Theatre Review: & Juliet


Poster for & Juliet. A Black woman with short hair stands in front of a neon heart pierced with an arrow.

About five minutes into the show I already had tears of laughter streaming down my face. I didn't stop laughing and squealing with delight until the curtain call. The plot - unusual for a jukebox musical - is relatively well thought through. What if Juliet didn't die at the end of Romeo + Juliet? What […]

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Responsible Disclosure: An Exam Board Touting Dodgy PDFs


Screenshot of some Javascript embedded in a page.

I hate academic tests. Wouldn't it be great if you could find the official answer papers? Oh, cool, the OCR Exam Board is hosting answer sheets for all my classes! What happens if I click it? Yeach! It redirects users to a scammy ebook service hosted on an external website. Which, I assume, the exam […]

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Review: Kaico Xbox HMDI Cable + Optical


A small white box with HDMI and optical outputs. There's a short lead with an Xbox connector.

A few days ago, I posted about my quest to find a decent HDMI cable for my original XBox. The good folks at Kaico Labs were kind enough to send me a demo unit of their new Xbox to HDMI + Optical cable. I agreed to give them feedback - and they were happy to […]

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The (Mostly) Complete Unicode Spiral


Zoomed out view of a dense spiral.

I present to you, dear reader, a spiral containing every1 Unicode 14 character in the GNU Unifont. Starting at the centre with the control characters, spiralling clockwise through the remnants of ASCII, and out across the entirety of the Basic Multi Lingual Plane. Then beyond into the esoteric mysteries of the Higher Planes2. Zoom in […]

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Book Review: Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City - William J. Mitchell


Book cover.

This book is outstanding. It is a clear-eyed view of the future as it was seen from 20 years ago. I've never taken so many scribbled notes in the margins of a book. Many of the ideas are ahead of its time - and only a couple of clunkers which never made it. One thing […]

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Fitting 1 dimensional data into 2 dimensional space


Hilbert curves.

A few notes to myself. Let's consider a set of 1 dimensional data. For example, the alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ What do we mean by "1 dimensional"? Consider the element "B". From there you can go left to "A" or right to "C". Left and right are the only directions you can move. You cannot go up […]

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Failing at reporting Android bugs


Android logo.

I try to write good bug reports, I really do. I fill out templates when asked. I try to include reproducible proof of the bug. I'll even give a screenshot or screen recording to prove I'm not making things up. If I'm familiar enough with the programming language, I'll also attempt to say roughly where […]

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Solar Efficiency and High Temperature


BBC headline "Why record heat doesn't mean record solar power".

I spoke, briefly, to BBC journalist Tom Singleton about our solar panels and how they're coping in the heat. The good news is that solar panels work when it is sunny (duh!) - but the bad news is that electronics are generally less efficient when it is hot. Here are a few examples. July 16th […]

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Original Xbox to HDMI


A connector which has a micro USB port and connects an XBox to a TV via HDMI.

I know what you're going to say - the Xbox has HDMI. Well, modern ones do. The Xbox 360 and its successors all have crisp digital outputs. But I'm talking about the original Xbox. This bad boy: Mmmmm! Chunky! The OG Xbox's AV connector is... Let's be charitable, a bit weird. The console was released […]

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Why we can't have an air source heat pump


Photo of an Air Source Heat Pump by Krzysztof Lis.

As part of our quest to make our house more efficient, we've installed solar panels, a battery, insulation, and all the other stuff you're supposed to do. The next step is working out if we can reduce our dependency on gas. Octopus Energy (join and we both get £50!) offered to send an engineer around […]

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