Book Review: Pod - Laline Paull


Book cover showing a swirling mass of dolphins.

After reading Laline Paull's The Bees, I was eager to read her next work. The Bees was about Bees, obviously. Pod is about a pod of dolphins - and their oceanic friends and society. Weirdly, this is the third book I've read from the perspective of cetaceans. Both The Idiot Gods and Startide Rising deal […]

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Movie Review: Don't Worry Darling


Movie poster.

This film is a masterpiece. Sure, the plot is nothing special ("What is the dark secret behind this seemingly idyllic life?!?) but it is directed with such flare and texture that it becomes a joy to watch. I can't remember when I last saw something which kept me engrossed just through the sheer inventiveness of […]

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Restaurant Review: 3D Printed Redefine Meat @ Unity Diner


Inside of the fake steak. It looks stringy, just like real meat.

"How long have you been vegetarian?" Asked the waitress. "Oh, over twenty years now," I replied. She looked concerned. "Some people find the 3D printed steak a bit..." she paused, considered, and continued, "A bit intense. It takes people by surprise how it makes them feel. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd eat […]

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The absurdity of technocracy


Screenshot of a scan of newsprint.

Punch was a satirical magazine first published in Victorian London. It had a long and noble history of poking fun at... well, just about every fashionable idea of the day. Anyone who pricked the public's conscious probably found themselves lampooned within its pages. Charles Babbage - inventor of the first mechanical computer - found himself […]

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Book Review: 12 Bytes - How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love by Jeanette Winterson


Book cover.

Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies are trying to recreate Mommy tidying their room via […]

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Unicode operators for semantically correct programming


Why do most programming languages use the / character when we have a perfectly good ÷ symbol? Similarly, why use != instead of ≠? Or => rather than →? The obvious answer is that the humble keyboard usually only has around 100 keys - and most humans have a hard time remembering where thousands of […]

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OpenBenches at GeoMob London


Liz and Terence standing in a lecture theatre, presenting their work.

Last week, Liz and I had the great pleasure of speaking at GeoMob London - a meet-up for digital geography nerds. We gave a talk about OpenBenches and how far it has come since launch. It blows our minds that we've have over TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND unique benches added to the site. And it is a […]

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How I became the #1 mapper in New Zealand


Screenshot showing that in the last 7 days I was the number 1 mapper in New Zealand the 42nd in the world.

I hate leaderboards. I think competition tends to corrupt the incentives people have to contribute to a goal. Yet, at the same time, I was delighted to see that I was the top mapper in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand. For one specific week in December. They say golf is a good walk spoiled. […]

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Book Review: If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable - Mikko Hyppönen


Book cover. The author's photo is distorted by electronic interference.

This is a curious book. It starts out as a look at the security of everyday objects, but quickly becomes a series of after-dinner anecdotes about various security related issues. That's not a bad thing, as such, but a little different from what I was expecting. There's no doubt that Mikko walks the walk as […]

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Adding restaurant review metadata to WordPress


Screenshot of a user interface which allows the entry of data.

I've started adding Restaurant Reviews to this blog - with delicious semantic metadata. Previously I'd been posting all my reviews to HappyCow. It's a great site for finding veggie-friendly food around the worlds, but I wanted to experiment more with the IndieWeb idea of POSSE. So now I can Post on my Own Site and […]

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