Terence Eden

Sometimes at the Edinburgh Fringe, you take a punt on a random show because it's close by and you can't be bothered walking any further. Justina Seselskaite's set was round the corner and started in 7 ½ minutes - so we scurried into one of the less glamorous rooms of The Hilton, sat at the front (as is our wont), and wondered what on earth Lithuanian stand-up was like. It was sublime! There's a rich history of foreign comedians coming to these shores and stealing our jobs making us laugh by…

Part of going to The Fringe is to expose yourself to new ideas, different art forms, and a range of artworks. Not everything needs to be a "zany" comedy about AI or a loving pastiche of that 1990s disaster movie you love. So I found myself sat in a Unitarian Church listening to a harpsichord and choral organ intertwined with a violin and cello while a soprano soared through Handel's greatest hits. I'm too much of a philistine to assess its merits - but there's always pleasure watching…

🎼"Hamlet's Mum Has Got It Going On"🎵 There you go, now you've seen the show. That's about the height it reaches. Distil the tortured Prince of Denmark down to an hour and sprinkle in parody pop songs. It so nearly works. There are a few good chuckles and a smattering of clever lyrics but, even for an hour, it feels a bit flabby. The cast are game, with KT Ihnatyszyn giving a tour-de-force performance as Hamlet. But for every decent pun there's a piece of uninspired mugging to the audience. The…

Afrofuturism is a hot topic in the world of sci-fi. This is the circus version of "For All Mankind" where the Zambia Space Academy (a 100% real thing) attempt to land on the moon and win the space race. Told in an acrobatic style, naturally. It is delightful to see classic acrobatics find a whole new audience - the children in the audience (and the adults) screamed with delight at the human pyramids, handstands, cartwheels, and aerial work. An absolutely joyful cast of kinesthetic clowns bring…

It is a brave children's show which starts with the song "I'm a smooth muthafukker"… This is sort of a live-action XKCD cartoon. A frenetic troupe of performers are decked with hand-drawn portraits and then… well, it is somewhere between a Sesame Street animation and the stick-figure kung-fu Flash animations of yesterday. The whole design is technically impressive. An endless stream of paper litters the floor as the cast rip them from their bodies to reveal more underneath. I found it enjoyable…

Last year, I reviewed a new type of Clip-On earphone - the Soundpeats Clip1 Cuff. I was a bit sceptical, but was won around by their comfort. The good folks at Soundpeats have sent me their new version to review. I had a few niggles with the Clip1 - so let's see how the UU2 Clip2 compare. Design The "cuff" design is fairly new to the UK - but is already popular in other parts of the world. Rather than sticking the buds in your earholes, they clip around the flappy bits of your ears. The aren't…

Sex work is work, so we're told. There's no difference between picking up a night job stacking shelves and a night job jacking-off on screen. Right? Perhaps a couple need a little bit of extra cash and the siren song of OnlyFans is right there. Let's fire up the webcam and release ourselves from financial drudgery! Then reality hits. The script by Sean Stillmaker sounds like it was ripped straight out of LinkedIn. Under a lesser cast, lines about synergising brand strategy to optimise the…

OMG! If you remember A/S/Ling your way through MSN to fill in your MySpace top 8, then you'll love this show. You're also over 30 and, therefore, old. Ew. The stage is littered with a Nokia 3310, Bliss Magazine, and Charlie Red. Katie (15/F/UK) talks us through the complexities of her nascent love life, what shag band colours mean, and which quotes sum up millennial angst. All the while serenading us with her musical takes on the tragic Aniston/Pitt split. Consistently funny and just the right…

The terror of AI has come to comedy. There are a dozen shows this year about the threat that technology poses to the way we live, laugh, and love. In this case, AI stands for Austrian Imperialism and the fight is for Switzerland's independence. Well, sort of. It gets a bit lost in an endless stream of rambly diversions. There's a fine line between surrealist comedy and utter nonsense. If you like seeing a man getting the audience to sing to a magical (albeit potentially traitorous) hat,…

My mum's friend Rachel has a one-woman show on at the Fringe. As, apparently, the only orthodox Jew on the UK comedy circuit she has constructed a fully interactive Jewish Mother experience. Like several shows on the fringe, it relies on the audience writing questions on cards and the comedian riffing on them. Unlike other shows, Rachel has a huge stream of anecdotes and songs to weave into her answers. She has the easy and relaxed delivery of a seasoned professional who knows her material…

Fancy a quickie in Scotland's most haunted pub? Smut Slam is a (mildly) interactive performance where a handful of speakers get to tell their dirtiest stories. The audience fills in cards with their questions or confessions which may be read out. The format mostly works. There are different stories every night, so maybe we got a slightly uninspiring batch. Tales of sex parties, STIs, and broken sex-toys are fun enough but weren't exactly mind-blowing. The audience participation kind of slowed…

By my count there are at least three "Heated Rivalry" musical parodies on at the Fringe this year. The zeitgeist skates to where the puck was six months ago, I guess! There's also a live version of a HR podcast if you just can't get enough of their wacky ice-capades. Just how much sexy-hockey can one city take? Produced by Quick and Funny Musicals, an American company specialising in cash-ins loving homages, this is surprisingly good! With songs like "Fuck Him Up The Butt (Metaphorically)" it…

Our first show at the Fringe! Caught by a rainstorm (in Scotland?!?!?) the app said this was the nearest comedy show to our sodden carcasses and it was free! This is bang-average stand-up. That isn't to disparage it at all. Four Australian blokes each doing 15 minutes of material - nothing particularly avant-garde or challenging. Just some decently funny (albeit well worn) observations about kids names, customer surveys at Tescos, and whether leaving skid marks is cultural heritage. That said,…

There's a certain strain of commentator who is just sure that nothing can ever get better. In amongst all the hullaballoo about the UK potentially banning under 16s from social media0, I saw a prominent historian say: i assume banning kids from social media will be accompanied by a huge investment in teen-friendly communtiy [sic] spaces (like youth clubs) and social activities? No? Huh. But, here's the thing. He's wrong. You can argue about whether the UK's Labour Government is doing the right…

How do you tell users that the text they're about to read has been synthetically generated? It is polite to readers that you don't waste their time, it's also important that LLMs don't feed on their own regurgitated slurry lest they pollute their own development. I think there are a number of potential ways to do this0 and I'd be interested in your thoughts1. Let's go with some bad ideas first. What's your love language? Perhaps the simplest is to simply ascribe a unique language to AI. BCP 47…

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me another Thermal Camera to review. The last one was a big beastie with a huge touchscreen. This one is much smaller and is designed to plug into your phone's USB-C port. The T2 Max is a chunky little camera - but doesn't weight too much. The USB-C connector is long enough to securely plug in even if your phone is wearing a case. Thermal Master boasts that this is the "world's smallest thermal monocular" - and it is easy to believe. The lens is…

It's 1998 and Doogie0, the guy across the hall in our student accommodation, will not stop playing The Boy With The Arab Strap. Eventually I crack and ask him who the band are. He infodumps on me with all the authority of an 18 year our music snob about this cool new Scottish band called Belle & Sebastian. I slip him a tenner, a couple of Smirnoff Ice, and the promise of my help on the next assignment we have - in return he pops into town and grabs me If You’re Feeling Sinister. Despite my…

This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings. By its nature it is a little repetitive. I suspect it's the sort of book students and business leaders will be expected to dip into on an ad-hoc basis for their MBA studies. It's also chock-full…

The good folks at Hikmicro have sent me their D02 Infrared Camera to review. It's part of their "Eco" series of thermal imagers - designed to be easy to use around the home and relatively cheap. Despite the no-fills appearance, it packs in a lot of features which put some more expensive models to shame. It even works with Linux. Shove in a USB-C cable to grab the photos or even use it as a webcam. All the images you see in this post are unaltered. I haven't optimised them or stripped the…

I've mostly tuned out of reading the news. But, once in a while, a headline will be shared on social media and I'll momentarily stare into the abyss. There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able to breathlessly report any half-baked gossip which would drive clicks. I saw "Rumours suggest so-and-so will be appointed…",…

For several years, Google's product help forums have been littered with people trying to download a .ics event from their email, only to receive the error "Unable to launch event" when trying to add it to Google Calendar. It doesn't happen with all iCal attachments, only some. Here's how to fix it. I checked dozens of broken iCalendar invites using this iCal validator and they all had the same problem: "Missing DTSTAMP property". Here's a typical broken file: BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0…

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 streamer narrates the action. The protagonists in Andy Weir's books are boys who know enough science…

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 volunteer shifts over the years, I also decided to be utterly selfish and do none this year. Again, rather…

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 out the truth, or comment on what they might mean. Instead, the author seems more interested in…

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. But, before I start, please remember that these proposals are not mandatory. If you don't want to…

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 is "Don't Make Me Think". Every time a service forces the user into making a decision, it is placing a…

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 space is much harder than any of the propagandists are willing to admit. Even if it were faster, safer,…

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 rubber button interface. This has a lush touchscreen which displays the thermal image and is used to…

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 legacy USB-A ports which were redundant. The pass through was useful for using the same socket as the…

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 Interrail discount. In total we spent approximately 40 hours on trains over a 7 week trip. This blog post…