I'm an ambivalent convert to FIRE - Financial Independence Retire Early. The basic gist is: Minimise your expenditure, Save 20x your annual expenditure, Retire early while maintaining the same lifestyle. That's it. There are a lot of crappy books about FIRE, but the concept is simple. So I try to spend a little less, and I try to save a little more, and I dream about stopping work while…
Continue reading →
Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), the richest man in the world, adopts a homeless boy, Youngman (Sir Ringo Starr). Together, they set out to prove that anyone, and anything, can be bought with money. I get that this is a seminal film. But it doesn't stop it being awful. London at the end of the Swinging Sixties looks like a grim and miserable place. The concrete is drab, the weather is…
Continue reading →
A few weeks ago, I received an unsolicited email inviting me to try out an exciting new "quantum resistant" cryptography app called Cyph. Because I hate myself, I signed up. Of particular interest to me was the fact that the homepage loudly proclaimed that it was "Open Source" - and had a public GitHub repo. That was handy, because there were some glaring usability flaws on the sign-up screen.…
Continue reading →
Confident and opinionated, 17-year-old Megan is far too strong-willed for her unsupportive parents, who begin to worry she is a lesbian. Their solution is to send Megan to 'True Directions,' a "rehabilitation camp" run by homophobic counsellor Mary Brown. Soon Megan meets the equally defiant Graham, and the two form a fast friendship. Ironically, the more time Megan spends at the camp, the more …
Continue reading →
Once told they'd save the universe during a time-traveling adventure, 2 would-be rockers from San Dimas, California find themselves as middle-aged dads still trying to crank out a hit song and fulfil their destiny. What is the nature of reality? What does it mean to grow old without ever realising your full potential? Can love survive the confines of marriage? What are the true limits of…
Continue reading →
I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music! It is lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy. Thanks! I hate it! Ingredients Raspberry Pi USB floppy drive Audio Cable / Headphones USB Battery WHY?!?! As I discussed yesterday, it's possible to fit half an hour of speech on a single floppy disk. The best band in the world are The Beatles, and their shortest album is A Hard…
Continue reading →
An old 3.5 inch floppy disk holds 1.44 MB of data. According to my calculations, that's 1,424 KB blocks. For a total of 1,458,176 Bytes. Once formatted as FAT, you end up with 1,457,664 Bytes of storage. But how much audio can a floppy hold? (Here I mean wave based audio of human speech. It's trivial to fit more in using MIDI or speech synthesis.) I'm going to use "A Podcast Of Unnecessary…
Continue reading →
This rather generic USB Floppy Drive has just arrived for me to review. It's sold by Dainty / ChuangZhiJLB - but it has the same internals as every other floppy drive on the market. It worked instantly in Linux and MacOS. Shows up as a USB drive. Shove a disk in there and your OS should automagically mount it. Appears to draw about 500mW in power. The disk read and write speed is pretty good…
Continue reading →
The fine folks at Poweradd have sent me one of their gadgets to review. This is their 26800mAh USB-C power bank with Power Delivery. It's pretty similar to most normal portable batteries - but because it has USB-C-PD, it can charge MacBooks, Nintendo Switches, and other high-power devices! Let's take a look: In the box A big black battery. A weird hybrid cable. It is USB-A to Micro-USB…
Continue reading →
I am rubbish at video games. I don't have the twitch-reaction speed for shooters, I can never remember what all the buttons do, and I frequently get lost in open-world games. Basically, I'm the opposite of my wife, who will rattle through Dragon-Ages, Mass Effects, Spiders-Men and the like. Factorio is sort-of-like Sim City. Or Populous. You have an open, discoverable world, full of natural…
Continue reading →
This is annoying me. So I'm posting in the hope someone can tell me what obvious thing I am missing. I want to tap my phone against an NFC tag hidden in LP sleeve. Then I want my phone to automatically launch the Spotify app and for the app to display that album. This should be simple, but I can't get it to work. Get the album link Spotify gives me an option to copy the album link, or Spotify …
Continue reading →
A curio from the archives. Waaaaaay back in 2003, I was working at Vodafone on their graduate training scheme. One of their fancy new ideas was a crowd-sourced employee suggestion box for new business proposals. As an eager young grad I submitted dozens of ideas. Most of them were crap. But, as I looked back over them, this one struck me as being a lot less crap than others. Terence Eden is on…
Continue reading →
