"I, Robot" - the 3 laws considered harmful


A metal face with glowing eyes stares at you.

What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference between man and machine?

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Book Review - Longitude


A book cover.

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius.

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Hidden Data in NFC Tags


Various NFC icons.

I've just got a set of wearable NFC tags, and I've discovered something interesting about the way data is stored on them. tl;dr Overwriting a tag can leave old data intact, and still readable. Here's the decoded memory layout of a tag with data written to it. In this case, a (failed) experiment at storing […]

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Book Review - Death's End


An explosion in space.

Death’s End (死神永生) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest.

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Book Review - This Is Going To Hurt


A doctor's white coat hangs on the wall. A red pen in the pocket is leaking.

​Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships...Welcome to the life of a junior doctor.

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UK Gov Camp Weeknotes


Edent Shouting into a microphone.

I'm finally feeling like I'm settling into my new role. I spent my Saturday at UK GovCamp - an unconference for Civil Servants. I ran a session on Acronyms in the Workplace. It was hillarious listening to people try to introduce themselves without any abbreviations. "I am the Chief Paperclip Office for the United Kingdom's […]

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Amazon Prime Video's weird Unicode problems


Description with an error in it.

It's 2019 and high-tech devices are still plagued by text encoding bugs. I recently bought the new 4K Amazon Fire Stick. It's a little Android dongle which plays videos. It's neat - but quite often displays weird text errors. Take the kids' TV show House of Anubis, the Fire displays the description like this: Looking […]

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Extracting DVD-Audio on Linux, the modern(ish) way


A cute penguin.

DVD-Audio (henceforce DVDA) is an unloved and mostly forgotten audio format. Nevertheless, there's a large back-catalogue of music which is still trapped on ancient discs encoded in the proprietary MLP format. A few years ago I wrote about how to extract the audio using the obsolete Windows program DVD-Audio Explorer. I wanted to be able […]

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Review - Space Odyssey the Making of a Masterpiece


A red-suited spaceman floats inside a giant computer.

Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release, this is the definitive story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acclaimed today as one of the greatest films ever made, including the inside account of how director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke created this cinematic masterpiece.

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Review - Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race


Book cover.

Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.

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