In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant…
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A curious little data leak, but one I struggle to care about. Perhaps useful for a bit of fingerprinting? Websites can access your system's camera and microphone. That's how modern video conferencing works in the browser. In an effort to retain user privacy, the browser asks the user for permission to use the camera and mics. No audio or video will be sent until the user agrees. But some…
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Five years ago, I wrote that I had 30 connected devices at home. How has that changed over the last half-decade? Some of my devices have consolidated. My Eufy security cameras have a hub - so despite having more cameras, They're using fewer IP addresses. Similarly, I've replaced most of my LIFX bulbs with Zigbee which also use a hub-and-spoke model. So these are the devices I currently have…
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Remember schlocky 1990s splatter film "Event Horizon"? No, me neither. But lockdown has us exhausting our supply of Sci-Fi movies, so we rewatched it. Anyway, I found some bugs! I'm a big fan of the Sci Fi Interfaces blog. It details the Human Computer Interaction design of the imagined future. It has primed me to pay attention to the interfaces in films. Look, you have your hobbies and I have…
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it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time… Winston Churchill I read this wonderful post from ThreeBallot voting. I've read it through twice, and I only think I understand how it works. For all its flaws, First Past The Post is really easy to describe. You can explain how it works in a sentence. "The p…
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As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team of brilliant individuals who are all committed to trying to make AMP better, and I'm sorry to leave them. I've been a member of the AC for a little over two years and now is the time to step away and…
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Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" is one of the defining texts of the 20th century. In it, he correctly predicts the insanity of living in the 21st century with its constant bombardment of the shock of the new. I thoroughly recommend you read it. But there's no official eBook copy. Why? If you trawl the Dark Web™ (2nd page of Google) you're sure to find hundreds of samizdat copies. Some l…
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Claire North's new book is only £1.99 on Kindle, and I highly recommend it. This is a perfect novella. It is the sort of Sci-Fi which adds only one new thing to our world, then plays out the unintended consequences. What if you had nano-bots keeping you healthy? And what if you paid for upgrades? And then - what if you couldn't keep up with your payments and your health was repossessed? …
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This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothing to produce, supply, and market. Yet people would pay through the nose for them. I say people. I mean kids. We saw a huge spike in purchases just as schools finished for the day. While we didn't …
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Back in 2017, I noticed that the UK Post Office was doing very dodgy things with their alt text. Lots of their pages had this snippet of code: Rather than add properly accessible alt text, a developer added placeholder Latin text. Being a good webizen, I tried to report this. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentHi @PostOffice,Why is your website's alt text written in Latin? I don't think that…
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There's an HTML element called <time>. It is a semantic element. That means robots can read and understand it. For example, if my code says: <p> The concert is <time datetime="2020-12-24">tomorrow</time> </p> Then the computer knows the specific date I'm talking about. A browser could offer to add the event to your calendar, or a search engine could find events which are happening on a…
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Mary Seacole left her native Jamaica to travel through the Caribbean, The Bahamas, Central America and to England. Keen to offer her services to English troops in the Crimea War, she was at first refused official support. Undaunted she went anyway and set up her famous hotel catering for British soldiers. Despite her invaluable contribution, she returned to England penniless and in ill health.…
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