Terence Eden’s Blog – Regular nonsense about tech and its effects

I've thoroughly enjoyed all of Janice Hallett's previous crime books. The Examiner is, frankly, more of the same - and I'm happy with that!
You, the reader, are given a series of transcripts and have to work out what crime (if any) has been committed. You don't find out who the victim(s) is/are until reasonably far through the story. The characters are well realised (although a little similar...

After my recent presentation at FOSDEM, someone asked a pretty reasonable question. What does it cost to run OpenBenches?
It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. It was designed to be as low cost while also being useful. Here's the breakdown:...

This is Star Trek before Star Trek. It is Alien long before Alien. It is the template for so much modern science fiction. What it is not is particularly good.
I don't intend to dump on the classics (and this is undoubtedly a classic) but 1950s sci-fi takes place in an almost alien media environment. Even if you ignore the anachronisms (like having to develop film in order to see photographs) and the archaic...

Email isn't an obvious business benefit. Imagine it is the early 1980s and you need to communicate with people across the country. A first-class letter will cost you 17p - about 60p in today's money. The letter will be delivered the next day and you...