The last year has seen an overabundance of death. Some of us got chatting about the various people from the GovCamp community who have died recently, and how we could memorialise them. It used to be the case that we started every 'Camp with a reading of the rules. A gentle intro to let everyone be on the same page. The "rules" started out as: Whoever comes are the right people. Whatever…
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My life is an endless stream of courier deliveries right now. Welcome to lockdown life. Recently, I received an email saying that a driver had delivered a parcel. They'd dumped it on my porch without ringing the bell, then ran back to their vehicle. That's fair enough. These people are given hellishly ambitious targets and they don't want to hang around chatting. But this was on the email I…
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Hanging on a wall in our house is a signed picture of Derek Jacobi. It is one of our most treasured possessions. It is a drawing of him as Professor Yana from Doctor Who. SPOILER ALERT He was really The Master! Back in 2007, I happened to be working next to a memorabilia shop, when I saw both Jacobi and Tom Baker sat in there. A long queue of people stood waiting to buy autographs. I got in…
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If you have a bank account, you probably have an IBAN - an International Bank Account Number. It is a well-structured text string which unambiguously identifies your account. A typical UK IBAN looks like GB33BUKB20201555555555 - with it, you can send money to that account from any bank in the world. OK, some banks make international transfers complicated or expensive, but it generally works! …
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tl;dr you have to keep complaining to Virgin for several months and then take them to the Communication & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme then complain to their Data Protection team by contacting them on LinkedIn. Background Virgin have a spammy DNS hijacking service. If you accidentally misspell a domain - for example example.coom - Virgin will pretend that the domain exists and serve…
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Virgin Media have provided me with a test unit of their new Intelligent WiFi pods to review. They're useful, but come with some annoying limitations. If you have a big home, put a pod in every room and you'll have fast WiFi broadcast everywhere. Well, that's the theory. Limitations The big limitation is that both your 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi SSIDs need to have the same name and password. I…
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Nine years later and I'm still bitter - and that's an unhealthy emotion. So I'm blogging as a form of catharsis. Back in 2012, I was taking the fledgling "QRpedia" project to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We had a cool little invention - stick a QR code on a museum exhibit and when a visitor scans it, they're automatically taken to the Wikipedia page in their native language. Nifty, huh? …
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Recently, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter was hijacked. It was turned into a PS5 giveaway scam. The people who hijacked the account changed the name, avatar, and deleted all the previous Tweets. Here's how I found who the original owner was, and managed to contact them. A Twitter account has a screen name. Mine is @edent. It is possible to change your screen name. Each Twitter account…
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Matt Webb has a whimsical blog about buying unused TV advertising space. There are a bunch of shows on streaming services which have ad-breaks unfilled. Mostly, I assume, because everyone hates adverts and no one can afford to buy anything right now. Matt proposes that he hyper-targets his friends and family with fun little messages. I think that's a nice idea. The cost of TV advertising has…
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I've been a vegetarian for 21 years. And, last year, I became (mostly) vegan. Because my bum kept falling off. I'd been getting frequent stomach cramps and "gastrointestinal distress" which culminated in a nice man from the NHS shoving a camera up me to see if my guts were rotten. They were not (aside from a couple of small polyps). After various food diaries and testing exclusion diets, my…
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This is an entertaining, useful, and thoroughly tedious book. Imagine your time machine went wrong and you were stranded in the past. How could you "invent" the technology needed to improve the world, At its heart is a potted history of every piece of technology required for modern civilisation. Short and entertaining chapters which discuss everything from leather tanning to electromagnetism.…
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The novelisation of the TV series! OK, OK, the book was written nearly 40 years before the Netflix miniseries. But it is uncanny how close the two are. Most adaptation are really "creative reimaginings" of the source material. Taking liberties with the source material, introducing new, relatable characters, and monkeying around with the plot. But the series is almost beat-for-beat the same as…
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