About five minutes into the show I already had tears of laughter streaming down my face. I didn't stop laughing and squealing with delight until the curtain call. The plot - unusual for a jukebox musical - is relatively well thought through. What if Juliet didn't die at the end of Romeo + Juliet? What if she left Verona to seek her heart's desire? And, much like a Shakespeare comedy, there's no shortage of star-cross'd lovers, puns, intense queerness, and ridiculous Frenchmen. There's also a…
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I hate academic tests. Wouldn't it be great if you could find the official answer papers? Oh, cool, the OCR Exam Board is hosting answer sheets for all my classes! What happens if I click it? Yeach! It redirects users to a scammy ebook service hosted on an external website. Which, I assume, the exam board does not endorse. Alongside exam books, textbooks, literary classics - there's a bunch of material which probably isn't suitable for school… If you visit the root of the domain, it s…
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A few days ago, I posted about my quest to find a decent HDMI cable for my original XBox. The good folks at Kaico Labs were kind enough to send me a demo unit of their new Xbox to HDMI + Optical cable. I agreed to give them feedback - and they were happy to let me blog about it. It is important to note that this is a demo unit. I don't know how much, if anything, will change before it gets released. Nor do I know the cost. Adjust your expectations accordingly! Video Firstly, I'm pleased…
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I present to you, dear reader, a spiral containing every Unicode 14 character in the GNU Unifont. Starting at the centre with the control characters, spiralling clockwise through the remnants of ASCII, and out across the entirety of the Basic Multi Lingual Plane. Then beyond into the esoteric mysteries of the Higher Planes. Zoom in for the massiveness. It's a 10,000x10,000px image. Because the Unifont displays individual characters in a 16x16px square, it is quite legible even when printed …
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This book is outstanding. It is a clear-eyed view of the future as it was seen from 20 years ago. I've never taken so many scribbled notes in the margins of a book. Many of the ideas are ahead of its time - and only a couple of clunkers which never made it. One thing to note is that it is written in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City. There are around 50 mentions of 9/11 in the book - to the point where it feels like an obsession. Even the most mundane observation is tied…
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A few notes to myself. Let's consider a set of 1 dimensional data. For example, the alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ What do we mean by "1 dimensional"? Consider the element "B". From there you can go left to "A" or right to "C". Left and right are the only directions you can move. You cannot go up or down from "B". There's no way to go in or out. You're trapped in a single dimension. What if we want to write the data onto a 2 dimensional space - like a bit of paper or a website. …
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I try to write good bug reports, I really do. I fill out templates when asked. I try to include reproducible proof of the bug. I'll even give a screenshot or screen recording to prove I'm not making things up. If I'm familiar enough with the programming language, I'll also attempt to say roughly where the problem lies. Sadly, that's not always enough. Two years ago today, I wrote what I thought was a pretty comprehensive bug report for Android OS. I included links to public forums where…
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I spoke, briefly, to BBC journalist Tom Singleton about our solar panels and how they're coping in the heat. The good news is that solar panels work when it is sunny (duh!) - but the bad news is that electronics are generally less efficient when it is hot. Here are a few examples. July 16th was a few days before the heatwave: .social-embed{all:unset;display:block;}.social-embed *…
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I know what you're going to say - the Xbox has HDMI. Well, modern ones do. The Xbox 360 and its successors all have crisp digital outputs. But I'm talking about the original Xbox. This bad boy: Mmmmm! Chunky! The OG Xbox's AV connector is... Let's be charitable, a bit weird. The console was released a few months before HDMI - so it isn't surprising that it doesn't feature that particular output port. Instead, it has a proprietary port which can output all sorts of different signals,…
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As part of our quest to make our house more efficient, we've installed solar panels, a battery, insulation, and all the other stuff you're supposed to do. The next step is working out if we can reduce our dependency on gas. Octopus Energy (join and we both get £50!) offered to send an engineer around for free to assess our property for suitability for an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP). The engineer was friendly, knowledgeable, professional, thorough, and just full of bad news! Here's a short …
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As part of my new job, I'm learning a lot more about the mysteries of the Domain Name System than any mortal should know I thought possible. The humble unix dig command allows you to query all sort of DNS information. For example, to see name server records for the BBC website, you can run: dig bbc.co.uk NS Which will get you: ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35614 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 8, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 17 ;; OPT…
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How do you show two languages simultaneously in HTML? If you want to show text in a foreign language, the markup is simple: <html lang="en-GB"> ... As Caesar said: <i lang="la">veni vidi vici</i> That says the page is in British English (en-GB) but the specific phrase is in Latin (la). But how can you offer an in-text translation of that phrase into the page's native language? Here are a few options - and their drawbacks. Title Text <i…
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