Summer is coming. The best time to buy air-con is before it gets blazing hot. So, off to the Mighty Internet to see if I can find a unit which I can attach to my burgeoning smarthome setup. I settled on the SereneLife 3-in-1 Portable Air Conditioning Unit. It's a small(ish) tower, fairly portable, claims 9000 BTU, is reasonable cheap (£160ish depending on your favourability to the algorithm), …
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As Cory Doctorow once said "Any time that someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you but won't give you the key, that lock's not there for you." But here's the thing with the LCP DRM scheme; they do give you the key! As I've written about previously, LCP mostly relies on the user entering their password (the key) when they want to read the book. Oh, there's some deep cryptographic…
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There's a new(ish) DRM scheme in town! LCP is Readium's "Licensed Content Protection". At the risk of sounding like an utter corporate stooge, I think it is a relatively inoffensive and technically interesting DRM scheme. Primarily because, once you've downloaded your DRM-infected book, you don't need to rely on an online server to unlock it. How does it work? When you buy a book, your vendor…
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My name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain. British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry. …
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It is always nice to meet someone in a pub who says "I've written my first book!" - so, naturally, I picked up Katie's novel as my next read. I'm glad that I did as it's a cracking crime story. It starts slowly, with a brilliantly observed satire of office life. The gossip, banal slogans, venal senior managers, and work-shy grifters are all there and jump off the page. You'll have met all of…
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I've been thinking about fun little artistic things to do with QR codes. What if each individual pixel were a QR code? There's two fundamental problems with that idea. Firstly, a QR code needs whitespace around it in order to be scanned properly. So I focussed on the top left positional marker. There's plenty of whitespace there. Secondly, because QR codes contain a lot of white pixels…
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404 Ink's "Inklings" series are short books with high ideals. This is a whirlwind tour through the ramifications of the rapid digitalisation of our lives. It provides a review of recent literature and draws some interesting conclusions. It is a modern and feminist take on Seeing Like A State - and acknowledges that book as a major influence. What are the dangers of static standards which force…
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What if, with your dying breath, you sent your lover back in time in order to change the fate of a ruined Earth? What if he sent a message back to his younger self to help seduce you? What if the Government intercepted a mysterious orb full of treasures from another dimension? What if…? This is a curious mish-mash of a book. Part sci-fi and part romance. I don't read enough romance to tell if t…
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In many ways it is refreshing that Ben Elton hasn't changed his act at all over the last 44 years. Go back to any YouTube clip of his 1980s stand-up and you'll hear the same rhythm, vocal tics, and emphasis as he does today. Even his politics haven't shifted (much) with identical rants about feckless politicians and the dangers of bigotry. What's lost is the sense of topicality. Hey! Don't we…
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Experimental and unconventional theatre is rare in the prime spots of the West End. There's a sea of jukebox musicals, film adaptations, standard Shakespeare, and Worthy Plays. Theatreland runs on bums-on-seats - doesn't matter what the critics say as long and punters keep paying outrageous prices for cramped stalls in dilapidated venues. Elektra is uncompromising. It is the sort of play the…
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Malcolm Croft (under the pseudonym Catherine Nappington) has produced a compendium of cat illustrations from ancient manuscripts. It's then peppered with a variety of regurgitated facts and captions of a sub-Facebook levels of humour. There are a few hundred pages of illustrations for you to flick through - but they're all devoid of context. As sumptuous as the images are, they're surround by…
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Because I'm a massive nerd, I actually try to read specification documents. As I've ranted ad nauseam before, the current TOTP spec is irresponsibly obsolete. The three major implementations of the spec - Google, Apple, and Yubico - all subtly disagree on how it should be implemented. Every other MFA app has their own idiosyncratic variants. The official RFC is infuriatingly vague. That's no…
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