There's an old joke about a man who reads his morning paper in bed. If he's not listed in the obituaries, he gets up to start his day. A few months ago I was checking my email in bed (always a bad idea) when the vanity alert I have for my name appeared. Google took great delight in telling me that "Terence Eden passed away peacefully..." I had a minor heart attack and continued reading, "...at …
Continue reading →
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in another country, downloading wallpapers, and uploading my poor attempts at…
Continue reading →
As we head unto an AI dominated future, the Turing test will probably become less like a Voight-Kampff test and more like a warzone Shibboleth. Yesterday, I asked the Alexa to set a timer. "What do you want to name your timer?" She It asked. "Bow," I replied. "Bow timer set," it said. Except… that isn't quite right. I wanted a timer for my bāo buns (包). That's pronounced /baʊ/ - as in to bow o…
Continue reading →
It's not often I go to a movie premiere. And it's less often that I go to a movie premiere of a film starring my mum! Straight 8 is an intriguing idea for a film competition. Film-makers have exactly one roll of Super8 film - which runs to about 3 minutes. The only editing they can do is in-camera. There's no audio - a soundtrack is submitted separately. And the first time they see the film is…
Continue reading →
The good folks at InfiRay have sent me their latest Infrared camera to review. It is tiny. It's smaller than a normal USB stick and barely weighs anything. Shove the USB-C protrusion into your Android phone, launch the app, and... nope - that's it! Pretty much instantly plug and play. There's also a reasonably long USB-C extension cable, so you can poke the camera in small places without…
Continue reading →
I have a screenshot of my phone's screen. It shows an app's user interface and a photo in the middle. Something like this: If I set the compression to be lossy - the photo looks good but the UI looks bad. If I set the compression to be lossless - the UI looks good but the filesize is huge. Is there a way to selectively compress different parts of an image? I know WebP and AVIF are pretty…
Continue reading →
