It's useful to share negative results. Not every experiment has an amazing or successful outcome. tl;dr you can't register Punycode .ss domains. This also means Internet users in South Sudan can't register domains using their own writing system. Background The Republic of South Sudan became independent and joined the United Nations back in 2011. A decade later, and it's now possible to…
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Adobe's accursed eBook DRM is just the worst. Not only does it lock up books that you have purchased - but it's impossible to use sensibly on Linux. Sure, you can futz around with Docker, WINE, and old versions of Python - and if you're lucky, you might get a book out of it. I wasn't quite so lucky. I wanted to see if I could download an ePub without using Adobe Digital Editions. Spoilers! I…
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Unconscious bias: persistent, unintentional prejudiced behaviour that clashes with our consciously held beliefs. We know that it exists, to corrosive and even lethal effect. We see it in medicine, the workplace, education, policing, and beyond. But when it comes to uprooting our prejudices, we still have far to go. With nuance, compassion, and ten years' immersion in the topic, Jessica Nordell …
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The Doctor and Rose arrive in an underground vault in Utah in the near future. The vault is filled with alien artefacts. Its billionaire owner, Henry van Statten, even has possession of a living alien creature, a mechanical monster in chains that he has named a Metaltron. Seeking to help the Metaltron, the Doctor is appalled to find it is in fact a Dalek – one that has survived the horrors of t…
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I've been experimenting with Amazon's Polly service. It's their fancy text-to-sort-of-human-style-speech system. Think "Alexa" but with a variety of voices, genders, and accents. Here's "Brian" - their English, male, received pronunciation voice - reading John Betjeman's poem "Slough": https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/slough.mp4 The pronunciation of all the words is…
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ULTRAVIOLENCE: THE MOVIE!!!! This is a complete splatter-fest with an unremitting obsession with cartoon gore. The paper-thin plot is contrived to give maximum gunshots and throat-punches per minute. Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing. Some of the action sequences are brilliant. For once, we get some fight scenes which don't rapid-cut every few frames. There's excellent use of the…
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A stunning collection of the best in Chinese Science Fiction, from Award-Winning legends to up-and-coming talent, all translated here into English for the first time. This celebration of Chinese Science Fiction — thirteen stories, all translated for the first time into English — represents a unique exploration of the nation’s speculative fiction from the late 20th Century onwards, curated and t…
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Here's a movie about objectively terrible people making bad choices! I love a quirky little indie-comedy. The problem is, there aren't too many laughs to be had here. Part of the issue is that I'm an old-fart. Celeste, the antagonist, seems like a lovely person! It's not her fault that Emily, the protagonist, abandoned her boyfriend and life. If Celeste picked up the pieces of a broken…
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Earlier this week, my holiday was interrupted by a sophisticated SMS scam. Rude! Let's take a look at it. Let's take a look at all the ways we can tell it is a scam. Firstly, and most obviously, I am not a customer of Lloyds Bank! But these scammers send out to multiple people hoping to catch victims. Secondly, I've not made a complaint to Lloyds! But, again, scammers know that plenty of…
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In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford draws on his experience as both an economist and presenter of the BBC’s radio show ‘More or Less’ to take us deep into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis that make communicating with numbers so rewarding. Through vivid storytelling he reveals how we can…
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This is a slightly unfair review as I fell asleep about 30 minutes from the end. I'll attempt to avoid spoilers - but I guarantee you've seen this movie before. I felt like I was watching a supercut of a dozen different movies and TV shows. Loving American parents secretly spies? The Americans! Tank driving through an urban centre? GoldenEye! Dropping a knife to a free hand? Game of Thrones!…
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A couple of months into the pandemic, I realised that I was vastly overpaying for my mobile usage. I was paying £10/month for unlimited calls, texts, and 8GB data. That's a pretty reasonable price, but I was sat at home all day on WiFi - so I had no need for data. I don't send SMS any more - all my friends and family are on Signal / WhatsApp / Telegram etc. And, it turns out those services also …
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