and sumptuous shows I've ever attended. An immersive theatrical experience which is lush with texture, ambitious in scope, and yet - somehow - slightly less than the sum of its parts. The pre-show i … | Continue reading
The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance. I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you don't know, modern ePub books … | Continue reading
Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Mode … | Continue reading
Dr Hibbett - he of the eponymous and well-regarded Hibbert Method - has taken the "Sing Your Thesis" concept to a brand new level. Who is Doctor Doom? I have only a passing interest in the increasingly convoluted Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I walked into this new comedy show wi … | Continue reading
It looks like the new Google's Pixel 4 watch comes with yet another incompatible change in charging technology. This is a ridiculous situation. The original Pixel Watch used one type of wireless charging. Then the Pixel Watch 2 & 3 removed wireless charging and swapped to a diffe … | Continue reading
I was lucky enough to score tickets to last-night's dress rehearsal. It would be unfair to review this like a completed show, instead this is a preview on what to expect and some thoughts on the "immersive" genre. Very mild spoilers ahead. I never really got the concept behind Se … | Continue reading
Janice Hallett is back with another epistolary mystery. Told through a series of transcribed conversations, WhatsApp messages, and torn-out pages from diaries - we the reader have to piece together the facts and crack the case! Much like her previous novels - The Appeal and The T … | Continue reading
If you hung around video arcades in your youth, you would have seen this message burned into the phosphor of a thousand dying CRTs. Obviously this was a devilish psyop by those gits who wanted kids to stop sniffing glue and having fun. The bastards! But there's a more serious sid … | Continue reading
I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their … | Continue reading
While spelunking through the caverns of Wikipedia, I came across a biography which contained this curious claim: She was the youngest and first woman to receive a British House of Commons Shield. That sounds like a fantastic achievement! But, and I hate to bring fact-checking to … | Continue reading
The ePub format is the cross-platform way to package an eBook. At its heart, an ePub is just a bundled webpage with extra metadata - that makes it extremely easy to build workflows to create them and apps to read them. Once you've finished authoring your ePub, you've got a folder … | Continue reading
I tell you what, that George Bernard Shaw knows how to write a witty one-liner! This play doesn't exactly have them rolling in the aisles - being about the seedy underpinnings of modern society - but it packs in more hilarious bon mots than many other plays on the West End. Speak … | Continue reading
We recently spent 30 days criss-crossing Europe. One of my concerns was how to feed myself. I know Amsterdam is full of weirdo hippies like me who avoid meat and dairy - but what about Frankfurt? What about Prague? What about Ljubljana? What about the trains themselves? Nightmare … | Continue reading
Code Golf is the art/science of creating wonderful little demos in an artificially constrained environment. This year the js1024 competition was looking for entries with the theme of "Creepy". I am not a serious bit-twiddler. I can't create JS shaders which produce intricate 3D w … | Continue reading
Human brains seem hardwired to defer to authority figures for morality decisions. Thousands of years after Aristotle made a first stab at defining an objective stance on morals, humans are seemingly no closer to agreeing on a universal system for what is and isn't the right thing … | Continue reading
Another day, another data breach. the spreadsheet, initially shared in 2022, and thought to contain data related to a small number of applicants, had contained hidden data related to more than 18,000 people. ICO statement in response to 2022 MoD data breach Why are people still … | Continue reading
I have a dual SIM Android phone. When I call or text, I get a choice of which SIM to use. But there's no quick way to swap which SIM is used for data. There used to be a built-in settings tile on stock Android, and some manufacturers still have it, but Google's Pixels don't. So h … | Continue reading
Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance. Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies: There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britai … | Continue reading
Imagine, just for a moment, that a mathematical breakthrough had occurred on the eve of the second World War. Perhaps Turing or Rejewski or Driscoll realised that prime number theory held the key to unbreakable encryption. This blog post attempts to answer the question "could pub … | Continue reading
Written because it pissed me off. I hope this helps you in your hour of need. You have to do one bulb at a time. If you plug in multiple bulbs and try to pair them, it won't work. I don't know why. You will need a portable lamp - or some other way to bring the bulb as close as po … | Continue reading
I've reviewed several thermal imaging products over the years. They range from tiny USB-C add-ons to professional quality hulking great handhelds. Topdon have sent me a mid-point model to review. It's relatively cheap for a thermal imaging product - only £140 on Amazon. I think t … | Continue reading
This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into wh … | Continue reading
This is the best book on practical feminism that I've read. Because it is long out of print, I had to get the British Library to pull this book out of the archives for me. I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) wh … | Continue reading
Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said: 😱 I Can't Use On This Day 😭 Seriou … | Continue reading
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Tu … | Continue reading
I did not care for this book at all. It is a dreary crime novel where - shock! horror! - someone has stolen a book. And, yes, it is the obvious suspect. Much like The Martian Contingency I found the lead character profoundly irritating. A miserable protagonist who is completely i … | Continue reading
Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023. I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only w … | Continue reading
I recently read an interesting article about Accountability Sinks. In it, the author argues that part of the reason for having business processes is that they diffuse accountability. Every one of us has tried to have an argument with an employee of a big company, and it always go … | Continue reading
There are some characters whose tone of voice is inimitable. You cannot fail to read this without Diane Morgan's languid cadence echoing in your big empty head. The book has been written with a very specific pace - one chuckle per paragraph, a big laugh every page, and a set numb … | Continue reading
Another day, another security disaster! This time, multiple printers from Brother have an unfixable security flaw. That's bad, obviously, but is it illegally bad? Let's take a look at details of the vulnerability: An unauthenticated attacker who knows the target device's serial n … | Continue reading
I have to say, I did not get on with this book. The central conceit is that a sci-fi fan is abducted by aliens and their universal translator converts everything into understandable slang. So we get lots of warp factors, ansibles, dilithium crystals, and Hitchiker’s references. I … | Continue reading
Google's monopolistic stranglehold on Android results in poor experience for power-users, and artificially restricts choice for those who have older phones. For example, Google Wallet is the de facto way to use NFC payments on Android. There's one problem though - it only works w … | Continue reading
This is a cheerful and convivial look through the history of humanity's search for life "out there". It isn't an "ancient aliens" style book of nonsense, but rather a steady walk through what has actually happened - and what we hope might happen. It is a beautiful PDF which has b … | Continue reading
I unashamedly love my smart-meter. Rather than having my energy provider guesstimate my bill, or having to send manual readings each month, it automatically beams them back to its mothership. It also enables interesting things like variable energy tariffs. By design, the smart-me … | Continue reading
The Lady Astronaut books are an absolute triumph - it's just a shame that they've been somewhat overshadowed by the TV series "For All Mankind". They both follow a similar trajectory - what if women were an integral part of the early space race and helped us to colonise off-world … | Continue reading
Leave your cynicism at the door. Jukebox musicals usually stick to a single-artist (Mamma Mia, & Juliet, Tommy). As a result, they all start to sound a bit samey after a few numbers. Shows like Return To The Forbidden planet shoe-horn in songs from a dozen artists without much re … | Continue reading
For boring and totally not nefarious reasons, I want to read all the data contained in my passport's NFC chip using Linux. After a long and annoying search, I settled on roeften's pypassport. I can now read all the passport information, including biometrics. Table of ContentsBack … | Continue reading
Writing web standards is hard. You have to write a formal specification which is useful for machines, humans, and web developers. I recently stumbled across what I think is a little bug which might be caused by a misreading of the SVG Animation specification. Here you should see … | Continue reading
Everyone I know told me to go and see this show. I resisted as long as possible but managed to score cheap last-minute tickets via a friend. I wish I hadn't waited so long! If you're unaware of the book (or the film. Or the novelisation of the film. Or the Twitter thread. Or the … | Continue reading
No book has the right to be this good. It's the sort of howling sci-fi satire that Ben Elton used to excel at - a novel set five minutes in the future with a eye firmly on today's problems. The plot is delightful - what if carbon credits extinction credits were the new capitalist … | Continue reading
Mostly notes to myself. Shotwell stores most of its information in a database. Which I lost. Because I'm an idiot. But a bunch of metadata is also stored in the image's EXIF metadata! Most importantly is the "Original File Name" which should become the "Description" in DigiKam. U … | Continue reading
I expected so much more from this book. It starts with a central thesis - the UK over-indexes on America because we speak the same language, but there is an enormous gulf in attitudes between the two nations. We rarely hear on the news what's happening in France, Germany, or Irel … | Continue reading
For some people, it seems, AI is an amazing machine which - while fallible - represents an incredible leap forward in productivity. For other people, it seems, AI is wrong more often than right and - although occasionally useful - requires constant supervision. Who is right? I re … | Continue reading
This is a charming travelogue through the confusing and contradictory world of measurement. It has a similar thesis to Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott and is infinitely easier to read than Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang Emanuele Lugli has noted, units of measurement a … | Continue reading
There are two sorts of people in the world; those who know they are stupid and those who think they are clever. Stupid people use a password manager. They know they can't remember a hundred different passwords and so outsource the thinking to something reasonably secure. I'm a st … | Continue reading
Is reading a morally good pastime? Do eBooks rot the brain in the same way that pulp paperbacks do? Should people of feeble character be allowed unfettered access to books? Show me how you want to read, and I’ll show you who you want to be. Leah Price has produced a pithy and ast … | Continue reading
There's a lovely moment in the documentary about The Pirate Bay where Peter Sunde is being interviewed in a District Court: Prosecutor 1: When was the first time you met IRL? brokep: We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK. But that's another issue. Prosecutor 2: Got to know … | Continue reading