To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys. The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people to play The Hunger Games, while a Twitch …

I've performed a talk at the last three EMFs - so this time I decided to go purely as a tourist. It made things much more relaxing. No waking up from a stress dream that my laptop didn't work. No casually dropping my talk into every conversation to build up an audience. No queueing for the loos five minutes before going on. No adrenaline spikes or come downs. It was bliss! After several…

I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well. For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of facts from Wikipedia. Occasionally various origin myths of citrus varieties are presented - there's no attempt to engage with them, seek …

I want to be able to share my location with my friends on social media. Twitter (RIP) had a way to attach an optional location to a post. Facebook still lets me check in to venues. But neither ActivityPub (Mastodon) nor AT Protocol (BlueSky) allow me to do that. I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on their monthly call. …

In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design…

I'm pretty sure this book is a psyop designed to demoralise a generation of starry-eyed dreamers. It is obviously written by the same people who told us not to land on Europa. A malignant energy designed to limit the scope of human ambition and thwart our plans to colonise the universe. The problem is, I can't find fault with any of their logic. The Weinersmiths make a compelling case that…

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their DV2 camera to review. As their name suggests, this is a thermal / infrared camera - they've specifically designed this for bird watching and animal spotting. Let's put it through its paces and see how it compares to the competition! Straight away you can see it is different from normal IR cameras - they tend to have a small fixed screen and a …

My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my phone and laptop. Two other USB-C ports for my other gadgets. And a couple of…

Shhh! RSS Club posts are only available to feed subscribers. Keep the secret! I'm not a big fan of the "Quantified Self" movement, but since buying a ridiculously cheap smartwatch, I've been interested to see just how many steps I take per day. During our recent Interrail holiday, we travelled about 6,400 Km by train over 49 days. But how much did we cover by foot? My watch pairs with the Open …

Last year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December. Here's how our journey ended up: The trip included two ferries - one overnight - which had a small…

My new year's resolution is to play more video games with my wife. 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 things which looked reasonable. Several people recommended Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime. It's a neat little game which is just short enough to…

Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise my blog as much as possible. It may not look like much, but it has got it…

I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling …

This was a little idea gnawing at the back of my brain. The humble barcode has been in use since the 1970s. In the next few years it will likely be replaced with a 2D QR Code. I couldn't find anyone who'd made a QR code with an embedded UPC - so I decided to make one. If you move your phone close to the code (so it can't see the squares in the corners) it should read the number in the 1D…

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: <!doctype html> <html lang=en-GB> There's a reason for that. It is more than the…

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot. The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not. It raises some excellent questions about …

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am. What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd. The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now …

I'm not paying seventy bloody quid for an official PS5 controller - so I found a knock-off version for a smidge under £40. And this one has lots of unnecessary blinkenlights! Gamrombo is the consumer-facing brand of the generically named Professional Controller Manufacturer. AKA "Huizhou Ronghui Technology Co., Ltd" - there's virtually no information about them online other than paid-for …

I find it baffling just how poorly documented most big projects are. Auth0 by Okta has a fair bit of cash, lots of customers, and almost completely absent documentation. Here's how to successfully authenticate a JWT supplied by Auth0. Once your user has authenticated with Auth0, they will be given an accessToken and an idToken. Only the idToken is needed for our purposes. It will look…

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly…

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is amazing. It allows you to precisely define how an image should look. Written in XML, it uses various mathematical operations to display an image which looks crisp and clear at any size. Here's a trivial example: <svg height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100" width="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> <circle cx="50" cy="50" fill="#f00" r="50"/>…

This is the most overwritten book I've ever read. Unfortunately, Alan Moore knows exactly how much polysyllabic pressure it takes to transmogrify base coal into precious gems. With lines like "his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle" and "There was a rumour of pink lipstick circling her mouth" you know you're in for a treat. Even better than the joyful prose of Bob…

Back in the late 1990s, I did a brief stint of work experience at the BBC. One of the most memorable moments was sitting in on a meeting about early forms of Interactive TV. I saw a demo of "Two Way TV". A flimsy grey box which (somehow) integrated with your OnDigital TV Box and connected to a server via a modem. If you were watching "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" you could play along at home,…

Welcome to RSS Club! These posts are only available to RSS and Atom subscribers. You can read more about the idea at Dave Rupert's site. I recently received an email from a distraught reader: I was going through my recent bookmarks and I found https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/rss-club-for-wordpress which I had clearly saved to reference again later. However, as with the nature of RSS Club™, I c…

Read enough articles about The Beatles and you'll repeatedly hit the claim that Frank Sinatra frequently introduced his cover of George Harrison's "Something" as his "favourite Lennon & McCartney number." Much like the misquote about Ringo not being the best drummer in The Beatles, I think this might be one of those semi-apocryphal lines which has taken on a life of its own. Here's what Paul…

When I ran Ethernet around our house, I thought I was being clever. A CAT6 cable for every room - lush! Some of my rooms have lots of devices, so they get a nice big Ethernet switch with lots of ports and blinking lights. But most of my rooms don't have that many devices. Our gym had only an Internet connected TV so that I could watch Quibi while exercising. Recently we added a Kodi box so that…

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute. This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered…

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you? Table of ContentsHistoryTLD RestrictionsAnomaliesSo What? History Let's do some history! This is 1978's "HOST NAMES…

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …

My mate Lisa has written a book! Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful…