I'm a sucker for anything Star Wars. So when my Oculus Quest told me I could fight Darth Vader in VR, I leapt at the chance. I kinda wish I hadn't bothered. There is very little "game" here. It's barely an interactive movie. Walk forward until you step on a trigger, watch a very slow cut scene, wave your arms until something happens, repeat a few times, roll credits. That's it. There's nothing …
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Ach. This is a hard one to give a lower review score to. I loved MRK's Lady Astronaut series - but this crime-thriller fell a little short of the mark for me. Part of the problem with setting a whodunnit in the future is that you have to assume criminal detection technology gets better. That means an author has to find a way to nobble cameras with privacy force-fields and bypass biometric…
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There are lots of new image compression formats out there. They excel at taking large, complex pictures and algorithmically reducing them to smaller file sizes. All of the comparisons I've seen show how good they are at squashing down big files. I wanted to go the other way. How good are modern codecs at dealing with tiny files? Using GIMP, I created an image which was a single white pixel,…
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I'm loving the fact that BBC iPlayer has all the classic Who stories available to stream. I've been dipping in and out of the ones I don't have in my DVD collection. Paradise Towers is a brilliant story. It is well directed (which makes a nice change) and the story actually makes sense (mostly). The set decoration and story elements directly influence the modern series. And - most importantly of …
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You type in to your browser's address bar example.com and it automatically redirects you to the https:// version. How does your browser know that it needed to request the more secure version of a website? The answer is... A big list. The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) list is a list of domain names which have told Google that they always want their website served over https. If the user …
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In "Theory Of Games And Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the authors discuss the card game of poker. There are dozens of variations of poker, each with their own intricacies. But they all boil down to the same pattern - is my hand stronger than your hand? Here's how the authors frame it: Since a “square deal” amounts to assuming that all possible hands are dealt wit…
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The 2016 film "Passengers", with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, is a gruesome study in "because of the implication". JLaw's character wakes on a spaceship to discover that only Pratt's character is alive and has prematurely roused her from her slumber. She has, in effect, been murdered and the only way she can pacify this dangerous man is to sleep with him. It is a grim film. WHAT IF THAT…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my predictions for 2023, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. So here are my five predictions for 2024 AI Genocide It is obvious that Large Language Models are based on stolen material. I suspect that a lawsuit will determine that at least one of the major players has to delete all copies of their AI. They will refuse …
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OK. What the actual fuck? This starts off as a rather charming period piece - 1920s hotel will all the guests snowed in - and then gradually descends into horrifying madness. I'm used to the bizarre worlds created by Kate Mascarenhas - but this took the creepiness up to an extreme level. There's an almost fetish-like description of the scenery which helps with the world building. At first I…
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One of the things I love about having a database-backed blog like WordPress is that's it opens up a delightful range of possibilities for displaying content. I've read and reviewed around 300 books over the last few years. So I wrote a scrap of code which goes through all my book reviews, grabs their cover and rating, and displays them in a nice grid. You can visit it at shkspr.mobi/blog/library …
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The nice thing about short story collections is that you never waste too much time if one of them is a bit of a dud. This contains some lovely tales of madness and despair. Some are high fantasy and some innovative sci-fi. A particular stand-out is Anuja Mitra's "Plague Year" - it's an almost joyous what-if of a pandemic tale. Similarly, Melanie Harding-Shaw's "Data Migration" brilliantly…
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Girl Power! Women deserve the vote and the right to a life of crime! This is the potted history of a criminal gang operating out of London. It's full of villainesses, shoplifterixen, and thievettes. A disreputable bunch of complex characters on a crime-spree fuelled by women's lib and abject poverty. Each biography could be its own movie - forget Peaky Blinders, this is the true story of an…
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