Five years ago today, we installed solar panels on our house in London. Solar panels are the ultimate in "boring technology". They sit on the roof and generate electricity whenever the sun shines. That's it. This morning, I took a reading from our generation meter: 19MWh of electricity stolen from the sun and pumped into our home. That's an average of 3,800 kWh every year. But what does that actually mean? The UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes quarterly reports…
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The fallout from Meta's extensive use of pirated eBooks continues. Recent court filings appear to show the company grappling with the legality of training their AI on stolen data. Evidence shows an employee asking if what they're doing it legal? Will it undermine their lobbying efforts? Will it lead to more regulation? Will they be fined? And, almost as an afterthought, is this fascinating snippet: If we were to use models trained on LibGen for a purpose other than internal evaluation, we…
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Depending on which side of the English Channel / La Manche you sit on, photography was invented either by Englishman Henry Fox Talbot in 1835 or Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839. By 1851, Englishman Sir David Brewster and Frenchman Jules Duboscq had perfected stereophotography. It led to an explosion of creativity in 3D photography, with the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company becoming one of the most successful photographic companies of the era. There are thousands of stereoscopic…
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Summer is coming. The best time to buy air-con is before it gets blazing hot. So, off to the Mighty Internet to see if I can find a unit which I can attach to my burgeoning smarthome setup. I settled on the SereneLife 3-in-1 Portable Air Conditioning Unit. It's a small(ish) tower, fairly portable, claims 9000 BTU, is reasonable cheap (£160ish depending on your favourability to the algorithm), and has WiFi. Why WiFi? I know it is a trope to complain about appliances being connected to the …
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As Cory Doctorow once said "Any time that someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you but won't give you the key, that lock's not there for you." But here's the thing with the LCP DRM scheme; they do give you the key! As I've written about previously, LCP mostly relies on the user entering their password (the key) when they want to read the book. Oh, there's some deep cryptographic magic in the background but, ultimately, the key is sat on your computer waiting to be found. Of…
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There's a new(ish) DRM scheme in town! LCP is Readium's "Licensed Content Protection". At the risk of sounding like an utter corporate stooge, I think it is a relatively inoffensive and technically interesting DRM scheme. Primarily because, once you've downloaded your DRM-infected book, you don't need to rely on an online server to unlock it. How does it work? When you buy a book, your vendor sends you a .lcpl file. This is a plain JSON file which contains some licencing information and a…
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My name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain. British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry. And so, for most of my childhood, I was Terry to all who knew me. There was a brief dalliance in my…
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It is always nice to meet someone in a pub who says "I've written my first book!" - so, naturally, I picked up Katie's novel as my next read. I'm glad that I did as it's a cracking crime story. It starts slowly, with a brilliantly observed satire of office life. The gossip, banal slogans, venal senior managers, and work-shy grifters are all there and jump off the page. You'll have met all of them if you've ever spent a moment in a modern open-plan office. It swiftly picks up the pace with a…
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I've been thinking about fun little artistic things to do with QR codes. What if each individual pixel were a QR code? There's two fundamental problems with that idea. Firstly, a QR code needs whitespace around it in order to be scanned properly. So I focussed on the top left positional marker. There's plenty of whitespace there. Secondly, because QR codes contain a lot of white pixels inside them, scaling down the code usually results in a grey square - which is unlikely to be recognised…
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404 Ink's "Inklings" series are short books with high ideals. This is a whirlwind tour through the ramifications of the rapid digitalisation of our lives. It provides a review of recent literature and draws some interesting conclusions. It is a modern and feminist take on Seeing Like A State - and acknowledges that book as a major influence. What are the dangers of static standards which force people into uncomfortable boxes? How can data be misused and turns against us? Rather wonderfully…
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What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his younger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…? This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if that side of it is any good - it's all longing looks, furtive glances, and "what if"s. It was charming …
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In many ways it is refreshing that Ben Elton hasn't changed his act at all over the last 44 years. Go back to any YouTube clip of his 1980s stand-up and you'll hear the same rhythm, vocal tics, and emphasis as he does today. Even his politics haven't shifted (much) with identical rants about feckless politicians and the dangers of bigotry. What's lost is the sense of topicality. Hey! Don't we all look at our phones too much?! Gosh! Isn't Daniel Craig a different James Bond to Roger Moore?!…
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