Funny from the preface up until the very last footnote. This is the updated version of the classic "What If" book - where Munroe goes into absurd details about ridiculous questions. Full of nerdy giggles and some utterly bizarre units. For example: The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5-inch drives, that’s 8 liters (2 gallons) of hard drive per second. I mean… I GUESS! Charmingly, there are some UK specific notes and …
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After reading Karin Tidbeck's Amatka I knew I needed to read more by her. Jagannath is an exceptional collection of short stories. In turns beautifully silly and oddly romantic. What does it mean for a man to fall in love with an airship? If God walks the streets, how can He be summoned? Does the Devil rely on mechanised bureaucracy to connect to people via phone? Each story feels like a half-remembered piece of folklore. There are twists in the tales, but they're rarely cruel. Rather…
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My good friend Suw alerted me to this venerable book by repeatedly ranting "What is your theory of change???" online. If ever there was a moment to yell "WHAT IS YOUR THEORY OF CHANGE???" that moment is now and we should all be yelling it at Just Stop Oil.It seems to me their theory of change is to make enough people pissed of with them that... er, um... Step 2: ???Step 3: Profit!! Wait, that's not right.— Suw (@suw.bsky.social) 2024-06-20T08:44:13.991Z Saul Alinsky's book is part i…
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I love OpenFreeMap it is a quick, easy, and free way to add beautiful maps to your Open Source projects. With the latest release of MapLibre-GL I wanted to see if there was an easy way to use both to make an interactive globe with clustered markers. Spoiler alert: yes! Basic Globe Here's a basic example which I've trimmed down from this example. When you load the below code, you'll get a globe which you can spin and zoom. Nifty! <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Globe…
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A million years ago, I was helping advise an analogue office who were thinking about making the great leap forward to the digital future. I was sat in the boss's office extolling the virtues of digitisation. "How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently. "Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. He pressed a switch on his (landline) phone. "Miss Moneypenny? Could you bring us, let's…
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I think everyone reading this post has accidentally messed up when sending an email, right? I noticed this story recently: The Metropolitan Police has apologised to victims of the Westminster "honeytrap" scandal after it accidentally sent an email which named all of them. … the sender, a detective sergeant in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection unit, included the recipients’ names in the CC section of the email, rather than BCC, which would have concealed their identities. …
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Android is belatedly getting a Bluetooth tracker feature which doesn't rely on proprietary apps. Long-time readers will know that back in 2016 I reviewed both the Chipolo and the TinTag. Both of those were adequate at finding things which were in range of your phone, but hopeless at finding lost items - because they required everyone to have a special app installed. But now, under pressure from Apple's incredible Find My network, Google has started rolling out a similar service to modern…
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"Mirror Mirror on the wall. What's the hottest gadget of them all?" Do you need a mirror which is connected to the Internet? Yes. Obviously. What's the point of having anything which doesn't have an IP address‽ The good folks at Infrared Group don't want me shivering while I blog, so they've sent me their latest Far Infrared heating panel which, obviously, is also a smart mirror. 350W of heat, enough for a 6m room, and a cool little display to tell you the weather. Let's put it through its p…
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I love ripping off good ideas from other people's blogs. I was reading Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida's blog when I saw this nifty little force-directed graph: When zoomed in, it shows the relation between posts and tags. In this case, I can see that the posts about Small Gods and Pyramids both share the tags of Discworld, Fantasy, and Book Review. But only Small Gods has the tag of Religion. Isn't that cool! It is a native feature of Quartz's GraphView. How can I build something like that…
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I've got a bunch of travel coming up to exotic locations. Previously, I've bought a local SIM card when I've landed - but they're often expensive, fiddly to fit, and queuing in an airport isn't much fun. I've also bought pre-paid SIMs which have a fixed amount of data or only last a specific amount of time. But the big problem with those solutions is that you lose a fair bit of value unless you exhaust the SIM. If you buy a month-long package but are only on holiday for a week, that's a…
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My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity, focus, mise-en-scène, proper lighting and a thousand-and-one details that I've never even thought of. Paul has published an essay about official photographs of politicians. In it, he …
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Lots of people using banking apps on their Android phones. They're a convenient way to check your balance, transfer money to people, and get alerts about fraudulent transactions. But, like anything related to money, they can be abused. Nowadays, thieves are not only snatching phones, but forcing their owners to transfer money to the thieves. This is not an isolated incident. How can you protect yourself from such a situation? Broadly speaking, there are four ways to protect your sensitive…
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