Back when I was a product manager for a large mobile network operator, we faced a constant problem. How do you launch a new product to the public? Most people are reluctant to try new things. Even in the exciting world of proto-smartphones, convincing someone to download, install, configure, and use a new app was difficult. Sure, we could run expensive advertising campaigns. Send hopeful text messages. Have a big celebrity endorsement. Or maybe get our customer service reps to push it. In the …
Continue reading →
Romeo and Juliet is obviously about a young Pakistani girl whose overbearing father wants to marry her off to a cousin, despite her age and wishes. How could it be anything but? ‘Oh dear, please don’t ruin Romeo and Juliet by talking about race!’ said a member of the public when the Globe hosted an anti-racist webinar on the play. You may be thinking this too. But worry not, because the play can’t be ruined. It can be opened up, however, and questioned, unpacked, challenged even I've reviewe…
Continue reading →
This is a fun bit of sci-fi. A bit tropey in places, but an excellent sense of world-building and a vicious cast of double-crossers. The protagonist is best described by one of the character's off-hand remarks about her being “The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.” Can you feel sympathy for someone who has been manipulated into being evil? What about if given every chance to change, they turn back to their abusers? Is it OK to use sexism to your own advantage? If you had the cha…
Continue reading →
Funny from the preface up until the very last footnote. This is the updated version of the classic "What If" book - where Munroe goes into absurd details about ridiculous questions. Full of nerdy giggles and some utterly bizarre units. For example: The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5-inch drives, that’s 8 liters (2 gallons) of hard drive per second. I mean… I GUESS! Charmingly, there are some UK specific notes and …
Continue reading →
After reading Karin Tidbeck's Amatka I knew I needed to read more by her. Jagannath is an exceptional collection of short stories. In turns beautifully silly and oddly romantic. What does it mean for a man to fall in love with an airship? If God walks the streets, how can He be summoned? Does the Devil rely on mechanised bureaucracy to connect to people via phone? Each story feels like a half-remembered piece of folklore. There are twists in the tales, but they're rarely cruel. Rather…
Continue reading →
My good friend Suw alerted me to this venerable book by repeatedly ranting "What is your theory of change???" online. If ever there was a moment to yell "WHAT IS YOUR THEORY OF CHANGE???" that moment is now and we should all be yelling it at Just Stop Oil.It seems to me their theory of change is to make enough people pissed of with them that... er, um... Step 2: ???Step 3: Profit!! Wait, that's not right.— Suw (@suw.bsky.social) 2024-06-20T08:44:13.991Z Saul Alinsky's book is part i…
Continue reading →
I love OpenFreeMap it is a quick, easy, and free way to add beautiful maps to your Open Source projects. With the latest release of MapLibre-GL I wanted to see if there was an easy way to use both to make an interactive globe with clustered markers. Spoiler alert: yes! Basic Globe Here's a basic example which I've trimmed down from this example. When you load the below code, you'll get a globe which you can spin and zoom. Nifty! <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Globe…
Continue reading →
A million years ago, I was helping advise an analogue office who were thinking about making the great leap forward to the digital future. I was sat in the boss's office extolling the virtues of digitisation. "How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently. "Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. He pressed a switch on his (landline) phone. "Miss Moneypenny? Could you bring us, let's…
Continue reading →
I think everyone reading this post has accidentally messed up when sending an email, right? I noticed this story recently: The Metropolitan Police has apologised to victims of the Westminster "honeytrap" scandal after it accidentally sent an email which named all of them. … the sender, a detective sergeant in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection unit, included the recipients’ names in the CC section of the email, rather than BCC, which would have concealed their identities. …
Continue reading →
Android is belatedly getting a Bluetooth tracker feature which doesn't rely on proprietary apps. Long-time readers will know that back in 2016 I reviewed both the Chipolo and the TinTag. Both of those were adequate at finding things which were in range of your phone, but hopeless at finding lost items - because they required everyone to have a special app installed. But now, under pressure from Apple's incredible Find My network, Google has started rolling out a similar service to modern…
Continue reading →
"Mirror Mirror on the wall. What's the hottest gadget of them all?" Do you need a mirror which is connected to the Internet? Yes. Obviously. What's the point of having anything which doesn't have an IP address‽ The good folks at Infrared Group don't want me shivering while I blog, so they've sent me their latest Far Infrared heating panel which, obviously, is also a smart mirror. 350W of heat, enough for a 6m room, and a cool little display to tell you the weather. Let's put it through its p…
Continue reading →
I love ripping off good ideas from other people's blogs. I was reading Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida's blog when I saw this nifty little force-directed graph: When zoomed in, it shows the relation between posts and tags. In this case, I can see that the posts about Small Gods and Pyramids both share the tags of Discworld, Fantasy, and Book Review. But only Small Gods has the tag of Religion. Isn't that cool! It is a native feature of Quartz's GraphView. How can I build something like that…
Continue reading →
