A million years ago, I was helping advise an analogue office who were thinking about making the great leap forward to the digital future. I was sat in the boss's office extolling the virtues of digitisation. "How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently. "Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. He pressed a switch on his (landline) phone. "Miss Moneypenny? Could you bring us, let's…
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I think everyone reading this post has accidentally messed up when sending an email, right? I noticed this story recently: The Metropolitan Police has apologised to victims of the Westminster "honeytrap" scandal after it accidentally sent an email which named all of them. … the sender, a detective sergeant in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection unit, included the recipients’ names in the CC section of the email, rather than BCC, which would have concealed their identities. …
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Android is belatedly getting a Bluetooth tracker feature which doesn't rely on proprietary apps. Long-time readers will know that back in 2016 I reviewed both the Chipolo and the TinTag. Both of those were adequate at finding things which were in range of your phone, but hopeless at finding lost items - because they required everyone to have a special app installed. But now, under pressure from Apple's incredible Find My network, Google has started rolling out a similar service to modern…
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"Mirror Mirror on the wall. What's the hottest gadget of them all?" Do you need a mirror which is connected to the Internet? Yes. Obviously. What's the point of having anything which doesn't have an IP address‽ The good folks at Infrared Group don't want me shivering while I blog, so they've sent me their latest Far Infrared heating panel which, obviously, is also a smart mirror. 350W of heat, enough for a 6m room, and a cool little display to tell you the weather. Let's put it through its p…
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I love ripping off good ideas from other people's blogs. I was reading Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida's blog when I saw this nifty little force-directed graph: When zoomed in, it shows the relation between posts and tags. In this case, I can see that the posts about Small Gods and Pyramids both share the tags of Discworld, Fantasy, and Book Review. But only Small Gods has the tag of Religion. Isn't that cool! It is a native feature of Quartz's GraphView. How can I build something like that…
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I've got a bunch of travel coming up to exotic locations. Previously, I've bought a local SIM card when I've landed - but they're often expensive, fiddly to fit, and queuing in an airport isn't much fun. I've also bought pre-paid SIMs which have a fixed amount of data or only last a specific amount of time. But the big problem with those solutions is that you lose a fair bit of value unless you exhaust the SIM. If you buy a month-long package but are only on holiday for a week, that's a…
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My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity, focus, mise-en-scène, proper lighting and a thousand-and-one details that I've never even thought of. Paul has published an essay about official photographs of politicians. In it, he …
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Lots of people using banking apps on their Android phones. They're a convenient way to check your balance, transfer money to people, and get alerts about fraudulent transactions. But, like anything related to money, they can be abused. Nowadays, thieves are not only snatching phones, but forcing their owners to transfer money to the thieves. This is not an isolated incident. How can you protect yourself from such a situation? Broadly speaking, there are four ways to protect your sensitive…
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This starts out as a delightfully silly and charming book about the bureaucracy of Time Travel and ends up as something darker and more thought provoking. What would happen if the UK Civil Service had access to TIME TRAVEL!?!?! It's a brilliant idea for a novel and is written with a seemingly-real understanding of the number of forms, systems, emails, and subterfuge needed to set up such a premise. It is perfectly observed - both in terms of the protagonists' lived experience and their…
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I read this brilliant blog post by Wouter Groeneveld looking at how many dead links there were on his blog. I thought I'd try something similar. What is a broken link? Every day, I look at the On This Day page of my blog and look at that day's historic posts. I click on every link to see if it is still working. If it isn't, I have a few options. If the site is working, but the content has moved, I change the link to point at the content. If the site is dead, or the content isn't there, I…
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Either I'm particularly thick, or this is the most over-written and under-explained academic claptrap I've read in some time. Some of the language is pure poetry: the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion It doesn't actually mean anything. You have to be able to parse unexplained concepts like "an oedipal calendar" and deal with interminable footnotes which blithely declare "postmodernism release heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened". …
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Welcome to this very silly series of blog posts where I attempt to identify all the mobile phones used in Doctor Who. The 2024 Xmas special is fairly light on phones. Right at the end, we see Ruby Sunday calling her mum. And a shot of the base of the phone. It looks like it's the same phone as last season albeit now in a bright yellow case. Probably a Pixel 5 The only other phone-like device is Joy's Mum's iPad. I've no idea which model iPad that is, but it looks like the case…
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