Oooh! This is an interesting play. It is dense, wordy, and tense. It isn't a play with a frenetic pace or a huge emotional roller-coaster. It is a series of subtle arguments and twisted relationships which slowly (very slowly) reveal themselves to the audience. It is actorly - wi … | Continue reading
The problem with plays about science is that they necessarily have to give the audience a mini-lecture in the subject. The problem with biographical plays is they need to give the audience a summary of a life in a few short speeches. The problem with historical plays is they have … | Continue reading
Here's a "fun" thought experiment. Imagine a website which let you sign in using only your username and TOTP code. No passwords. No magic links emailed to you. No FIDO tokens. No codes via SMS. Just a TOTP generated and displayed on your device. Is that useful? Sensible? Practica … | Continue reading
Suppose you have lots of links on a page. You want to highlight the ones which point to example.com - is that possible in CSS without using JavaScript? Yes! This scrap of code will turn all those links red: a[href^="https://example.com"] { color: red; } Now, there are a few gotch … | Continue reading
In the early part of the 20th Century, there was a fad for "Radium". The magical, radioactive substance that glowed in the dark. The market had decided that Radium was The Next Big Thing and tried to shove it into every product. There were radioactive toys, radioactive medicines, … | Continue reading
A decade ago, I appeared on the 361 Podcast to give my advice about mobile security. This was the era of the iPhone 5 and Android KitKat. BlackBerry was trying to have (yet another) resurgence and Nokia was desperately trying to keep Windows Phone alive. What advice did I give th … | Continue reading
This is a fucking audacious thriller! I literally stayed up way past my bedtime, tearing through the chapters, gasping out loud. The core of the story is simple - a woman steals her dead friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own. Will she get caught? The hook (for want of … | Continue reading
This is an excellent pop-science book. It gently weaves a personal tale (nearly getting crushed by a whale) into the current cutting-edge research of animal communication. It takes in along the way philosophy, geopolitics, and the crushing inevitability of death. At its heart is … | Continue reading
What does it mean to block someone on a social media site? Way back in the mists of time, we dealt with trolls on Usenet with the almighty PLONK - PLaced On Newsgroup Killfile. It meant your newsreader never downloaded their posts. They could rant at you all day long, and you'd n … | Continue reading
This is a bit niche! A few months ago, I received a mysterious £25 from National Savings and Investments. A prize from the Premium Bonds! Not enough to make me rich, but enough for a takeaway. Oddly, after checking their app and website, I could find no record of the win. Curious … | Continue reading
The Mirror has a rather wonderful image gallery of behind the scenes photos from Doctor Who. Lots of lovely black-and-white photos of classic stories. And then, right at the end, this: Cor! Four classic Doctors each with a mobile! This photoshoot was, apparently, done at the Hamm … | Continue reading
I went for a spelunk0 through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok1. {\s]+)>}i I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It tur … | Continue reading
Big Finish have been pumping out Doctor Who audio dramas for quarter of a century. But this, apparently, is the first time they've recorded one live and in front of an audience. It was glorious! Big Finish could have cheaped out - even with a bare set and a cast of newbies, the f … | Continue reading
It may be hard for you to understand this; reading is a skill. Unless you have recently started learning a new language with an unfamiliar writing system, you probably do not remember the tedious and agonising process of having to train your brain to recognise printed characters. … | Continue reading
Much hullabaloo about Oasis using "Dynamic Pricing" for their concerts. There are far more fans than there are tickets, so prices rise. There are all sorts of complicated economic theories around how efficient markets can be, and whether "reverse Dutch auctions" are sensible. But … | Continue reading
I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series - Her Majesty's Royal Coven. The basic premise is that there is a secretive cabal of witches which run a shadow government organisation. There's skulduggery, slattern-ish behaviour, and sexy scandals. And lots of violence and dea … | Continue reading
Several years ago, I posted this poll on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf the recent Twitter hack had exposed they way you voted on every Twitter poll, how would you feel?(There is no suggestion that this has happened, I'm just curious about people's relationships to … | Continue reading
What is our life? Is it the days we live or the way others perceive us? The comedian Adrian Edmondson steps us through his life. But, as he points out, what we remember and what we're interested in isn't necessarily the most significant part of the subject's life. In 2016 I adapt … | Continue reading
Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData0. I was bored and asked ChatGPT. The new Omni model claims to be faster and … | Continue reading
I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of … | Continue reading
There's currently an open consultation about whether banks should have a lower compensation limit to refund their customers who have been scammed. Currently, if a customer falls for an Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam, they may be eligible for up to £415,000 back from their ban … | Continue reading
It looks like everyone's favourite FIDO token provider might have an unpatchable vulnerability! Much Sturm und Drang from the usual sources. But how bad is it really? Not so bad - but it does expose some weaknesses in the very idea of having physical tokens. First up, as the rese … | Continue reading
It is sometimes useful to embed the contents from one website into another. For example, you may wish to quote a post from a microblogging site like Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, or Mastodon. All of them offer an "embed" button which will copy a snippet of code for you to paste into … | Continue reading
If your WordPress site has lots of plugins, it's sometimes difficult to keep track of what is manipulating your content. Ever wondered what priority all your various actions and filters have? This is a widget which will show you which actions are registered to your blog's hooks, … | Continue reading
I am a bear of very little brains sometimes. I had a site which, for various boring reasons, was printing a