Movie Review · 350 words
Cruella is a soundtrack with a movie attached. Every time the film thinks you might be getting a little bored, or feels like you might be glancing at your phone, the DJ thumps on another banger to make you say "CHOOOOON"! That works brilliantly in old movies where you're nostalgic for feeling like you did as a kid. But here it is a cheap way to inject a sort of faux-nostalgia. You liked The…
Continue reading →review · 2 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~1,453 times
About a dozen years ago, I first started seeing kids skating through malls on their shoes. I was incredibly envious. They looked so cool and fun. Surely they sold them in adult sizes? Nope! Terence Eden is on Mastodon @edent I desperately want a pair of…
Continue reading →beatles NaBloPoMo · 1 comment · 650 words · Viewed ~484 times
There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff. Bits of it are just sublimely beautiful. Listening to George Harrison's first performance of I, …
Continue reading →Book Review NaBloPoMo · 4 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~947 times
Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM's wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its…
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo review theatre · 350 words
Ocean is... breathtaking. As is foreshadowed in the first few minutes, it is like a stage version of The Dark Crystal. An explosion of supernatural weirdness, eerie music, and baffling puppetry. It's also full of subtle magic. I mean that literally. Props appear in the blink of an eye, characters change without you noticing, the whole set comes alive. It is reminiscent of "Harry Potter and the…
Continue reading →Certified in The Art of Hacking exam NaBloPoMo · 1 comment · 700 words · Viewed ~315 times
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was unsure how I was going to complete a security exam due to ProctorU not supporting Linux. I'm delighted to say that the examiners - APMG - were understanding about my plight. They were aware of ProctorU's limitations and had a workaround. They had me install Beyond Trust's "bomgar" Linux client - which is a simple Remote Desktop app. It was…
Continue reading →BBC drm iplayer iplayer-dl media NaBloPoMo python · 13 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~5,031 times
Way back in 2010, Paul Battley was blogging about device discrimination on the Internet. The new iPlayer service was using TLS certificates to ensure that only specific devices were able to stream media from the BBC's servers. That's a situation which continues over a decade later. If you watch iPlayer on your laptop, you're stuck with 720p quality. If you want 1080p and above, you need a…
Continue reading →Annalee Newitz Book Review NaBloPoMo Sci Fi · 300 words
A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future. 1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming. 2022: Tess, a…
Continue reading →blockchain crypto NaBloPoMo scam · 700 words · Viewed ~313 times
You've heard of the AI Winter, right? The period where funding for AI dried up due to products failing to meet their hype. I think we're now in Springtime For Crypto - named after the musical "Springtime for Hitler" from movie The Producers - where scams abound. You should take a couple of hours to watch The Producers. Either the 1967 classic movie, or the 2005 remake will do. The pivotal…
Continue reading →Book Review NaBloPoMo NetGalley · 850 words
Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and m…
Continue reading →360 android LG360 linux NaBloPoMo · 29 comments · 900 words · Viewed ~14,536 times
Four years ago, I reviewed the LG-R105 360 Camera. It's a pretty nifty bit of hardware. Sadly, LG have decided that they don't want to support it any more. They already got your money, so fuck you for expecting any further updates. Here's their message: We express a sincere gratitude for your patronage to LG 360 CAM Manager Service. Due to changes in our operation policies, LG 360 CAM Manager…
Continue reading →HowTo images linux NaBloPoMo ubuntu · 3 comments · 250 words · Viewed ~287 times
(Mostly notes to myself.) If you have a lot of images in a directory, and want to quickly make an image montage, here's how to do it on Linux using ImageMagick. First up, this command finds all JPG file, then resizes them so they fit in a maximum box of 256x256, then sets the quality to 75%, then saves them as JPGs: find ./ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -exec mogrify -verbose -format jpg -layers…
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