Why am I reading so much about death lately? This is a wryly funny and cosily charming book about council funerals. Evie King conducts Section 46 funerals under the Public Health Act. If you die and there's no one else around who is able to arrange your funeral, the local counci … | Continue reading
The good folks at Orico have sent me their latest power-strip to review. On the surface, the specs are pretty good - two UK sockets, two USB-C for PowerDelivery, and two USB-A for legacy devices. Let's put it though its paces! Specs Physically, it is a little larger than I w … | Continue reading
I bought this book for the title alone and I'm glad I did! I don't think I've seen any of Hayley Morris's comedy sketches. To be honest, you don't need to be a fan of her work to appreciate the humour and courage in this book. It could quite easily have been a cash-in celebrity a … | Continue reading
The folks at GitHub know that Open Source maintainers are drowning in a sea of low-effort contributions. Even before Microsoft forced the unwanted Copilot assistant on millions of repos, it was always a gamble whether a new contributor would be helpful or just some witless jerk. … | Continue reading
It is refreshing to read a political polemic which contains useful actions the reader can take. Too many books about the social problems with technology end up being a diagnosis with no cure. Paloma Oliveira's new book (with technical review by my friend Dawn Foster) is a deep d … | Continue reading
I am both vain and prurient. A combination which makes me fun at parties and a delight to know. Sometimes when I raise an issue on GitHub, or write a comment, other users leave me Emoji reactions. Perhaps a 👍 or 🎉 if they like my contribution, but occasionally a … | Continue reading
I've thoroughly enjoyed all of Janice Hallett's previous crime books. The Examiner is, frankly, more of the same - and I'm happy with that! You, the reader, are given a series of transcripts and have to work out what crime (if any) has been committed. You don't find out who the … | Continue reading
After my recent presentation at FOSDEM, someone asked a pretty reasonable question. What does it cost to run OpenBenches? It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. … | Continue reading
This is Star Trek before Star Trek. It is Alien long before Alien. It is the template for so much modern science fiction. What it is not is particularly good. I don't intend to dump on the classics (and this is undoubtedly a classic) but 1950s sci-fi takes place in an almost ali … | Continue reading
Email isn't an obvious business benefit. Imagine it is the early 1980s and you need to communicate with people across the country. A first-class letter will cost you 17p - about 60p in today's money. The letter will be delivered the next day and you'll have your answer back the d … | Continue reading
Is it possible to "die well"? We have midwives for births, should we have "deathwives" for the other end of our lives? I think this book was recommended to me in the depths of the pandemic. I was too much of a chicken to read it while those around me were dying. The book aims to … | Continue reading
You've read the books, listened to the original radio performances, re-read the books, worn the t-shirt - and now it is time to be part of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. *Cue the music from Flight of the Sorcerer* This is a 90-ish minute immersive experience. As well as … | Continue reading
So! Much! Melodrama! This is a gently funny (and slightly tragic) romp with a band of travelling vagrants actors as they attempt to ply their renditions of Shakespeare to an indifferent 1700ish audience. There's a lot of charm to the characters and the plot is relatively straigh … | Continue reading
One of the dreams of Web 2.0 was that website would speak unto website. An "Application Programming Interface" (API) would give programmatic access to structured data, allowing services to seamlessly integrate content from each other. Users would be able to quickly grab data from … | Continue reading
This book is excellent at describing the symptoms of madness which have beset the world. It expertly diagnoses the causes which have led so many people into a mirror-realm of fantasy. Sadly it falls short of prescribing a cure. I doubt anyone who has fallen into the conspiracy mi … | Continue reading
I'm absolutely addicted to the Reddit's UK Personal Finance forum - where people mutually support each other through the difficult world of managing one's personal finances. It's a great community and full of people eager to help others. In amongst the confusion around pensions, … | Continue reading
After the pretty good Her Majesty's Royal Coven, the excellent Shadow Cabinet, the law of reverting to the mean hits the conclusion of Juno Dawson's Witches of Hebden Bridge trilogy. By now you know the tropes - Bitchy-Witches, 90s pop-culture references, and wry chapter titles. … | Continue reading
Notes to myself because I keep forgetting. tl;dr Unzip it into the /opt/ directory. I want to install Filezilla - so I can SFTP files around. Sadly, the Flatpak version is unmaintained and the version in apt is out of date. Luckily, you can download the zipped version. Their W … | Continue reading
This is a hugely extended version of Will Harris' "An oral history of Airplane". It goes through the pre-history of the project, how it eventually got made, and the aftermath. In many ways, it is like an old-fashioned DVD extra. The whole book consists of snippets of interviews w … | Continue reading
Problem: I've received a PDF which has a large "watermark" obscuring every page. Investigating: Opening the PDF in LibreOffice Draw allowed me to see that the watermark was a separate image floating above the others. Manual Solution: Hit page down, select image, delete, repeat … | Continue reading
The problem with fans is that we want to know everything. What did Lennon eat for breakfast the day he recorded Imagine? Which colour pencil did the script editor use on our favourite episode of Doctor Who? Did the costume designer on Buffy secretly sneak in Masonic references in … | Continue reading
My mother, the actress Carrie Cohen, once had a blazing argument with Anthony Hopkins. He was saying that he preferred appearing in Hollywood blockbusters compared to appearing on the stage because nothing was more boring than playing Hamlet for the 100th time. My mother's conte … | Continue reading
What - and I cannot stress this enough - the actual ever-loving fuck!? OK, perhaps it was a mistake to start reading this while on an international flight. The book concerns Linda, a content moderator at an endlessly sub-contracted tech company, who is in love with planes. No, s … | Continue reading
This is an astounding bit of high-concept sci-fi. Imagine a world where crossing a border literally split your body in two. A young woman emigrates from South Korea - one version of her stays in Seoul, another version goes off to live in New York. This is the way humanity has al … | Continue reading
Lander 23 had a few pre-launch glitches, but is now up and running in Woolwich. It is a fun enough experience, but could be a whole lot more with some tweaks. In a team of four, you are split into two groups. One group operates a baffling array of switches and has to direct the o … | Continue reading
I was recently prompted to test my blog's layout when rendered in right-to-left text. Running a website through an automatic translator into a language like Arabic or Hebrew will show you any weird little layout glitches which might occur. But mechanical translation is a bit of … | Continue reading
This is an an interesting and varied set of sci-fi/fantasy stories. Some barely a couple of pages, others cutting short at just the right time. They are all on a similar theme - the strife between parents and children. Whether it is a twisted take on classic fairy tales, or a div … | Continue reading
Chimoney is a new "multi-currency wallet" provider. Based out of Canada, it allows users to send money to and from a variety of currencies. It also supports the new Interledger protocol for WebMonetization. It is, as far as I can tell, unregulated by any financial institution. N … | Continue reading
This is an intriguing and mostly satisfying sci-fi tale. It has shades of Oryx Crake mixed in with A Canticle for Leibowitz - we are mere observers of the tattered remains of humanity. Watchers guide scattered settlements as they strive to evolve and understand their place on a … | Continue reading
Yes, I know the cliché that bloggers are always blogging about blogging! I like semantics. It tickles that part of my delicious meaty brain that longs for structure. Semantics are good for computers and humans. Computers can easily understand the structure of the data, humans ca … | Continue reading
Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review. Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes conspiracy theory which is driven by classism (" … | Continue reading
I travel a fair bit. My passport is usually quickly scanned and I can enter or leave a country without delay. But every time I use the eGates at Heathrow Airport to get back in to the UK, my passport is rejected and I'm told to seek assistance from Border Force. Today, I think I … | Continue reading
I cracked open my review copy of Room 706 and settled in for an early night in my hotel room. I was up until way past midnight tearing through the book - my heart pounding. Given that the book centres around a woman trapped by terrorists in her hotel room, it was perhaps not the … | Continue reading
You can't put a price on pure delight. In Thailand you can get a perfectly decent Pad Thai and beer for a few hundred Baht. You can have an good pizza or freshly cooked burger for next to nothing. Food, in general, is cheap and cheerful. After a week of spring rolls and Tiger be … | Continue reading
While looking down the back of the Internet for something or other, I stumbled across Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2001. It has been a quarter of a century since 2001 (!!) so that's a good excuse to look back at what stood the test of time. The article states: Inventio … | Continue reading
Happy Birthday Bitcoin! At the risk of awakening long-dormant beasts, it looks like Bitcoin has failed for day-to-day transactions. So I've a simple question to ask - can you meaningfully spend any cryptocurrency in your city centre? A few months ago, my wife and I went on a 30 … | Continue reading
While digging though some old journals in a fruitless side-quest, I came across this delightful description of what I think is the Comet Encke. It is quite an astonishing prediction, and the last line is perfection. In 1926, several journals and almanacs syndicated a column d … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.tx … | Continue reading
Modern Android cameras can take "Motion Photos". They capture a few seconds of video from before and after you hit the shutter button. You can then either select the bit of the photo where no-one is blinking, or you can send the whole thing as a little movie. Some apps (like Wha … | Continue reading
This is delightful whimsy wrapped up in a sensible chuckle. The sort of gigglesome nonsense that washes over you and worms its way into your ears. There's a hint of caper, a soupçon of cosy crime, and a sprinkling of a love story. And then there's a massive tonal shift where it … | Continue reading
I like using microdata within my HTML to provide semantic metadata. One of my pages had this scrap of code on it: The Google Search Console was throwing this error: I was fairly sure that was a valid ISO 8601 string. It certainly m... | Continue reading
My friend Sal has written a book! I was lucky enough to get early access to it. Code, Chips and Control is an in depth look at cyber security. And I do mean in depth - this literally starts at the silicon wafer level! It isn't just about the trivial logic bugs which so often get … | Continue reading
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a g … | Continue reading
I read this book while on a long flight to Tokyo. While superficially about Japan, it's more about American anxiety about the relationship between the two countries. The constant undercurrent is an admiration about how Japan played capitalism better than the country which conquer … | Continue reading
At a recent unconference on AI, someone introduced me to the story of a guy who'd tasked an LLM with writing a bedtime story for his daughter. It personalised the tale to include her favourite stuffed toy, whichever cartoon she was obsessing over, and a range of not-too-scary bad … | Continue reading
One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites … | Continue reading
After reading about a menopausal werewolf (fictional) I decided that it was probably a sensible idea to read up on the reality. Dr Lundy has an inclusive and relaxed tone of writing. She methodically goes through every aspect of the menopause in great detail. The book is sprinkl … | Continue reading
I like to visit new countries. I also need to eat in order to survive. As a vegetarian, some countries make that easier than others. I was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was go Interrailing around Europe while maintaining a Vegan / Vegetarian diet. My next adventure was J … | Continue reading