Last year, I reviewed the X-Sense wireless interlinked smoke alarms. They were a multipack of smoke alarms - set one off in the kitchen and the one in your bedroom will start chirping. As I noted at the time, they were only smoke alarms. Without an interlinked heat alarm, they may not have been compliant with Scottish legislation. Well, I'm pleased to say the fine folk at X-Sense have released…
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(This is a rant because I'm exhausted after debugging something. If you've made RegEx your whole personality, I'm sorry.) The other day I had to fix a multi-line Regular Expression (RegEx). After a few hours of peering at it with a variety of tools, I finally understood the problem. Getting that deep into the esoteric mysteries made me feel like a powerful wizard with complete mastery of my…
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I've been reading lots of books about race, justice, and history. One of the things which confused me when I started this journey was the notion that race is a construct. But then I started reading about how Blumenbach literally invented the concept of distinct human races. And about how the discredited "Science" of race is making a comeback. And then about the Philosophy of Race weaves its…
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A few years ago, I tried out that Seek Thermal Compact Infrared Camera which is a USB addon for phones. It was a good gadget, but had a number of compromises to get it into such a small form-factor. I've just been sent the TopDon TC004 handheld thermal camera to review. It's a chunky beast of a device. About the same size as a large barcode scanner - and pretty weighty. It promises superb…
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If you're a Doctor Who fan, this post contains a lovely little surprise at the end. I promise you it'll be worth it. For a few years now, I've been running a blog series about the Mobile Phones of Doctor Who. I'm only human, so I occasionally miss some of the devices. A reader contacted me to say I'd missed three phones from the Series 10 episode Pyramid at the End of the World. Firstly, a…
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I read an interesting discussion the other day about why humans (mostly) don't eat carnivorous mammals. It boiled down to a few main points: Carnivores often don't taste good due to their relative lack of fat and stringy muscles. Aggressive animals are hard to domesticate. What do you feed them? 1 and 2 are manageable. A few centuries of selective breeding and I'm sure you'll have a…
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I ordered some pills off the Internet and swallowed them! What could possibly go wrong? Let's get one thing out of the way first. I am not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. This blog post is not medical advice. (more…) …
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After reading Laline Paull's The Bees, I was eager to read her next work. The Bees was about Bees, obviously. Pod is about a pod of dolphins - and their oceanic friends and society. Weirdly, this is the third book I've read from the perspective of cetaceans. Both The Idiot Gods and Startide Rising deal with similar themes - how to represent the complex world of sea creatures into sometime…
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This film is a masterpiece. Sure, the plot is nothing special ("What is the dark secret behind this seemingly idyllic life?!?) but it is directed with such flare and texture that it becomes a joy to watch. I can't remember when I last saw something which kept me engrossed just through the sheer inventiveness of its design. I love going into movies without knowing anything about them. I'd seen…
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"How long have you been vegetarian?" Asked the waitress. "Oh, over twenty years now," I replied. She looked concerned. "Some people find the 3D printed steak a bit..." she paused, considered, and continued, "A bit intense. It takes people by surprise how it makes them feel. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd eat it again." With that, she swept off with our cocktail orders. Unity Diner is a…
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Punch was a satirical magazine first published in Victorian London. It had a long and noble history of poking fun at... well, just about every fashionable idea of the day. Anyone who pricked the public's conscious probably found themselves lampooned within its pages. Charles Babbage - inventor of the first mechanical computer - found himself starring in a few articles. Here's a scan of one…
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Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies are trying to recreate Mommy tidying their room via AI, Uber is trying to eat the world, algorithms leave us in…
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