A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future. 1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming. 2022: Tess, a time-traveling geologist, journeys to different eras for her research, while secretly hoping to correct a …
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You've heard of the AI Winter, right? The period where funding for AI dried up due to products failing to meet their hype. I think we're now in Springtime For Crypto - named after the musical "Springtime for Hitler" from movie The Producers - where scams abound. You should take a couple of hours to watch The Producers. Either the 1967 classic movie, or the 2005 remake will do. The pivotal moment in the film is when Leo Bloom has this stunning realisation: "Amazing. It's absolutely amazing.…
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Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception and p…
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Four years ago, I reviewed the LG-R105 360 Camera. It's a pretty nifty bit of hardware. Sadly, LG have decided that they don't want to support it any more. They already got your money, so fuck you for expecting any further updates. Here's their message: We express a sincere gratitude for your patronage to LG 360 CAM Manager Service. Due to changes in our operation policies, LG 360 CAM Manager Service via mobile applications will be terminated as of June 20, 2020. Well, that's a load of…
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(Mostly notes to myself.) If you have a lot of images in a directory, and want to quickly make an image montage, here's how to do it on Linux using ImageMagick. First up, this command finds all JPG file, then resizes them so they fit in a maximum box of 256x256, then sets the quality to 75%, then saves them as JPGs: find ./ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -exec mogrify -verbose -format jpg -layers Dispose -resize 256\>x256\> -quality 75% {} + This will overwrite your existing files so make sure you…
Continue reading →Last year, I set myself a challenge to only read books by women. I got through 42 books - not bad for a pandemic! This year I was more relaxed - I just picked books which took my fancy. And a few that I needed to read for my MSc. Quite a few came from NetGalley which gives out Advance Reader Copies. So I got to read unpublished books for free in exchange for a review. My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules) and, I'm somewhat surprised to say, I read 85 books! I try to spend what …
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I hate the way modern workplaces make you beg for feedback. Something about the forcing of humanity into little boxes and vague sentiments really gets my goat. So, this year, I added an extra question to my validation-seeking questionnaire. As well as asking how I did this year, what I could do better, where we can work together in the future etc etc blah blah - I added a little bonus. A multiple choice question from the Voight-Kampff test. And, to my delight, my colleagues answered! What…
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It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. Like lots of you, I guess, it kind of feels like a year of stasis and stagnation. The last year seems to have whizzed by. Most of it spent in the same house - with only occasional forays to OutsideLand. A couple of day-trips to the coast, a few doctor's appointments, and one funeral. I feel like we got off lightly. I've completed one year of my MSc. I have mixed…
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When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realised, the Lord doesn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked Him to forgive me Emo Philips Perhaps, in the context of technology, you've heard the phrase "Better to seek forgiveness than beg for permission"? It's usually said when someone is trying to do something that the "grown-ups" in the organisation probably won't like. It will take ages for someone to approve X - so let's just do it anyway because its…
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Kevin Kelly has written an insightful blog post about Class 1 / Class 2 Problems. I encourage you to read it. I agree with the thesis, but not the specific conclusion. Blockchain tech could unleash collaborations of several million members working on one project in real time, or orgs that are far more leaderless than today. How? Projects like the Linux Kernel already have thousands of contributors - it may well be the largest, most distributed successful tech project. But it's not clear…
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The tyrannous Huntsmen have declared everyone in one village to be outlaws, since they insist on supporting the magical beings of neighbouring Darkwood. Why won’t they accept that magic is an abomination? Far from being abominable, the residents of Darkwood are actually very nice when you get to know them, even Snow the White Knight, who can get a bit tetchy when people remind her she’s a Princess. In order to stop the Huntsmen from wiping out all magical beings, Snow and her friends hav…
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I spent last Thursday at COP26 - as part of the Open UK delegation. It was an amazing day - which filled me with hope. As it was my first large in-person event since the Before-Times, I was extremely nervous about how it would go. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of Amanda Brock, May Cheung and their small army of volunteers it was a flawless event - all held in a magnificent set of tents. Here are a few of my highlights from the day: An excellent question posed in the session about future …
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