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…
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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 …
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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