A bit of a random one this. My friend David Carrington bought me it as a birthday present. It is AMAZING! Absolutely everything a modern sci-fi novel should be. It has aliens who are alien! Not just because they have pointy ears, but because their cultural values are radically different from humans. And us humans, for once, aren't the founders of a mighty Empire - we're a small, obscure species tentatively trying to gain acceptance. It holds inclusivity as a core concept. It isn't like Star …
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The last year has seen an overabundance of death. Some of us got chatting about the various people from the GovCamp community who have died recently, and how we could memorialise them. It used to be the case that we started every 'Camp with a reading of the rules. A gentle intro to let everyone be on the same page. The "rules" started out as: Whoever comes are the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it is over, it is…
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My life is an endless stream of courier deliveries right now. Welcome to lockdown life. Recently, I received an email saying that a driver had delivered a parcel. They'd dumped it on my porch without ringing the bell, then ran back to their vehicle. That's fair enough. These people are given hellishly ambitious targets and they don't want to hang around chatting. But this was on the email I received. That's... weird. Right? I mean, no one enjoys delivering parcels. It's a thankless…
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Hanging on a wall in our house is a signed picture of Derek Jacobi. It is one of our most treasured possessions. It is a drawing of him as Professor Yana from Doctor Who. SPOILER ALERT He was really The Master! Back in 2007, I happened to be working next to a memorabilia shop, when I saw both Jacobi and Tom Baker sat in there. A long queue of people stood waiting to buy autographs. I got in line, said hi to Tom, and then told Sir Derek that my fiancée had just finished an MA and was now a …
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If you have a bank account, you probably have an IBAN - an International Bank Account Number. It is a well-structured text string which unambiguously identifies your account. A typical UK IBAN looks like GB33BUKB20201555555555 - with it, you can send money to that account from any bank in the world. OK, some banks make international transfers complicated or expensive, but it generally works! Wouldn't it be great if I could write a URl like iban://GB33BUKB20201555555555/GBP10 or…
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tl;dr you have to keep complaining to Virgin for several months and then take them to the Communication & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme then complain to their Data Protection team by contacting them on LinkedIn. Background Virgin have a spammy DNS hijacking service. If you accidentally misspell a domain - for example example.coom - Virgin will pretend that the domain exists and serve you up an advertising page. Yahoo powered! Yeuch! This means my data is sent to these advertisers…
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Virgin Media have provided me with a test unit of their new Intelligent WiFi pods to review. They're useful, but come with some annoying limitations. If you have a big home, put a pod in every room and you'll have fast WiFi broadcast everywhere. Well, that's the theory. Limitations The big limitation is that both your 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi SSIDs need to have the same name and password. I usually split the names so that I always know which network I'm connected to. Virgin will remotely log…
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