After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events? This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the…
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I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…
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My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…
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I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case I need it to log on to something. I don't want to faff around with physical SIMs, so I went looking for the cheapest way to keep my number for the longest time. There are a whole bunch of providers…
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I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation. It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of …
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I'll admit, I was a little sceptical about returning to Avenue Q. I saw it on its original West End run back in… OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD! FUCK! Where did the time go? It's always hard to know how much to update a show. Does it need constant reinvention to stay in the zeitgeist or can it be pickled forever as a classic? "I wish I had taken more pictures" was something that utterly resonated with …
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As discussed in my last blog post, the scumsuckers at Apollo.io have been giving out my personal details. Not only did they have my email address, they also had a copy of one of my phone numbers. I asked them where they got it from and they said: Your phone number came from Parsely, Inc (wpvip.com) one of our customers who participates in our customer contributor network by sharing their…
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Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address. A few weeks ago I signed up for BrowserStack as I wanted to join their Open Source programme. I had a few…
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When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …
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A delightful and emotional rendition of three rather different works. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Three Screaming Popes" was a chaotic cacophony. Wild, bizarre, inventive, and seemingly driven by excess. A fascinating performance, although not one I'll put on in the background. Turnage himself took to the stage to bask in the applause. Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1. Reading the story behind the …
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This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster. At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download. Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the moov atom at the end of the file was missing. I wondered if it would be possible to make a file format which was…
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There is no such thing as the Vitamin String Quartet. They're an ever-changing line-up of musicians who have found an excellent schtick; modern songs played like classical music. Somehow they've parlayed that into over 300 albums, covering thousands of artists, and dominating the soundtrack of Bridgerton. The concert is titled "The Music of Billie Eilish, Bridgerton, and Beyond" - it's all…
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