The Bastard Academic

I am aware that there are misgivings amongst the musical community about Spotify's business model, and from the bits I know, these are perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, it is useful and productive consumer model, and it's this I want to briefly write at you about. Spotify's catalogue is huge, an ever-expanding horizon that seems to want to engulf the soundscape in totality. It's easy to use, and you can usually find the album or artist you want to listen to. But it's true genius is in its algorithms, specifically the ones it uses to create the playlist it constantly nudges you to listen to. Now, because of how pushy it seemed, I avoided my Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlist like the plague for ages. This was a mistake. Or maybe, because I hadn't listened and followed enough, they just weren't right for me yet. Now, however, I spend a good two days paying attention to them, and then expanding my aural sphere to at least 3 of the recommend...

This is not a post about transhumanism or integrated tech. This is about my horrible time management. And it is horrible. I've been doing my annual email cleanout, and found some dark neglected corners. A couple of years ago, I decided it might be a Good Thing to create some email rules to help keep my Inbox a bit tidier, and infinitely more readable. It turns out that this has worked, at least to make my Inbox workable. Unfortunately, it means that I have neglected some 350+ newsletters I actually enjoy reading. Because the email rules put them directly into subfolders (and in some cases, subfolders of subfolders (because I like to be organised)), and also I primarily use a mobile app, I tend to glance over these in favour of the ridiculous (100+) amounts of mail that still comes through the Inbox. I am not pleased with myself for this. I am also grateful that my current job does afford me multiple hours of time on a Monday to be able to contend with this backlog. I will be ...

I've not written about this disaster here before, mostly because trying to make sense of it has been ludicrously difficult. But here it goes, my tuppence worth: What a fucking calamity. I don't care what side of this debate you fall on, unless you are deliberately ignorant of reality, or stand to make an absolute fortune, there's no way you can be happy with the way things have gone. No deal will please anyone, not entirely. The current, and only deal on offer, pleases people less than no deal at all, which has also been rejected. This leaves extension or not leaving. Now, leaving aside my preference (remaining) for now, I think we can all agree that this whole project has been a complete catastrophe from the beginning. A move made solely to sort internal Tory party issues, the referendum (which was a non-binding advisory vote, essentially and opinion poll) ended up with that failing miserably, and "Call Me Dave" Cameron doing a runner (despite promising oth...

No, I’m not talking about Taylor Swift’s birthday, I’m referring to the 30 th anniversary of the World Wide Web. I know, it seems like only yesterday Tim Berners-Lee’s creation was first introduced to the world, and forever changed the way we shared and organised information. Forget waiting for the promised ASI Singularity, this was the last one, and anyone who claims they could see how this would change the face of human society is a liar. In March 1989 at CERN in Switzerland, Berners-Lee wrote and submitted this proposal for a new way of managing the huge amount of information the research facility generated. He was concerned with the lack of comprehensive documentation for projects, as well as the lack of information retention as people came and left when projects concluded. With the LHC project looming large in their immediate future, keeping track of all the data was becoming a concern. The idea of hypertext and hypermedia had been floating around for a while, but no-one...

Well, well, isn't this one for the books: the NSA have released GHIDRA, their reverse engineering tool. Yes, you read that correctly, the NSA have released something. Not The Shadow Brokers or any other APT, it hasn't been leaked or nabbed and let into the wild, this is a deliberate sharing of technology by the Puzzle Palace. Not what you'd expect, is it? Announced at this years RSA conference (already controversial this year as Adi Shamir, the 'S' in RSA, was unable to obtain a visa to attend), this reverse engineering tool seems primed to shake things up a bit, as many RE tools cost a fair bit of money. It also seems to be free of backdoors, and although one bug has been found , it can be remedied was reasonable ease. I've not really done much RE myself, but with a powerful, military-grade tool such as this, it might be a whole lot easier to get into. I'll let you know more when I've had a chance to play around with it. If you are interested...