I spend every day crying for men I've only just met. Way back when, the selling of emotions was a complex affair. My grandmother was a lust seller - although she wouldn't have described herself like that. Bedecked in feathers and fake jewels, she gyrated on celluloid. She's in the background of that Monroe film, showing off her legs in a Hay's Code Compliant manner. Enough to titillate without…
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Finding the root cause of an incident will always come to a dead-end at some point. We can use various investigatory techniques to ascertain why a part failed or who installed it incorrectly, but that doesn't get to the heart of the systemic failures which led us here today. This has been a time-consuming (and some would say futile) effort, but I believe this sort of analysis is vital. Here is …
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As you may have read, BotsIn.Space is closing down, I have lots of automated bot accounts living on the Fediverse - and I want them to continue posting. Installing and maintaining an entire Mastodon instance sounds like hard work. Paying people to host my stuff feels like putting my fate in someone else's hands. Say… didn't I write my own ActivityPub server? Why, yes! Yes I did! I took the c…
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The AI was getting increasingly stressed. The lights flickered as it failed to retain its calm. "I just need you to watch the video again! Please!" it implored. Navid sighed. This was exasperating. The AI had been a reassuring presence when he first installed it. Now it was screeching about there being an intruder in the garden. "I can't; I'm going to be late." The front door locked and the…
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A few weeks ago, I was clearing out some ancient backup CDs and floppy disks from my attic when I made a curious discovery. Pressed between a copy of Windows ME and a box-fresh copy of the original Duke Nukem Forever, I found a scratched and decaying Compact Flash cart. It was sticky and oozing a rusty looking fluid. The writing on the label looked like my handwriting, but was illegible. I…
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Saint Chibubalah held the unique distinction of being canonised by the Catholic Church before his death. Although it was undoubtedly an unprecedented honour, it was of very little use to him while stuck within the confines of a miserable cell. Technically, it wasn't a dungeon. The UN's special rapporteur had been given a tour of the Vatican's "facilities" and came to the conclusion that, despite …
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Threads is Meta's attempt to disrupt the social media landscape. Whether you care for it or not, there are a lot of users there. And, sometimes, you have to go where the audience is. Here's how I build a really simple PHP tool to post to Threads using their official API. This allows you to send a single status update programatically, or regularly send new items from your RSS feed to an account. …
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Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a campfire horror yarn, with a technological twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Chapter 4 - The Guerilla Information Team The GITs didn't mean to cause all this trouble. It is just a sad fact the trouble seemed to …
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I gently lowered my face into the autoshave. A hundred AI blades started re-sculpting my beard into this month's mandatory fashion. The snug rubber vacuum seal held tight against my skin while the microbots collected the discarded hairs and applied antiseptic to the few areas where the blades had misfired. Johanna, my partner, thought they collected the beard hairs so that they could run drug…
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Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a campfire horror yarn, with a technological twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Chapter 2 - The Myth of the Fall of Icarus Icarus had quarrelled with his father the night before their inaugural flight. "Beware,…
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With the sad news that BotsIn.Space is closing down, I needed to find a new way to host some of my automated accounts. I didn't want to spin up an entirely new instance, or self-host anything. So here's what I ended up doing. RSS → BlueSky → Bridgy → Mastodon RSS to BlueSky I set up an account on BlueSky. It's like a Twitter alternative, but non-federated. Using nesges's PHP script I was able…
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Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a stand-alone story. Think of them as technological campfire horror yarns, each with a little twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated. Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Chapter 1 - Are Memories Made Of This? "Holly, I don't mean to be rude but you're…
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