You're a big Doctor Who fan, right? If I asked you what the world DALEK meant, you'd probably tell me that it is an anagram of KALED - the original name of their species. You'd be wrong. In 1965, it was clearly established by a canonical source, that the world DALEK stands for: Destroy without pity Attack without fear Live without conscience Eliminate without worry Kill, kill, kill, kill! I ain't even lying! WTAF? A few years ago, I picked up a copy of this - The DALEK World. A 1965…
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This is a rambly rant because I can't be bothered responding to every troll on the #DoctorWho hashtag. I've loved Flux - the latest season - and it fits in perfectly with the ethos of Doctor Who. So, let's knock down some common complaints, eh? iT's To POLIticALly CorREct wItH alL ThE GENdeR EqUAliTy The very first episode of Doctor Who had two men and two women in the lead roles. It has always strived for gender balance. Even in the Peter Davison era there were two female and one male…
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The Doctor and Rose arrive in an underground vault in Utah in the near future. The vault is filled with alien artefacts. Its billionaire owner, Henry van Statten, even has possession of a living alien creature, a mechanical monster in chains that he has named a Metaltron. Seeking to help the Metaltron, the Doctor is appalled to find it is in fact a Dalek – one that has survived the horrors of the Time War just as he has. And as the Dalek breaks loose, the Doctor is brought back to the b…
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No spoilers, sweetie :-) This evening's Doctor Who - The Bells of St John - revolves around mysterious WiFi signals. Alien SSIDs which, if you connect to them.... well, watch the episode to find out! In the show, they look like these: So, can we do the same thing for our home WiFi network? Yup! There are some limitations though. SSIDs can only have a maximum length of 32 byte. Those are usually interpreted as 8-bit characters, so if you're using multibyte Unicode characters, you're…
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Having moaned that my TARDIS was too full, I set on a quest to find another. The cardboard one I had appears to be the last of its kind - but I did manage to snag this beauty on eBay. It's a Panopticon '93 Officially licensed TARDIS - similar to this one on RetroTrader. Click to embiggen images. It's a little scuffed, but nothing a lick of paint can't fix. Of slight - very slight - annoyance is that it's a fraction too shallow to hold standard DVD cases and have the doors tightly…
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Mobile QR codes are fantastic. They're real-life hyperlinks. Snap them with your phone and go direct to a website. What could be better? The BBC, however, need a few lessons in how to optimise the experience. As part of their Prisoner Zero page - the BBC have an awesome "Wanted Poster". Here's the teaser image. Prisoner Zero - QR Code Let's take a look at the full QR code. This is about the size it would be if the poster were printed on A4. QR Code There are three problems with this…
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It shouldn't come as a surprise to any reader of this blog that I'm a phone geek. And a Doctor Who geek. So, image my utter nerdgasm when we got to see the 11th Doctor using a mobile he'd nicked. The burning question is which phone? Touchscreen It's quite hard to see throughout the episode. It just looks like a standard touchscreen device in a rubber casing. I had wondered if the props team had created a dummy phone to be used. What Phone? Annoyingly, the phone is almost always out of fo…
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I'm a shameless Doctor Who geek. I loved the first episode of the new series. But I wanted to point out a (minor?) plot hole in the episode. Slight spoilers here, so wait until you've seen the show. Towards the end, the Doctor is having a stand off with the Atari. He's discussing the planet Earth and asks... Is this world protected? The Atari play a montage of various baddies the Doctor has seen off including the Silurians / Sea Devils!) - but take a look at these three images. Ood Ev…
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