It's the following Thursday. Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life. As bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. And if they find the…
Continue reading →
It has been a year since I stopped working for NHSX. A few weeks ago, someone reached out to me inquiring about a job there. They wanted to know what they needed to know before joining. As well as the normal moaning about the quality of vending machine coffee, I told them about three things which caught me off-guard when I joined. So, here for your edification, are three things I wish I'd…
Continue reading →
The Cabinet is a story about the documents that record these symptomers and the man who manages the documents in Cabinet 13. This seemingly ordinary, old cabinet is filled with stories that are peculiar, strange, eye-pop- ping, disgusting, enraging, and touching. However, the fast changing world is also full of all sorts of unbelievable things. Perhaps symptomers exist not only in the novel but …
Continue reading →
I want to buy a big chunk of data and use it until it runs out. I'm not interested in a contract. I don't want a bundle of phone calls, SMS, or ringtones. Just give me DATA that lasts for as long as possible. Here's the best data deals that I could find. Stick them in your 2nd SIM slot, use them as broadband backup, or shove in a dongle and attach to a Raspberry Pi. Operator Cost Data …
Continue reading →
Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science. Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way…
Continue reading →
💾 Download this page! What's going on behind the scenes? Here's the code. Note - it doesn't require thousands of imported NPM libraries, a complex Docker set-up, or any AI-on-the-blockchain. <a href="" download="this.html">Download this page</a> HTML 5 introduced a new attribute for the anchor element - download. Rather than having to set your server up with Content Disposition headers - yo…
Continue reading →
Legacy websites are a constant source of vulnerabilities. In a fit of excitement, a team commissions a service and then never bothers updating it. Quite often the original owners leave the business and there's no-one left who remembers that the service exists. So it sits there, vulnerable, for years. The [REDACTED] website had a subdomain which was running KANA's IQ software which was last…
Continue reading →
Two years ago, I gave my first blood donation. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentVery nearly an armful etc. Didn't hurt. Looking forward to finding out my blood group! pic.x.com/RKpqX9HuEl❤️ 20💬 6🔁 014:51 - Mon 29 July 2019 Due to a combination of moving house, and the whole pandemic thing, I've not been able to donate again until now. It was quick - in and out in 90 minutes.…
Continue reading →
I'm not a big fan of Virtual Reality. I find it claustrophobic and impractical for most uses. There are some areas which it does impress though. Scale. Half-a-dozen years ago - during one of VR's periodic hype-phases - an employer asked me and my team to "do something interesting" with all the expensive VR kit they'd bought on a whim. We looked at virtual store walkthroughs, simulating the…
Continue reading →
This is a slow, and very silly, way to experience an ancient browser. I'm aware that you could spin up a virtual machine, or pay for a browser testing service. But there's something nice about running a browser in a browser. Like wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Using Copy's v86 it's possible to recompile x86 code to browser native WASM. This means you can load up Windows 98 in your …
Continue reading →
Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the gender on his birth…
Continue reading →
Regular readers know, I'm Creating an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. I've already had some success using an existing NZ Centric, Equal Earth Map. And I've programmatically created a correctly projected map with R. But is it possible to do this with Satellite imagery? YES! Install gdal For this to work, you'll need GDAL - the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library.…
Continue reading →
