An abandoned warehouse in Deptford hosts one of the most audacious, ostentatious, and sumptuous shows I've ever attended. An immersive theatrical experience which is lush with texture, ambitious in scope, and yet - somehow - slightly less than the sum of its parts. The pre-show is exemplary. You're handed a lanyard with a room number and make your way through the imposing set until you find…
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The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance. I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you don't know, modern ePub books are just HTML wrapped in a zip file. They have all of the accessibility advantages of the web and should be easy to…
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Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a lot. As a consequence, their battery life is generally poor. The industry's…
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Dr Hibbett - he of the eponymous and well-regarded Hibbert Method - has taken the "Sing Your Thesis" concept to a brand new level. Who is Doctor Doom? I have only a passing interest in the increasingly convoluted Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I walked into this new comedy show with no idea. I assumed a baddie of some sort? I left with, if not a university education on the subject, then a…
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It looks like the new Google's Pixel 4 watch comes with yet another incompatible change in charging technology. This is a ridiculous situation. The original Pixel Watch used one type of wireless charging. Then the Pixel Watch 2 & 3 removed wireless charging and swapped to a different charging mechanism. And now the 4 has changed again. So three different charging cables in under three years.…
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I was lucky enough to score tickets to last-night's dress rehearsal. It would be unfair to review this like a completed show, instead this is a preview on what to expect and some thoughts on the "immersive" genre. Very mild spoilers ahead. I never really got the concept behind Secret Cinema. It seemed like an overhyped cult with its mish-mash of festival, improvisation workshop, and collective …
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Janice Hallett is back with another epistolary mystery. Told through a series of transcribed conversations, WhatsApp messages, and torn-out pages from diaries - we the reader have to piece together the facts and crack the case! Much like her previous novels - The Appeal and The Twyford Code - you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief a fair bit. Do people really talk like that when they…
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If you hung around video arcades in your youth, you would have seen this message burned into the phosphor of a thousand dying CRTs. Obviously this was a devilish psyop by those gits who wanted kids to stop sniffing glue and having fun. The bastards! But there's a more serious side to the corny message. Are you a winner if you've cheated? Lance Armstrong "won" multiple Toures de France. It…
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I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future! The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not …
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While spelunking through the caverns of Wikipedia, I came across a biography which contained this curious claim: She was the youngest and first woman to receive a British House of Commons Shield. That sounds like a fantastic achievement! But, and I hate to bring fact-checking to an argument, what is it? Looking around the web, I could only find three mentions of this no-doubt prestigious…
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The ePub format is the cross-platform way to package an eBook. At its heart, an ePub is just a bundled webpage with extra metadata - that makes it extremely easy to build workflows to create them and apps to read them. Once you've finished authoring your ePub, you've got a folder full of HTML, CSS, metadata documents, and other resources. The result is then stored in a standard Zip file and is…
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I tell you what, that George Bernard Shaw knows how to write a witty one-liner! This play doesn't exactly have them rolling in the aisles - being about the seedy underpinnings of modern society - but it packs in more hilarious bon mots than many other plays on the West End. Speaking of other plays, I'm not sure when Sir Sadiq Khan passed a law saying every show in London must have a revolving…
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