Lab grown meat is nearly here. To be fair, it has been "nearly" here for a long long long long long time. But with the imminent arrival of lab-grown meat, it is time to investigate Synthetarianism. A diet of Synthetic food. I haven't eaten meat for... oh... 20 years now. I live with a carnivore but, despite her amazing cooking, I've no real desire to eat animal flesh. I'm sure it tastes nice …
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I spent the first few months of lockdown in a blur. Working with NHSX, on the national app launch, meant that I didn't have a minute to think about what was going on outside my immediate focus. Then, a few months ago, I switched to a new job in the Data Standards Authority - so I've had all the excitement of getting up to speed on new projects. And this week. Just... *bleugh*. I've hit the wall. …
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A group of college kids staying at a riverside cabin are menaced by a swarm of deadly zombie beavers. The moment that the zombie beavers deliberately chewed through the phone lines in order to strand our hapless heroes, I knew I was in for a treat. This is an unapologetic B-Movie. It knows exactly how much sex and violence it can cram into a 15 certificate. The female cast members mostly…
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If you have Virgin Media's cable service, you may have been forcibly opted-in to their WiFi Hotspot Sharing service. This allows anyone with a Virgin Media account to connect to your WiFi! Virgin have been moderately sensible with their design of this - users get a separate IP address, so their activity cannot be commingled with yours. But what about your bandwidth? Here, Virgin have been…
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Apple's HEIC format is... annoying. At the moment, Apple's products are the only mainstream cameras which use it. Forums are littered with people trying to upload HEIC files to web services and failing. So, here are four quick tips for dealing with this formal. Display in browser Absolutely no browser supports HEIC. Not even Apple's own browser supports it. Why? Terence Eden is on…
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In his first-ever Doctor Who novel, Tom Baker’s incredible imagination is given free rein. A story so epic it was originally intended for the big screen, Scratchman is a gripping, white-knuckle thriller almost forty years in the making. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane Smith arrive at a remote Scottish island, when their holiday is cut short by the appearance of strange creatures – hideous sca…
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Some background reading. Skip if you're familiar with fonts. A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that. Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the Latin letter Capital W, U+20AC is the Euro…
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Hello gang! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every single episode of Doctor Who! This bonus post looks at a very special entry from s01e01 - but feel free to rummage in the archives. A Rose By Any Other Name... The very first episode of New-Who has some lovely zeitgeisty phones. But there was one I MISSED! I'm indebted to James Sutton for pointing out something which was hiding …
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I hate superhero movies - let's get that out of the way first. They're a bag of clichés, where flashing lights are considered an adequate replacement for new ideas. 2017's "Logan" is the only one I've found interesting. What happens to a Superhero after they're too old for this shit? What does it mean to keep a promise to someone who doesn't remember that you made it? How do we stop our children …
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Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in m…
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A few years ago, I took part in a local trial to install a solar battery in our home. The battery was excellent - and made a reasonable difference for our energy use. Sadly, last year, it died. It was prototype hardware, and these things happen. Moixa offered to replace it with an updated model - which was generous of them. While we were waiting for the new model to come in to stock, we moved…
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My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech synthesis. Recently, people have worked out a way to perform ray-tracing on it! …
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