Terence Eden

This is a charming and funny book all about the various ways humans have promoted fake medical cures in exchange for money. Despite the grim (and occasionally distressing) subject matter, the tone remains light and poppy throughout. There are lots of snarky asides (especially about the fake medical practitioners) and a real appreciation for the bizarre. It's fun the whole way through, although sometimes at the expense of people who perhaps didn't know better than to trust charlatans. One thing…

Let's get this out of the way first - this is a terrible idea! I want my two-factor authentication codes to be easily accessible to me, so I've built a watch app which will display them. That's really convenient for me - but makes for a terrible security posture. Anyone who steals my watch will be able to see my one-time code. If they're clever, they can decompile the app and find the secret which powers the code generation. You should absolutely not do this and, if you ignore my warnings, you…

A few months ago, I went to see Dr Hutchinson record his stand-up comedy special for the BBC - it's about his experiences working in the NHS as a Black doctor. As the title of the book implies, some of the public can be a mite suspicious that anyone with even a hint of melanin can rise beyond being a porter or, at a push, a nurse. Much like Adam Kay's "This Is Going To Hurt", this is part biography, part rant about the NHS, and part humorous look at what it takes to be a modern doctor.…

It's hard to craft a book with so much righteous indignation - let alone make it funny, accessible, and informative. Nevertheless, Dipo Faloyin has succeeded in writing a spectacular takedown of the myths which are often perpetrated about Africa. It starts in the best way possible: [Insert generic African proverb here. Ideally an allegory about a wise monkey and his interaction with a tree, or the relationship between the donkey and the ant that surprisingly speaks to grand gestures of valour.…

Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver. While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain when it comes to domestic gadgetry. This blog posts compares today's prices with those from a little over a decade ago. Some of the changes are startling, others less so. I'm basing the prices on what a…

The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that it is a true story. It isn't literally true, but it is literary true. We see the same motif repeated throughout all cultures and all times. Caroline Lea (writing as Caroline Finch) asks an important question - what if every pair of star-cross'd lovers were reincarnations of the original Verona duo? The essence of tragedy is that the end is unavoidable. You've probably watched Romeo sup poison a hundred times. It is inevitable that Juliet will take her…

Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a better way. As I've written before, you should sit down and actually test your readme. Spin up a fresh Virtual Machine, go through what you've written, and see if it makes sense. But…

I'll be radically honest here - I never really got the idea of "Test Driven Development". I'm much more of a "telnet into production and damn the consequences" kind of guy. Look, it's much more fun and my cardiologist recommends severe shocks every now and again. The essence of unit testing is pretty simple: Feed a function some data See how it responds Send it good data and if it returns "true" the test passes. Send it bad data and make sure it returns false. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. As part…

London's musical entertainment scene has something for everyone - from long-running blockbuster shows to no-name bands in dingy basements. Somewhere in the middle is monophonic plainchant versions of the Halo theme sung in a church. The acoustics at St Martin in the Field are echoey. That makes it rather hard to hear the amplified announcement to turn off our phones, but makes an a cappella chorus absolutely soar. The choir of London Voices have sung on just about every movie you've watched and…

I'm a theatrical cheapskate. I'm on all those last-minute seat-filler websites. I'll happily take a chance on an experimental play for a tenner a ticket or sit in an inexplicably unsold cheap seat at a major show. My philosophy is that the worst seat at the best show is preferable to the best seat at the worst show. But, once in a while, I'll splash out and pay full price. When the email landed in my inbox that Richard E. Grant (!!) and Christine Baranski (!!!) would be performing Noël Coward's…

I don't know why hardware manufacturers find it so hard to write decent documentation. As I've said before you need to actually test your readme. The Una Watch development instructions are scattered across a bunch of different files. So here's how to go from zero to your first "Hello, World!" Glance app with the minimum of fuss. This all assumes a fairly modern Debian / Ubuntu / Pop OS Linux. Prerequisites This installs most of the tools you will need: sudo apt update sudo apt install -y git…

With the news that the BBC are tendering for a new series of Doctor Who, I thought I'd write down what I want from the show. This is, to be fair, pure fan-service wankery with zero chance of being made. I've based it on the oft-made observation that Hollywood is obsessed with remaking successful films rather than trying to remake unsuccessful ones. Do we really need another Spider-Man origin story? No. Do we need the umpteenth remake of "The Italian Job"? Boring! Why don't producers take a film…

I've never been a huge fan of smart watches. My £16 smartwatch is basically fine, but the OS is closed source and there's no way to add new functionality. Previously I had the eInk Watchy which was a pain to use and really poorly designed. Even back in 2014 I was bemoaning the design compromises in the MyKronoz ZeWatch Smart Watch. So why did I pick up the Una Watch? Firstly, the Una Watch is designed in Scotland from girders, and it's always nice to support local businesses. Secondly, as a…

What do you use your smartwatch for? A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactless payments. He looked a bit crestfallen at his impromptu user-research participant and somewhat…

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl, someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages. Bob's brain is uploaded to a computer post-mortem. Awoken in a dystopian future, he has to pilot a spaceship to strange new worlds, put right what once went wrong, and hoping The Force will be with him,…

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever. For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy for them to half-arse it and basically just play the CD. Instead we got a full band, guest singers, and 360° video projection, Oh, also a disco Sputnik flying over the crowd! Simply magical! As were…

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax0." Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacific bits you got the jist & the splelling & grandma dont mattr to much. HTML is much the same. You can…

One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element. An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft. There are a dozen ways to show a preview of an <img> element before the src= attribute has loaded. So why not standardise on previewsrc=? There's an…

Last year I ran an experiment to test the ability of modern LLMs to correctly answer a relatively straightforward question. Every single one of them got it wrong. Some missed information, some made up false statements, none were right. Of course the fanbois variously claimed that I was holding it wrong, my prompts were shit, I should have chosen better defaults, and - my favourite - that it would be better next year. Well, next year is now. 365 days after the original experiment, let's see if…

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It…

The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to "Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom them from the age of four and keep them imprisoned so they become perfect submissives." Is the fear…

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of ContentsBackgroundGetting a DOI the easy wayLet's Go Rogue!Automatic Submission of New ContentManual Submission of Old ContentGetting the DOIGeneratin

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps. Back in the bad-old-days, there weren't many good options for laying out a pixel-perfect HTML page. One option was to draw your website in an image…

Do riders in autonomous vehicles think that they are in a private space? Here's a fascinating story from California where an robotaxi was redirected from its intended destination and, instead, delivered its misbehaving passengers to the police. The 15-year-old passengers were riding in a driverless autonomous car around San Mateo Monday afternoon. The teens drank alcohol inside the Waymo taxi and shot Orbeez beads with a toy gun toward other vehicles. A Waymo employee, who was remotely…

Let's suppose you've updated the description of your ActivityPub account from "World's Number 1 Taylor Swift Fan" to "This account is now a Nickleback Truther". How do you let the rest of the Fediverse know that you've changed your allegiance? By default, most Mastodon instances won't periodically poll your account information just to see if you've updated it. So how does the information get from your server to your followers' servers? This wasn't immediately obvious to me, but I got a clue…

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of them worked. Somewhere between the HDMI output of the presentation laptop and the speakers, the audio…

Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to tell me why I'm wrong. Here's my thinking: Table of ContentsCausesIs that a problem?What are we trying to protect against?Putting it

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a scam. Most people just mark as spam and move on with their day. But a significant number of people don't. They hastily visit the site, tap in their credit card details, give it their mother's maiden…

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic Earth-bound stories to the the most extraordinary flights of fancy. One story might be set in a downtown art gallery, the next in the ice-rings of a far-off planet. The creeping feeling of senescence…

If you're reading this, you've probably been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to parse and decipher the new HTTP Signatures sent by Mastodon and other Fediverse servers. This is a basic and somewhat incomplete guide to accepting these signatures. I'm sure there are various gotchas, but it works with the signatures I've seen in the wild. Shut Up And Show Me The Code! OK, wow, no need to be a dick about it! Here's how I validated a real signature that my server received. $verified =…