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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People like to send me gadgets to review. My motto is "if it has a USB-C port, I'll review it!" So the good people at Flexispot have sent me a chair with a USB-C port. Fair play! This is the Lotus XR6 Recliner Chair - the electric variant of the XC6. Here's what it looks like when assembled: And once fully reclined: Not completely flat, but good enough for a quick snooze! Tech Specs …
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Some people like to receive this blog via email. I previously used JetPack to send out subscriber messages - but it became increasingly clear that Automattic isn't a good steward of such things. I couldn't find any services which would let me send a few thousand subscribers a few emails per week, at zero cost. So, redecentralise! I installed phpList which is an open source email campaign tool. …
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Markdown is, I think it is fair to say, a frustrating "specification". It's origins are a back-of-a-fag-packet document and a buggy Perl script - and we've been dealing with the consequences ever since. There are now multiple Markdown parsers, each with their own idiosyncrasies. To make matters worse, there's a set of extensions popularly known as "Markdown Extra". Extra has support for things…
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