There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff. Bits of it are just sublimely beautiful. Listening to George Harrison's first performance of I, Me, Mine is breathtaking. And then it is devastating to watch the fall-out as the emotional…
Continue reading →
Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM's wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and …
Continue reading →
Ocean is... breathtaking. As is foreshadowed in the first few minutes, it is like a stage version of The Dark Crystal. An explosion of supernatural weirdness, eerie music, and baffling puppetry. It's also full of subtle magic. I mean that literally. Props appear in the blink of an eye, characters change without you noticing, the whole set comes alive. It is reminiscent of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child". Except it's actually good! Whereas Cursed Child threw all its tricks onto the stage…
Continue reading →
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was unsure how I was going to complete a security exam due to ProctorU not supporting Linux. I'm delighted to say that the examiners - APMG - were understanding about my plight. They were aware of ProctorU's limitations and had a workaround. They had me install Beyond Trust's "bomgar" Linux client - which is a simple Remote Desktop app. It was preconfigured with my invigilator's details and they were able to remotely see my screen and control my…
Continue reading →
Way back in 2010, Paul Battley was blogging about device discrimination on the Internet. The new iPlayer service was using TLS certificates to ensure that only specific devices were able to stream media from the BBC's servers. That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a specially certified device. Well, that's what everyone thought! A few weeks ago, I found this curious…
Continue reading →
A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future. 1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming. 2022: Tess, a time-traveling geologist, journeys to different eras for her research, while secretly hoping to correct a …
Continue reading →
You've heard of the AI Winter, right? The period where funding for AI dried up due to products failing to meet their hype. I think we're now in Springtime For Crypto - named after the musical "Springtime for Hitler" from movie The Producers - where scams abound. You should take a couple of hours to watch The Producers. Either the 1967 classic movie, or the 2005 remake will do. The pivotal moment in the film is when Leo Bloom has this stunning realisation: "Amazing. It's absolutely amazing.…
Continue reading →
Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception and p…
Continue reading →
Four years ago, I reviewed the LG-R105 360 Camera. It's a pretty nifty bit of hardware. Sadly, LG have decided that they don't want to support it any more. They already got your money, so fuck you for expecting any further updates. Here's their message: We express a sincere gratitude for your patronage to LG 360 CAM Manager Service. Due to changes in our operation policies, LG 360 CAM Manager Service via mobile applications will be terminated as of June 20, 2020. Well, that's a load of…
Continue reading →
(Mostly notes to myself.) If you have a lot of images in a directory, and want to quickly make an image montage, here's how to do it on Linux using ImageMagick. First up, this command finds all JPG file, then resizes them so they fit in a maximum box of 256x256, then sets the quality to 75%, then saves them as JPGs: find ./ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -exec mogrify -verbose -format jpg -layers Dispose -resize 256\>x256\> -quality 75% {} + This will overwrite your existing files so make sure you…
Continue reading →
Last year, I set myself a challenge to only read books by women. I got through 42 books - not bad for a pandemic! This year I was more relaxed - I just picked books which took my fancy. And a few that I needed to read for my MSc. Quite a few came from NetGalley which gives out Advance Reader Copies. So I got to read unpublished books for free in exchange for a review. My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules) and, I'm somewhat surprised to say, I read 85 books! I try to spend what …
Continue reading →
I hate the way modern workplaces make you beg for feedback. Something about the forcing of humanity into little boxes and vague sentiments really gets my goat. So, this year, I added an extra question to my validation-seeking questionnaire. As well as asking how I did this year, what I could do better, where we can work together in the future etc etc blah blah - I added a little bonus. A multiple choice question from the Voight-Kampff test. And, to my delight, my colleagues answered! What…
Continue reading →
