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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I don't have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don't remember them. I've had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I've drawn a blank. My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've met. Things like this: And, I guess we've all got a contact like this, right? (Sorry,…
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Texas is under a mountain of snow. As the energy grid struggles, the law of supply-and-demand kicks in. Electricity prices climb ever higher. The wholesale cost rises. And doesn't stop rising. Some people signed up to "Griddy" a service which charges users the wholesale rate for electricity. In normal times, that might be a good deal. Cut out the middle-man and get access to market rates. But…
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(A hastily written and grumpy post.) Another day, another Blockchain Bullshit project. Someone "claimed" one of my Tweets and added it to the Blockchain. I'm not particularly happy about that. Nor am I happy with the hoops I had to jump through to contact the company and remove my work. You can read the whole sorry thread on Twitter. But, mostly, I'm unhappy with this whole scammy…
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This is either the greatest time-travel novel ever - or a load of monkeyshine. And I'm not sure which! What if Quantum Leap was an Agatha Christie novel? That's the basic plot - but, in this, Sam is only leaping between characters in the same story. The whodunnit plot is brilliantly worked out - and has the requisite number of twists-and-turns. But the quasi-time-travel requires the reader to…
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