In The Memory Illusion, forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr Julia Shaw draws on the latest research to show why our memories so often play tricks on us - and how, if we understand their fallibility, we can actually improve their accuracy. The result is an exploration of our minds that both fascinating and unnerving, and that will make you question how much you can ever truly know about yourself. Possibly the most disturbing book I've read. Your mind is nothing. Your memories are…
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Here's a quick tutorial for turning an old Nook into a passive display. This is an update to my 2013 post End Result An eInk screen which displays the trains I can catch from my local station. It shows the next few available trains, and whether they're delayed. It also shows how long until the next local bus to the train station. Updating the Nook Before doing anything, manually update the Nook's firmware. You can download the latest version from Barnes and Nobel Copy the .zip file to…
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What kind of life will we find in the depths of Europa's Oceans? What kind of life will we allow an AI with human level intelligence? The ten stories in Sapience: A Collection of Science Fiction Short Stories explore these questions and many more. A delightful - and weird - collection of sci-fi shorts. All loosely tied together by the looming moon of Jupiter. A couple were a little too grim and visceral for my liking. But each was compelling and perfectly composed. …
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The scene: post-conference, sat in an airport, one dark winter's morning. I'm casually chatting to one of the other speakers about our mutual hate of being sat in an airport this early. His phone rings and he excuses himself to answer it. My German is pretty rusty, but good enough to understand "...Yes, I am at the airport... Yes, I'll make the flight... I have my passport... Do you want any duty free? OK... I love you." I smile at him - I know that call. "Ach!" he says to me, "My husband is …
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Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. A profound and moving book. It neatly describes how online socialising tickles some parts of our needy brains,…
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Post-it® notes are the life-blood of Agile. So we're told. Those little flaps of paper, usually hastily scribbled on, are the only way to prove you're Doing It Right™. I'm not a big fan. They're environmentally wasteful, inaccessible, and a bit crap for remote workers. But some people love them, so who am I to judge? Recently, I visited a fairly large company who are making the painful transition from providing mega-software into to being a nimble, digital supplier. Their walls were pl…
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Why do we find it so hard to say 'No'? What does poker teach us about power structures? How can feminism be more inclusive? The Guilty Feminist will challenge you, reassure you and empower you to see the world differently. A fantastic book. Even if you've listened religiously to The Guilty Feminist Podcast, or seen the author's solo shows, there's plenty of new material in here. It's a powerful and inclusive piece of work. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about…
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The HTML5 specification is complicated. I've been an author on it, and even I couldn't tell you all the weird little gotchas it contains. Between that and "idiosyncratic" browser engines, it's a wonder the world wide web works at all. Let's talk about the humble <meta> element. As its name suggests, it contains metadata about the document. A typical element might look like this: <meta name="description" content="Search our shop for great deals!"> What can the content tag contain? Text!…
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Winner of the 2016 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Newcomer. Shortlisted for the 2016 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novel. Shortlisted for the 2016 Locus First Novel Award. Sorcerer to the Crown is the first in Zen Cho's thrilling magical adventure series, the Sorcerer Royal Trilogy. This was an absolute delight to read. Magic, racism, and sexism, wrapped together with international politics. It is, basically, fan-fiction for the "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" universe.…
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Eight years ago, I released an open source database of Shakespeare's plays. Yesterday, it received its first Pull Request! I'm playing the long game... This led me down a curious little rabbit-hole. Which characters appear in Shakespeare's plays - but have nothing to say? The Pull Request looked at the characters mentioned in the Dramatis Personae and correlated them with the characters with spoken lines in the play. Here's what it found. Henry IV, Part 2 Poor old Sir John Blunt. He gets…
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. It shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves. Possibly the…
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Popular URl shortner Bitly allows users to customise its links. This means you can have all sorty of weird and wonderful character in there. For example: bit.ly/ó¾°ó¾° You can also use Emoji! bit.ly/☹ bit.ly/♐ Well, OK, not all Emoji. If you try to use most of them, the Bitly system craps out and generates broken URls, like so: But you can use most Unicode Miscellaneous symbols - some of which may have Emoji style representations on your system. bit.ly/♔♕♖♗♘♙♚♛♜♝♞♟ Please use …
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