What is our life? Is it the days we live or the way others perceive us? The comedian Adrian Edmondson steps us through his life. But, as he points out, what we remember and what we're interested in isn't necessarily the most significant part of the subject's life. In 2016 I adapted William Leith’s book Bits of Me Are Falling Apart into a one-man play. It took six weeks to do the adaptation, four …
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Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData. I was bored and asked ChatGPT. The new Omni model claims to be faster and more accurate. But, in my experience, it's wrong more than it is right and is a bit more racist. I asked "Which Oscar …
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I'm not a paper fetishist. The smell of old books does nothing for me. But I'll admit to a slight sense of wonder when I held this 86-year old book in my hands. What is feminism? This is an out of print, and somewhat obscure, attempt to answer that question. Out of the shadow of the Great War and barely a decade after universal suffrage in the UK, one woman decided to catalogue the…
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There's currently an open consultation about whether banks should have a lower compensation limit to refund their customers who have been scammed. Currently, if a customer falls for an Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam, they may be eligible for up to £415,000 back from their bank. The proposal is to limit this to a maximum of £85,000. What does this mean and is it a bad thing? APP fraud is w…
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It looks like everyone's favourite FIDO token provider might have an unpatchable vulnerability! Much Sturm und Drang from the usual sources. But how bad is it really? Not so bad - but it does expose some weaknesses in the very idea of having physical tokens. First up, as the research paper's abstract says: The attack requires physical access to the secure element So, straight off the bat,…
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It is sometimes useful to embed the contents from one website into another. For example, you may wish to quote a post from a microblogging site like Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, or Mastodon. All of them offer an "embed" button which will copy a snippet of code for you to paste into your website. Here's how they compare: BSky In my considered opinion, BlueSky is the only modern service which…
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