It has been a full calendar year since my office sent me home for the last time. A few weeks later, lockdown was announced. For years, the biggest lie from customer service call centres was "Your call is important to us!" Then, a few years ago, it became "Due to unusually high call volumes, it may take longer than usual to answer your call." Now, it is "Due to the unprecedented situation,…
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I expect everyone will be writing these pieces soon. So here's my cliché-ridden effort. I've found this year to be... liberating. I can stay up all night, knowing I can roll out of bed and be instantly at work. I can be as social as I like - and I can decline invitations if I'm just not in the mood. I can read a good book over lunch, rather than hunching over my desk eating Pret. Or I can take …
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Turn your Android phone into a USB webcam with DroidCam. I can't believe it took me a whole fucking year of pandemic-time to discover this app. My laptop's webcam is... basically fine. It's a cheap 720p sensor with a tiny lens. It doesn't really cope with low light, and the picture is a bit fuzzy and grey. If you're on a conference call with me, I look like this: I've got an old Samsung…
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Let's get this out of the way first. I freakin' love Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut Series. She has created this amazingly rich and detailed universe, full of fleshed-out characters engaging in daring-do. So when this earlier novel was cheap on Amazon, I picked it up. The "Glamourist Histories" novels were written several years before the Astronette books. And, I'll be honest, it…
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Camille, a revolutionary's daughter, leads a band of outcasts – a runaway girl, a deserter, an aristocrat in hiding. As the Battalion des Morts they cheat death, saving those about to meet a bloody end at the blade of Madame La Guillotine. But their latest rescue is not what she seems. The girl's no aristocrat, but her dark and disturbing powers means both the Royalists and the Revolutionaries w…
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A bit of a random one this. My friend David Carrington bought me it as a birthday present. It is AMAZING! Absolutely everything a modern sci-fi novel should be. It has aliens who are alien! Not just because they have pointy ears, but because their cultural values are radically different from humans. And us humans, for once, aren't the founders of a mighty Empire - we're a small, obscure…
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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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