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I've thoroughly enjoyed all of Janice Hallett's previous crime books . The Examiner is, frankly, more of the same - and I'm happy with that! You, the reader, are given a series of transcripts and have to work out what crime (if any) has been committed. You don't find out who the victim(s) is/are until reasonably far through the story. The characters are well realised (although a little similar to some of her others). The twists are shockingly good and will make you flick back to see if you could...

After my recent presentation at FOSDEM, someone asked a pretty reasonable question. What does it cost to run OpenBenches ? It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. It was designed to be as low cost while also being useful. Here's the breakdown: Hosting - £171 per year Our biggest expense but, I think, our most reasonable. Krystal charges around £342 for a 2 year contract. That inc...

This is Star Trek before Star Trek. It is Alien long before Alien. It is the template for so much modern science fiction. What it is not is particularly good. I don't intend to dump on the classics (and this is undoubtedly a classic) but 1950s sci-fi takes place in an almost alien media environment. Even if you ignore the anachronisms ( like having to develop film in order to see photographs ) and the archaic language (lots of vibrators being used against a big pussy) it is hard to get over how ...

Email isn't an obvious business benefit. Imagine it is the early 1980s and you need to communicate with people across the country. A first-class letter will cost you 17p - about 60p in today's money . The letter will be delivered the next day and you'll have your answer back the day after. By contrast, a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that's before you take into account message transmission costs. That's roughly the same price as sending over 8,000 letter...

Is it possible to "die well"? We have midwives for births, should we have "deathwives" for the other end of our lives? I think this book was recommended to me in the depths of the pandemic. I was too much of a chicken to read it while those around me were dying. The book aims to normalise the process of death and mostly succeeds. Unlike a lot of books, it doesn't just identify a problem - it provides pages of solutions. Every chapter ends with a series of questions to ask yourself (or your loved...

You've read the books, listened to the original radio performances, re-read the books, worn the t-shirt - and now it is time to be part of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. * Cue the music from Flight of the Sorcerer * This is a 90-ish minute immersive experience. As well as a full cast of actors and a puppet android, there are ✨celebrity✨ voice cameos. And songs! So many songs! Pre Show I'm always interested in how shows build excitement before a performance . We were encouraged to arrive e...

So! Much! Melodrama! This is a gently funny (and slightly tragic) romp with a band of travelling vagrants actors as they attempt to ply their renditions of Shakespeare to an indifferent 1700ish audience. There's a lot of charm to the characters and the plot is relatively straightforward. The characters are a bit one-note. The baddie never actually twirls his moustache - but you'll instantly picture him doing it every time he appears. The others very much stay in their lane; the feisty woman who ...

One of the dreams of Web 2.0 was that website would speak unto website. An "Application Programming Interface" (API) would give programmatic access to structured data, allowing services to seamlessly integrate content from each other. Users would be able to quickly grab data from multiple sources and use them for their own purposes. No registration or API keys, no tedious EULAs or meetings. Just pure synergy! Is that dream dead? If so, what killed it? A decade ago, I posted a plea looking for Ea...

This book is excellent at describing the symptoms of madness which have beset the world. It expertly diagnoses the causes which have led so many people into a mirror-realm of fantasy. Sadly it falls short of prescribing a cure. I doubt anyone who has fallen into the conspiracy mindset will read this book - but I hope if you read it you will become inoculated against the brain-worms. Let's start at the beginning. If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof....

I'm absolutely addicted to the Reddit's UK Personal Finance forum - where people mutually support each other through the difficult world of managing one's personal finances. It's a great community and full of people eager to help others. In amongst the confusion around pensions, tips for budgeting, and complaining about debt-collectors is a persistent drumbeat encouraging people to save money. Good! More people should save more money. But the advice is always undercut with the message "sticking ...

After the pretty good Her Majesty's Royal Coven , the excellent Shadow Cabinet , the law of reverting to the mean hits the conclusion of Juno Dawson's Witches of Hebden Bridge trilogy. By now you know the tropes - Bitchy-Witches, 90s pop-culture references, and wry chapter titles. It's all done well enough, the plot is a little twisty, the story entertaining, and the repeated mentions of Buffy are only a little too self-referential. The continual pop-culture references are a bit blunt and, in al...

Notes to myself because I keep forgetting. tl;dr Unzip it into the /opt/ directory. I want to install Filezilla - so I can SFTP files around. Sadly, the Flatpak version is unmaintained and the version in apt is out of date. Luckily, you can download the zipped version . Their Wiki helpfully says : If you have special needs, don't have sufficient rights to install programs or don't like installers, the zip version is there for you. A zip-file is a file that contains files inside of it. They are p...

This is a hugely extended version of Will Harris' "An oral history of Airplane" . It goes through the pre-history of the project, how it eventually got made, and the aftermath. In many ways, it is like an old-fashioned DVD extra. The whole book consists of snippets of interviews with the cast, crew, and various talking heads. Like all DVD special features, it is fairly sycophantic. Yes, there are some good-natured swipes at the people who passed on the script, but it is a bit of a Hollywood love...

Problem: I've received a PDF which has a large "watermark" obscuring every page. Investigating: Opening the PDF in LibreOffice Draw allowed me to see that the watermark was a separate image floating above the others. Manual Solution: Hit page down, select image, delete, repeat 500 times. BORING! Further Investigating: Using pdftk , it's possible to decompress a PDF. That makes it easier to look through manually. pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress Hey presto! A PDF you can open in a tex...

The problem with fans is that we want to know everything . What did Lennon eat for breakfast the day he recorded Imagine? Which colour pencil did the script editor use on our favourite episode of Doctor Who? Did the costume designer on Buffy secretly sneak in Masonic references in that extra's shirt?!?! There's no trivia so obscure that it won't be referenced somewhere, debated endlessly, and eventually schism'd. The problem with Doctor Who histories is that the real fans know all there is to kn...

My mother, the actress Carrie Cohen , once had a blazing argument with Anthony Hopkins 0 . He was saying that he preferred appearing in Hollywood blockbusters compared to appearing on the stage because nothing was more boring than playing Hamlet for the 100th time. My mother's contention was that he was talking rubbish. The joy of repeated performance is finding new and interesting ways to bring the character to life. Even after a hundred performances, you will still be able to discover exciting...

What - and I cannot stress this enough - the actual ever-loving fuck!? 0 OK, perhaps it was a mistake to start reading this while on an international flight. The book concerns Linda, a content moderator at an endlessly sub-contracted tech company, who is in love with planes. No, strike that, she is excessively sexually attracted to the idea of dying in a plane crash. Yeah. The story goes though all her attempts to, effectively, manifest an in-air disaster through the power of wishful thinking an...

This is an astounding bit of high-concept sci-fi. Imagine a world where crossing a border literally split your body in two. A young woman emigrates from South Korea - one version of her stays in Seoul, another version goes off to live in New York. This is the way humanity has always existed. People bifurcating and dealing with the consequences. It is heady stuff. The book spans life, love, politics, religion, and folklore. It layers on narrative and meta-narrative. Like any debut novel, there ar...

Lander 23 had a few pre-launch glitches, but is now up and running in Woolwich. It is a fun enough experience, but could be a whole lot more with some tweaks. In a team of four, you are split into two groups. One group operates a baffling array of switches and has to direct the other group around a ruined city because of [under developed plot point]. Only by working together can you… well, it is unclear. Something to do with energy? Think of it a bit like a longer game of "The Crystal Maze". Ove...

I was recently prompted to test my blog's layout when rendered in right-to-left text . Running a website through an automatic translator into a language like Arabic or Hebrew will show you any weird little layout glitches which might occur. But mechanical translation is a bit of an unthinking brute. In this example, I had a code snippet which contained the word "link". Should that word be translated? Obviously not! The code isn't valid unless the element name is in English - and it probably does...