This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it. The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence. A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from a … | Continue reading
Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with " … | Continue reading
I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" = … | Continue reading
The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Minis … | Continue reading
As part of my quest to try new things I decided to dig for treasure in my local park. The wonderful folks at DigVentures allow members of the public to assist with archaeology projects in their local area. We arrived on a sunny Thursday to find a couple of areas of Lesnes Abbey … | Continue reading
Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience. Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the op … | Continue reading
The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee. But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Ye … | Continue reading
Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base. So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe? No. Firstly, all your Open Source code … | Continue reading
I'm grateful that my blog posts attract lots of engaged, funny, and challenging comments. But any popular post also attracts spammers. I use Antispam Bee to automatically eradicate a couple of hundred crappy comments per day. Nevertheless, some get through. Here's a particular … | Continue reading
The venerable eSpeak is a mainstay of Linux distributions. It is a clever Text-To-Speech (TTS) program which will read aloud the written word using a phenomenally wide variety of languages and accents. The only problem is that it sounds robotic. It has the same vocal fidelity as … | Continue reading
My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of … | Continue reading
I still use my obsolete LG 360 Camera. When copying MP4 videos from its SD card, they come out in "Dual Fisheye" format - which looks like this: VLC and YouTube will only play "Equirectangular" videos in spherical mode. So, how to convert a dual fisheye to equirectangualr? Th … | Continue reading
After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events? This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - … | Continue reading
I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were … | Continue reading
My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now bro … | Continue reading
I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case I need it to log on to something. I don't want to faff around with physical SIM … | Continue reading
I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical … | Continue reading
I'll admit, I was a little sceptical about returning to Avenue Q. I saw it on its original West End run back in… OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD! FUCK! Where did the time go? It's always hard to know how much to update a show. Does it need constant reinvention to stay in the zeitgeist or … | Continue reading
As discussed in my last blog post, the scumsuckers at Apollo.io have been giving out my personal details. Not only did they have my email address, they also had a copy of one of my phone numbers. I asked them where they got it from and they said: Your phone number came from Par … | Continue reading
Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked m … | Continue reading
When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in pla … | Continue reading
A delightful and emotional rendition of three rather different works. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Three Screaming Popes" was a chaotic cacophony. Wild, bizarre, inventive, and seemingly driven by excess. A fascinating performance, although not one I'll put on in the background. Turn … | Continue reading
This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster. At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download. Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the … | Continue reading
There is no such thing as the Vitamin String Quartet. They're an ever-changing line-up of musicians who have found an excellent schtick; modern songs played like classical music. Somehow they've parlayed that into over 300 albums, covering thousands of artists, and dominating the … | Continue reading
Back in November 2023, our crowdsourced website of memorial benches reached 30,000 entries. At the start of March this year, I was delighted when long-time contributor jrbray1 added this gorgeous memorial, taking us up to 40,000 benches catalogued: You can read more about Dr J … | Continue reading
Every few years, someone reinvents FOAF. The idea behind Friend-Of-A-Friend is that You can say "I, Alice, know and trust Bob". Bob can say "I know and trust Alice. I also know and trust Carl." That social graph can be navigated to help understand trust relationships. Sometimes … | Continue reading
Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just va … | Continue reading
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were highe … | Continue reading
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They count … | Continue reading
On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of Waiting for Godot Bottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, Vyvyan and the People's Poet Eddie and Ritchie wait to see what the cruel hand of fate has dealt them in this week's episode "Hole". At on … | Continue reading
I couple of years ago, I developed ActivityBot - the simplest way to build Mastodon Bots. It is a single PHP file which can run an entire ActivityPub server and it is less than 80KB. It works! You can follow @openbenches@bot.openbenches.org to see the latest entries on OpenBench … | Continue reading
Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a million miles away, the peopl … | Continue reading
When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - near … | Continue reading
First up, you should go and watch The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa. It is a brilliant set of performances and a joy to see. While perusing the programme on the National Theatre website I stumbled upon a little bug. The incredible Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ has her name … | Continue reading
Ofgem, the UK's energy regulator, publishes the current energy price cap per region. Note that it is only the current price cap. I couldn't find the complete historic data on their site. So I sent a quick email asking for it which they treated as a Freedom of Information request. … | Continue reading
A couple is facing the devastating prospect of divorce. Their young daughter is understandably distraught. In her fear, she doses both parents with a powerful hallucinogenic drug in the hope that tripping through therapy will save their marriage. Well, OK, that's not exactly wha … | Continue reading
I'm sure we have all met a person like this: People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with … | Continue reading
Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about i … | Continue reading
I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources. If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and Fra … | Continue reading
What can a fifty-year-old book teach us about cybersecurity? Written just as computing was beginning to enter the mainstream, The Electronic Criminals takes us into a terrifying new world of crime! Fraud over Telex! Ransomware of physical tapes! Stealing passwords and hacking in … | Continue reading
Last year I reviewed the Treedix USB Cable Tester - a handy device for testing the capabilities of all your USB cables. I noted that it had a few minor bugs and contacted the manufacturer to see if there was an update. For some reason, lots of Chinese manufacturers don't like pu … | Continue reading
I'm a fan of R.F. Kuang's books - but this is the first which I've found laugh-out-loud funny. What if your University advisor died and the only way to graduate was to descend into hell and bring him back? In a terrible sort of way, I'm glad that Kuang had such a miserable time … | Continue reading
I dropped into a pub in central London and ordered two pints of draught beer. Obviously the price of everything is nuts these days - and doubly so in London - so I only winced a little bit when the cost came to about twelve quid. Shocking, obviously. But as we supped on our pints … | Continue reading
My new year's resolution is to play more video games. Specifically co-operative games. I hate playing competitively; it's rubbish to achieve victory at the expense of someone else. So I asked for recommendations and picked the cheapest thing that looked reasonable. Unravel Tw … | Continue reading
I use Auth0 to provide social logins for the OpenBenches website. I don't want to deal with creating user accounts, managing passwords, or anything like that, so Auth0 is perfect for my needs. There are a wide range of social media logins provided by Auth0 - including the usual … | Continue reading
Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist. What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war? I find it f … | Continue reading
Back in August 2023, we installed a Moixa 4.8kWh Solar Battery to pair with our solar panels. For the last year and a half it has chugged away slurping up electrons and sending them back as needed. Its little fan whirrs and the lights on its Ethernet port flicker happily as it do … | Continue reading