Our competitor was a dud - and we still lost


BBC Headline talking about the competition.

Nine years later and I'm still bitter - and that's an unhealthy emotion. So I'm blogging as a form of catharsis. Back in 2012, I was taking the fledgling "QRpedia" project to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We had a cool little invention - stick a QR code on a museum exhibit and when a […]

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How to track down the original owners of stolen Twitter accounts


The Twitter logo drawn in circles.

Recently, one of the accounts I follow on Twitter was hijacked. It was turned into a PS5 giveaway scam. The people who hijacked the account changed the name, avatar, and deleted all the previous Tweets. Here's how I found who the original owner was, and managed to contact them. A Twitter account has a screen […]

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Let's Disrupt TV Advertising!


An old fashioned CRT TV. It is blank.

Matt Webb has a whimsical blog about buying unused TV advertising space. There are a bunch of shows on streaming services which have ad-breaks unfilled. Mostly, I assume, because everyone hates adverts and no one can afford to buy anything right now. Matt proposes that he hyper-targets his friends and family with fun little messages. […]

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(Mostly) Vegan


Vegetarian sashimi on a bed of ice.

I've been a vegetarian for 21 years. And, last year, I became (mostly) vegan. Because my bum kept falling off. I'd been getting frequent stomach cramps and "gastrointestinal distress" which culminated in a nice man from the NHS shoving a camera up me to see if my guts were rotten. They were not (aside from […]

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Book Review: How To Invent Everything


Book cover.

This is an entertaining, useful, and thoroughly tedious book. Imagine your time machine went wrong and you were stranded in the past. How could you "invent" the technology needed to improve the world, At its heart is a potted history of every piece of technology required for modern civilisation. Short and entertaining chapters which discuss […]

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Book Review: The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis


A young woman stares over a chess board.

The novelisation of the TV series! OK, OK, the book was written nearly 40 years before the Netflix miniseries. But it is uncanny how close the two are. Most adaptation are really "creative reimaginings" of the source material. Taking liberties with the source material, introducing new, relatable characters, and monkeying around with the plot. But […]

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How do I know you?


Geoff Don't Answer.

I don't have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don't remember them. I've had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I've drawn a blank. My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've […]

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It's cheaper because we pass the risk on to you!


Person walking through the snow.

Texas is under a mountain of snow. As the energy grid struggles, the law of supply-and-demand kicks in. Electricity prices climb ever higher. The wholesale cost rises. And doesn't stop rising. Some people signed up to "Griddy" a service which charges users the wholesale rate for electricity. In normal times, that might be a good […]

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Stop this digital ownership madness. NFTs are bullshit. And the stupid makes me angry.


Fraud alert warning signs.

(A hastily written and grumpy post.) Another day, another Blockchain Bullshit project. https://twitter.com/tweet_nfts/status/1360896333100548097 Someone "claimed" one of my Tweets and added it to the Blockchain. I'm not particularly happy about that. Nor am I happy with the hoops I had to jump through to contact the company and remove my work. You can read the […]

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Book Review: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle


The staircase in a grand house.

This is either the greatest time-travel novel ever - or a load of monkeyshine. And I'm not sure which! What if Quantum Leap was an Agatha Christie novel? That's the basic plot - but, in this, Sam is only leaping between characters in the same story. The whodunnit plot is brilliantly worked out - and […]

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