Thoroughly disappointing. It's a rip-off of about a dozen Asimov stories about domestic robots. Robot helps child. Robot gets religion. Robot Misunderstands world. Robot is abused. It baffles me why this was nominated for so many prizes - I guess judges don't read enough old-school sci-fi? It's written in Ishiuro's dreamy, wandering style. I enjoyed that on his previous books, but here it feels like a parody of himself. The plot is linear and unsurprising. There are subtle hints of…
Continue reading →
The first indication I had that anything was wrong at home was my solar panels's cloud service casually emailing me to say they hadn't generated any electricity that day. We were on holiday - literally on the other side of the planet - and there were reports of snow at home, so I didn't think anything of it. But the same thing happened the next day. And our alarm system app started complaining that it couldn't reach our home network. Nor could our security camera app, heating app, and…
Continue reading →
This is a tough little compilation to review. It's a collection of mid-1980s stories all grouped around the loose theme of "Cyberpunk". What is Cyberpunk? Well, I'm not quite sure. And neither is the book. Some of the stories are high-tech tales of people fighting the system and sticking it to the man! Others are... allegories about original sin in gargoyles? That said, they're all interesting stories. Mostly by men, which is a bit disappointing. But they convey some spectacular predictions…
Continue reading →
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more on toothpaste. Or change your political opinions. Either way, they are your adversaries. The IAB's tech lab is working on a system called UID2. It's a more advanced way to track you no matter what you do and no…
Continue reading →
If you have a large collection of eBooks, you probably use Calibre - it's simply the best bit of cross-platform software for managing your library. It runs rock-solid on Linux. But a recent upgrade gave me a problem. I started the app and the windows were missing their borders and my mouse cursor was too small. Not show-stopping problems, but mildly annoying. After a bit of faffing around, I discovered the cause and how to fix it. I was running the Flatpak version of Calibre. Normally I…
Continue reading →
This is a delightfully silly magical romp. Without getting too deep into the spoilers, it is the anti-Potter of books. Middle-aged, feminist, modern witches - drinking wine and kicking arse. And they're all out of wine. I don't think it adds much new to the genre - bitchy witches bullying their peers hasn't changed since Mildred Hubble burnt her first cauldron. But this is done with such glee - and a decent undercurrent of rage - that it is worth reading. The plot isn't too taxing, the…
Continue reading →
After reading Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire I was keen to read more about my country's history. It's weird that studying history in the UK consists of the Tudors, Shakespeare, the Industrial Revolution, and the World Wars. Nothing about how modern Britain came to exist, our empire, its global and local consequences, or the path it put us on. I guess we have to learn that from random statues before they experience marisepultura… Sanghera is very clear this isn't a purely academic history b…
Continue reading →
This is a sequel to Shouting Zeros and Ones - Digital Technology, Ethics and Policy in New Zealand and follows a familiar pattern. It's a series of essays looking at digital issues from a uniquely NZ perspective. There is a fair bit of Te reo Māori (Māori language) in the book. It's great that the language is enjoying a resurgence. Most concepts are explained in context - although you may need to rely on your eReader's dictionary function a few times. Ideas like ‘social licence’ for me is h…
Continue reading →
This is a profoundly depressing but utterly necessary read. It charts Fiona Hill's journey from the moribund educational opportunities provided in a dying coal city in England, all the way to her testimony in the Trump impeachment hearings. It is part biography and part political manifesto. Both parts work well together, but requires a degree of context switching. She contextualises all her political observations with personal anecdotes. This helps her make the case that large western…
Continue reading →
My mate Julia has written a book! And, as per the title, it is really good. This is a book about helping you discover if that idea you've had - for a product, feature, book, business, whatever - is likely to catch on. It does this through the lens of understanding users. The Really Good Idea Test puts people at the heart of innovation, rather than the other way around. Essentially, it's a series of worksheets - provided free - which help you get answers to the seven questions which make…
Continue reading →
If you've visiting Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur, I have two tips for you. Firstly, get there as early as possible in order to avoid the heat and other tourists. Secondly, after climbing a mountain of stairs, marvelling at the wonders therein, and being stared at by hundreds of monkeys - you're going to be hungry. So treat yourself to lunch at Rani's. A varied vegetarian menu - helpfully illustrated. Great big piles of food served on a banana leaf - you can't go wrong. Just spicy enough to be…
Continue reading →
This thorough examination of Pink Floyd's epic album is a lushly illustrated coffee-table book. Breezily written and good for dipping in and out of. It gives as a brief history of Pink Floyd and then dives in to every nook and cranny about the making of DSotM. It's chock full of some great archive photos - it really goes for the deep cuts. Although I'm sure that die-hard fans will have seen a lot of these, there's plenty to keep you entertained. That said, some of the photos veer into…
Continue reading →
