The Mobile Phones of Doctor Who - 2022 Specials


Ace holding a BlackBerry phone.

So, farewell Jodie! What a brilliant Doctor she has been. I started this series of blog posts four years ago to celebrate her becoming ther new Doctor. As ever, I've identified all of the mobile phones used in Doctor Who. This blog post goes through the 2022 specials - three cracking stories to round out […]

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Why can't Twitter stop the "Twoo Fun / Ask For Me" spam?


Colourful image saying "Who visits your Twitter profile. Real data. Totally free."

Back in June, I noticed a pretty insidious piece of Twitter spam. The "twoo.fun" website was claiming that it could tell you who visited your Twitter profile. That's pretty enticing! It's what LinkedIn uses to drive its premium product. Perhaps it would tell me if a potential employer was looking at my profile? Or if […]

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MSc: "So, You Have to Write a Literature Review"


Bright yellow book cover.

The end-game of my MSc is almost in sight! I've written up 6 assignments. Now all I need to do is write a 10,000 word dissertation in the form of a Major Project Report. Oh, and go through an End-Point-Assessment with my portfolio to make sure I actually know what I'm talking about. But, back […]

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HOWTO: Remove the Blubrry PowerPress "New!" Banner


WordPress menu. There is a distracting badge with a white background and red text.

The best thing about WordPress is the plugin infrastructure. A million little gadgets to make your blog better. Sadly, there are all sorts of ways plugin authors can abuse their privileges. Dodgy code and user-hostile features sometimes make plugins more trouble than they're worth. Recently, the normally excellent Blubrry PowerPress plugin pissed me off. It's […]

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Hackday - Group Solar Forecasts


Screenshot of the demo page. A street is covered in solar panel icons.

Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams […]

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Two Anniversaries on One Day


A passport stamp from Immigration Canada. The date is 11th October 1999.

I'm off to a wedding in Canada which means dealing with the bureaucracy of the Electronic Travel Authorisation. The form asked me if I'd ever had a previous visa for Canadaland. As it happens, yes! I spent a year studying in Ottawa. Well then, said the form, you'd better tell me your old visa number. […]

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Theatre Review: Beatles Evolver 62


Poster for the show.

It is an undisputed fact that Mark Lewisohn knows more about The Beatles than anyone else - including The Beatles! This is a cosy and intimate show - well, a PowerPoint presentation really - which see Mark take us through 62 events in the year 1962. Why '62? Well, that's the year everything changed. Mark […]

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Blog To Speech


Screenshot of a blogpost saying that the audio version has been recorded by "George Hahn".

Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I've noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them - though by no means the majority - are including audio versions of the content. The usually look something like this: or The ones which […]

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