Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance. Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies: There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points. Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the…
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Computer Science encryption · 10 comments · 3,000 words · Viewed ~1,257 times.
Imagine, just for a moment, that a mathematical breakthrough had occurred on the eve of the second World War. Perhaps Turing or Rejewski or Driscoll realised that prime number theory held the key to unbreakable encryption. This blog post attempts to answer the question "could public-key cryptography have been used in 1939?" Let's briefly step back into history. The Enigma machine represented…
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hue IoT lights Smart Home · 11 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~231 times.
Written because it pissed me off. I hope this helps you in your hour of need. You have to do one bulb at a time. If you plug in multiple bulbs and try to pair them, it won't work. I don't know why. You will need a portable lamp - or some other way to bring the bulb as close as possible to the hub. Open the Hue app, go through the "Add Device" sequence. The app changes regularly and may be…
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gadget infrared review thermal · 2 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~201 times.
I've reviewed several thermal imaging products over the years. They range from tiny USB-C add-ons to professional quality hulking great handhelds. Topdon have sent me a mid-point model to review. It's relatively cheap for a thermal imaging product - only £140 on Amazon. I think the sensor is made by Raytrontek. But is it any good? While it has a bunch of useful features, there's no video …
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Amazon Book Review · 400 words
This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into what its future holds. Or, as the rather academic intro puts it: The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: …
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Book Review feminism · 1 comment · 2,100 words · Viewed ~311 times.
This is the best book on practical feminism that I've read. Because it is long out of print, I had to get the British Library to pull this book out of the archives for me. I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) which is a series of mini-autobiographies of prominent women. One of them was Dame Caroline Haslett - an electrical…
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AI git LLM spam · 2 comments · 950 words · Viewed ~2,705 times.
Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said: 😱 I Can't Use On This Day 😭 Seriously, What’s Going On?! 🔍 I’ve been trying to use the On This Day feature, but it’s just not working for me! 😩 Every time I input my d…
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dns internet trivia · 11 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~36,398 times.
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They …
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Book Review · 200 words
I did not care for this book at all. It is a dreary crime novel where - shock! horror! - someone has stolen a book. And, yes, it is the obvious suspect. Much like The Martian Contingency I found the lead character profoundly irritating. A miserable protagonist who is completely ineffectual and refuses to take even the most minor of actions. Her self-loathing drips off the page and smothers any…
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hacking Hacktoberfest t-shirt · 2 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~1,566 times.
Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023. I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only wears free conference t-shirts. GDS@GDSTeamWe support open source. And we’ve got the t-shirts to prove it (thanks @…
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forms politics · 6 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~401 times.
I recently read an interesting article about Accountability Sinks. In it, the author argues that part of the reason for having business processes is that they diffuse accountability. Every one of us has tried to have an argument with an employee of a big company, and it always goes like this: the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on …
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Book Review comedy · 200 words · Viewed ~287 times.
There are some characters whose tone of voice is inimitable. You cannot fail to read this without Diane Morgan's languid cadence echoing in your big empty head. The book has been written with a very specific pace - one chuckle per paragraph, a big laugh every page, and a set number of uncontrollable giggles per chapter. Somewhat formulaic, but highly effective. I kept highlighting bits of it…
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