beer data r untappd · 200 words
10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIs there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing.❤️ 0💬 2🔁 018:55 - Thu 21 July 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI just earned the 'Newbie' badge on @untappd!…
Continue reading →Book Review equality history · 750 words
The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before ‘queer’ was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we…
Continue reading →maps OCSE · 2 comments · 50 words · Viewed ~328 times
Yup - I'm still banging on about this! This time, in R Result The colours are wrong, and the labels need adjustment - but not bad for a few lines of code! Code library(tidyverse) library(rnaturalearth) library(rnaturalearthdata) library(sf) centre <- 160 # NZ mostly centred, prevents Africa and South America wrapping. projection <- "eqearth" # Other good projections are wag1 wag7 eck4…
Continue reading →fact check quote tesla · 2 comments · 1,100 words · Viewed ~18,045 times
I see this quote pop up occasionally: World of Engineering@engineers_feedNikola Tesla's last message to his mother: "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation." pic.x.com/OmfbsC5GHR❤️ 21,733💬 367🔁 022:00 - Sun 25 July 2021 But what's the source of it? The most prominent source appears to be this article from March 2015 in Telegraf.…
Continue reading →Adobe drm ebook linux ubuntu · 13 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~5,805 times
After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported. No PDF Command line only Alpha quality software. It works - but i…
Continue reading →dns domains emoji punycode unicode · 4 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~318 times
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…
Continue reading →Adobe drm ebook · 550 words · Viewed ~928 times
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…
Continue reading →Book Review NetGalley TheEndofBias · 600 words · Viewed ~228 times
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 …
Continue reading →Book Review Doctor Who DrWho · 500 words
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…
Continue reading →AI Amazon tts turing · 1 comment · 500 words
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…
Continue reading →Movie Review · 1 comment · 250 words
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…
Continue reading →Book Review NetGalley Sci Fi · 1 comment · 500 words
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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