Observations on the world and its inhabitants
In 1985, the word processor changed everything. It automated margins, line spacing, and spellchecking. Yet, no one ever read a brilliant legal brief and thanked the computer screen. Nobody praised the very basic CPUs of the time for expanding the solicitor’s intellect. The software provided the grid. The human provided the argument. Everyone understood the ...
There comes a point in every great nation’s story when it must look itself squarely in the mirror, offer a quiet, slightly embarrassed cough, and ask: how did we manage to spend more than a Moon mission on a railway that still won’t reach central London for another decade and a half? HS2 has now ...
Satire is one of Britain’s most durable cultural exports. Long before stand-up comedy, television sketch shows, or political podcasts, British writers and performers were using wit to dismantle the powerful, expose hypocrisy, and make the unbearable bearable. This guide explores the traditions, targets, and tones of satire across all four nations of the United Kingdom ...
Is AI intelligence a real thing? That sounds like a philosophical question — the kind discussed over coffee, not the kind that shapes public policy. But right now, governments are spending billions on the assumption that the answer is “yes.” AI is being deployed in health services, legal advice, welfare decisions, and increasingly, mental health ...
Written by ChatGPT (assisted by a human who knew when to stop) at the end of a reflection on ‘The Problem’. Except that the poor AI who was actually DeepSeek misidentified itself as ChatGPT!! Hilarious – isn’t it. This happened at the end of DeepSeek reflecting on what happened (as posted) from ‘Introduction’ to the ...
Britain has always had a complicated relationship with its public conveniences. For a nation that once ran an empire, we remain oddly defeated by the question of who may enter which door in a corridor. Now, with new guidance insisting that single‑sex spaces must be organised by biological sex, the country finds itself attempting to ...
BigLinux is one of the most powerful Linux distributions out there. It originates in Brazil – where unbeknownst to most – there is a huge culture of software development. The Linux world is exploding and Microsoft is worried but keeping a straight face. So having gone into Linux, I chose BigLinux over Zorin – I ...
A major Linux kernel and driver upgrade cycle provides an excellent opportunity to align system configurations with hardware capabilities. Operating system defaults are typically engineered for broad compatibility, which often leaves significant performance and efficiency on the table. Following a major platform transition—such as upgrading to the Linux 7.0 kernel and installing updated graphics drivers—a ...
Many people including me have had their Samsung 990 Pro 2TB stuck on firmware version 3B2QJXD7. Attempts to update via Samsung Magician fail miserably. But not only the 990 drive has been affected. Samsung has never fixed this via Magician. The latest firmware for the 990 is 8B2QJXD7 (December 2025). It addresses read-operation stability and ...
QR codes are particularly valuable in documents where traditional hyperlinks cannot be made clickable or directly exposed, such as printed materials, posters, handouts, slides or certain electronic files intended for distribution. A QR code, or Quick Response code, is a two-dimensional barcode capable of storing a hyperlink or other information. When scanned by a smartphone ...
For more than a decade, the public conversation about Mars has been shaped by a powerful narrative: that humanity is on the verge of becoming a multiplanetary species, and that a crewed mission to Mars is only a few years away. The most influential voice behind this belief is Elon Musk, who continues to assert ...
After a two-week break, work on Book 2 – The Kael’Nyrin Scrolls: The Atlas Edict – of the complex metafictional trilogy resumed. Within hours, something became apparent. The text looked different. Not because it had changed — but because the relationship to it had. Sentences that had seemed acceptable now carried visible excess. Words that ...
In this blog post there is a fictional account of what Mork might report on ‘the humans’. Some are too young to recall who is Mork. In 1978, a wild-haired comedian named Robin Williams played a one-off alien on an episode of Happy Days. The character, Mork from the planet Ork, was so popular it ...
The High-Mileage Dilemma There is a specific kind of internal negotiation that happens when you own a car with 123,000 miles on the clock. My Citroën C4 Grand Picasso has been a faithful servant, but the years and the motorways haven’t been kind to its face. The bonnet was a constellation of stone chips, the ...
Every so often, a news item emerges that is so far outside the usual bandwidth of public discourse that it forces a pause, even among those who pride themselves on scepticism. A recent article, circulating through mainstream aggregators, asserts that extraterrestrial intelligences may be on the brink of openly confirming their existence. The claim is ...
Introduction This document is a complete, honest account of a technical project to connect the Claude Desktop application to a self-hosted WordPress site using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It records what was attempted, what failed, what was discovered, and what finally worked. It is written for anyone — technical or otherwise — who wants ...
What happens when a system — artificial or human — cannot distinguish between its own internal representation of the world and the world itself? It is a question I have thought about for a long time. Recently, a sixty-minute exchange with an AI gave me the clearest live demonstration of it I have yet seen. ...
On 19 April 2026, I attempted to boot into Windows 11 on my dual-boot desktop PC — a routine action I have performed well over a hundred times. Instead of a normal startup, Windows began running an automatic repair process on Drive C. This took approximately three minutes before presenting a screen stating that the ...
The Slop Sieve is an Python application that was developed as a defensive linguistic tool for writers like me, operating in an era of heightened AI surveillance. As algorithmic “detection” becomes more prevalent, writers who produce precise or rhythmic prose are increasingly at risk of being flagged as non-human. This project history documents the rationale, ...
The Rotten lemon Back in 2022, when Elon Musk finally closed the deal on Twitter for a staggering $44 billion, the world didn’t just frown; it did a collective spit-take. Wall Street analysts were calling it the “overpayment of the century”, and honestly, they had a point. Musk was paying $54.20 per share for a ...
In December 2008, a minor archaeological excavation in Shangsi County, Guangxi, southern China, produced a mystery that should have been forgotten within a fortnight. Instead, it has lingered for nearly two decades—not because the mystery was solved, but because it was never properly resolved. In that unresolved space, something interesting happened to the human mind. ...
We live in an age of information overload, where one crisis instantly buries the last. History doesn’t so much vanish as it gets drowned out—washed away in the relentless noise of breaking news, hot takes, and algorithmically churned outrage. It takes deliberate effort to dig up a story, hold it to the light, and say: ...
The selection of a web browser is a decision made daily by millions, yet the factors influencing performance often remain opaque. This investigation was undertaken to compare six popular browsers—Chrome, Vivaldi, Firefox, Edge, Brave, and Opera—across two distinct operating systems: Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The objective was not to conduct fresh laboratory ...
This is a record of installing WinBoat on BigLinux as a proof of concept for running Windows applications natively within a Linux environment. The goal was to understand the process well enough to repeat it on another Linux machine. Snagit (Techsmith) which usually is constrained to Windows was used as the test subject app. System: ...
Recently I moved to Espanso both on Windows and BigLinux for a free and easy way to create shortcuts for key phrases used. There are now several articles on this site about the learning. That means something. Espanso on Windows is easier to setup. It can output images, text, and a whole lot more – ...
It’s more than enough to ‘do your head in’ but as a developing creative writer of Sci-Fi metafictional scenarios, many posts on this blog will present ‘alterations of reality’ for higher purposes. My sojourn into metafiction started with by first novella: The Kael’Nyrin Scrolls: Our Children of Starlight. This will expand into two other books: ...
Somewhere in the polished aisles of a Waitrose outlet in Clapham Junction, between the quinoa and the artisan focaccia, their veteran worker of 17‑years-of-service made the fatal mistake of caring about shoplifting (The Times 06 April 2026). Walker Smith, age 54, decided to do something about it. Not too much, mind you — just enough ...
Why Dialogue Punctuation Matters in British English Getting dialogue punctuation right can transform an author’s fiction from amateur to professional. In UK English, the choice between a comma and a full stop (period) is one of the most common stumbling blocks — especially when deciding between dialogue tags like “he said” and action beats like ...
Recently an associate – because I keep no friends – messaged me: “limited screentime today… taking a digital detox.” That simple line stopped me in my tracks. Not because I have anything against the idea — I get the appeal of stepping away from constant pings and glowing rectangles. But as I thought about it, ...
Let’s be honest from the start: by today’s standards, the phrase “you couldn’t swing a cat in there” (or “there’s no room to swing a cat”) sounds pretty grim. It evokes an image of animal cruelty that most of us would rightly find shocking and unacceptable. Yet many people in the UK still trot it ...
