There's an old joke about a man who reads his morning paper in bed. If he's not listed in the obituaries, he gets up to start his day. A few months ago I was checking my email in bed (always a bad idea) when the vanity alert I have for my name appeared. Google took great delight in telling me that "Terence Eden passed away peacefully..." I had a minor heart attack and continued reading, "...at …
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This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in another country, downloading wallpapers, and uploading my poor attempts at…
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As we head unto an AI dominated future, the Turing test will probably become less like a Voight-Kampff test and more like a warzone Shibboleth. Yesterday, I asked the Alexa to set a timer. "What do you want to name your timer?" She It asked. "Bow," I replied. "Bow timer set," it said. Except… that isn't quite right. I wanted a timer for my bāo buns (包). That's pronounced /baʊ/ - as in to bow o…
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It's not often I go to a movie premiere. And it's less often that I go to a movie premiere of a film starring my mum! Straight 8 is an intriguing idea for a film competition. Film-makers have exactly one roll of Super8 film - which runs to about 3 minutes. The only editing they can do is in-camera. There's no audio - a soundtrack is submitted separately. And the first time they see the film is…
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The good folks at InfiRay have sent me their latest Infrared camera to review. It is tiny. It's smaller than a normal USB stick and barely weighs anything. Shove the USB-C protrusion into your Android phone, launch the app, and... nope - that's it! Pretty much instantly plug and play. There's also a reasonably long USB-C extension cable, so you can poke the camera in small places without…
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I have a screenshot of my phone's screen. It shows an app's user interface and a photo in the middle. Something like this: If I set the compression to be lossy - the photo looks good but the UI looks bad. If I set the compression to be lossless - the UI looks good but the filesize is huge. Is there a way to selectively compress different parts of an image? I know WebP and AVIF are pretty…
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Yet another compendium of Chinese sci-fi stories - and there are some great stories in this collection. There are also some essays about what makes Chinese science fiction Chinese. Based on my (limited) experience, I'd say one of the defining characteristics of the Chinese SF I've read is the way exposition is dispensed with and replaced by poetry. Mankind streamed across the river of time,…
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I finished watching Frasier over lockdown - the miserable tale of a self-destructive incel - and decided to continue watching old American sitcoms. I thought Cheers was a hellish dystopia populated with malicious tormentors. So now on to M*A*S*H. It's hailed as a masterpiece of comedy. But, really, it's an exercise in military propaganda. The first season is genuinely hilarious and, at times,…
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Due to a strange mix-up with an eBay order, I've come into possession of these rather quaint anti-suffragette postcards. I hope it is obvious that I am pro universal suffrage. What amuses me about these cards is how emotional they are! These aren't dispassionate arguments designed to calmly influence the rational man. It is all pure emotion! Looking through the archives of anti-suffragette…
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Should my bank be able to block me from using their Android app, just because my phone is rooted? I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that... yeah, it's fair that they get to decide their own risk tolerance. Sage of the Internet, and general Sooth Sayer, Cory Doctorow once gave an impassioned speech on "The Coming War on General Computation". I'll let you read the whole thing but, I…
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I once described my ideal coding environment to a colleague as "telneting directly into prod and damn the consequences!" I jest. But only a little. When I build for myself I treat best practices and coding styles as harmful. Chaotic evil but, hey, it's only myself I'm hurting. Anyway, my wife and I run a hobby site - OpenBenches.org - which was coded in a long alcopop fueled weekend. It's fair…
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Well, this is a glorious mess! The puppetry is astounding. The grey-clad puppeteers manipulate their charges with grace, precision, and joy. The work is so much more intricate than, say, Avenue Q. The mannerisms of the Tom Cruise doll are perfectly executed, with subtle moments of genius. The puppets range from miniscule to gigantic, with some requiring multiple people to bring them to life. …
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