So, farewell Jodie! What a brilliant Doctor she has been. I started this series of blog posts four years ago to celebrate her becoming ther new Doctor. As ever, I've identified all of the mobile phones used in Doctor Who. This blog post goes through the 2022 specials - three cracking stories to round out Jodie's tenure. Eve of The Daleks Classic time-loop episode where - for once - a mobile phone saves the day! Sarah Sarah's mammy keeps video-calling Sarah's Samsung. Thankfully, the props…
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Back in June, I noticed a pretty insidious piece of Twitter spam. The "twoo.fun" website was claiming that it could tell you who visited your Twitter profile. That's pretty enticing! It's what LinkedIn uses to drive its premium product. Perhaps it would tell me if a potential employer was looking at my profile? Or if my crush kept visiting it!??!?!? So people visited the website and signed in with their Twitter account. Whereupon the app started posting spam. Something which looked like…
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The end-game of my MSc is almost in sight! I've written up 6 assignments. Now all I need to do is write a 10,000 word dissertation in the form of a Major Project Report. Oh, and go through an End-Point-Assessment with my portfolio to make sure I actually know what I'm talking about. But, back to the report. I need to write a 1,000 word literature review. The only problem is… I've never done one of those before! Sadly, my MSc provider aren't particularly proactive in providing resources to s…
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The best thing about WordPress is the plugin infrastructure. A million little gadgets to make your blog better. Sadly, there are all sorts of ways plugin authors can abuse their privileges. Dodgy code and user-hostile features sometimes make plugins more trouble than they're worth. Recently, the normally excellent Blubrry PowerPress plugin pissed me off. It's a useful plugin for publishing podcasts on WordPress. They had a new feature - some kind of embedded audio player - and introduced it…
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Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams showed off some impressive demos which aimed to tackle the issues. My demo was reasonably simple and (I thought) quite effective. It displayed a satellite view of a street in…
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I'm off to a wedding in Canada which means dealing with the bureaucracy of the Electronic Travel Authorisation. The form asked me if I'd ever had a previous visa for Canadaland. As it happens, yes! I spent a year studying in Ottawa. Well then, said the form, you'd better tell me your old visa number. Ah… In amongst the various shoe boxen which serve as my ersatz filing system lay a tatty old passport. Crumpled in it was a fading visa, the ink smeared with a barely legible reference number. I…
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It is an undisputed fact that Mark Lewisohn knows more about The Beatles than anyone else - including The Beatles! This is a cosy and intimate show - well, a PowerPoint presentation really - which see Mark take us through 62 events in the year 1962. Why '62? Well, that's the year everything changed. Mark makes a convincing case that 1962 is when pop culture changed forever. Not just with the formation of the band (and them legally splitting up) but the entire culture of era being ready for…
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Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I've noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them - though by no means the majority - are including audio versions of the content. The usually look something like this: or The ones which have this are mostly using commercial Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines. Although a few of the (perhaps wealthier?) bloggers have hired people to record audio versions of their…
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