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Yesterday marked the launch of one of New Internationalist's first multimedia immersive long-form pieces, Smoke and Mirrors. Cooking smoke is responsible for a staggering amount of deaths in the world — more than malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined. Not only that, the need for wood c …
Doctorow is both an entertaining author and very much on the right (by which I mean left/anarchist) side of politics. His futuristic utopia is set in a world where people are kept artificially poor in the midst of post scarcity merely to keep the capit …
A while ago, my buddy Oxguin was thinking about the blocking on Twitter, specifically because of Donald Trump. What happens, you see, is that when Trump says something twattish, as he is wont to do, all the non-twattish people on Twitter start telling him how much of a twat he is for saying it. …
Since the world, or at least the UK, seems to have decided to Gastrate all its pubs and the hipsters have taken over even once proudly grim local boozers, it seemed important to invent a tool to generate hipster menu items. And it should be written in vintage javascript, of course.So let me pres …
Bruce Sterling is that other cyberpunk author. He is back to writing counterfactual alternative histories examining what may have been had things just happened to turn out slightly differently (cf. steampunk bible and Victorian romp The Differen …
Here is a quick SSH tip that I only discovered a month or two ago despite years of using SSH on a daily basis. When SSH freezes, as can sometimes happen if the network connection drops, it is possible to kill the connection more elegantly than just by closing the terminal tab (my previous way of dea …
I first came across binary puzzles in early 2013 after finding a book of them in a Belgian supermarket, not long after I first came across Haskell. And I believe that I've now published the first solver for binary puzzles written in Haskell. And it only took 3 years ;-)The puzzles are a little lik …
This is a pretty comprehensive 'brief' history of the Anglo-Saxons - from the decline of the Romano-British culture in (what we now call) England up until the arrival of the Normans and indeed beyond. Hindley investigates …
This novel was one of a trove I inherited from my parents, a gift for my mother on her 20th birthday. It tells the story of a weaver, formerly a religious nonconformist and now miser, who discovers a meaning in life other than gold when an orphan c …
A few weeks ago, I received an email from Twitterfeed’s founder, a chap called Mario. In unnecessarily jolly prose, it announced the demise of the service which turned RSS feeds into Tweets and recommended moving to dlvr.it or Buffer. We’re writing to let you know that Twitterfeed wi …
I wanted to show off the comment system I just made. I also need some data in it. Here is a bit ofLorem Ipsum text.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.