Rudiger Tost’s The People I Knew In Another Lifetime was published in 1976 as an “instant paperback” (by Editions Henty, and no, I’ve never heard of them either) and never reprinted so far as I know. There were other “instant paperbacks” in the series (I’ve taken the term from the…

My thanks, today, to Quire Team (possibly the Quire Team) for zir email (pronoun not specified). Mx Team wrote to tell me about Permissions. “Hi William,” ze began. “Teamwork is all about collaboration, but not everyone has the same role in your organisation.” Aha! And there was me thinking collaboration…

This is how one online bank tells me that they’re going offline overnight. “Dear customer, Thank you for your patience while we continue to work hard to improve. We’re committed to making sure we provide you with the best experience possible.” To do that, they’re shutting down from 10pm “until…

Today I want a movie that changes every time I watch it. Not a limitless chaos of changes — I could just watch a different movie every time — but a movie with, I don’t know, an embedded decision tree at key points in the plot. Do we have the…

This piece is being written by an incurably older person. I’m not particularly woke and I’m certainly not a millennial, but I do have a perspective. I’ve watched information technology develop since my then-employer, the Financial Times, replaced my typewriter with an Apple Mac. I can remember pushing my keyboard…

People with short sight, their eyes look smaller in their spectacles. People with long sight, their eyes look bigger in their spectacles. [Long sight is where you need reading glasses; short sight is where you can see the elephant in the room but not the herd of elephants on the…

Do people ever tell you how to live your life? Well-meaning friends, I mean, who know that if you would only change — this — or do — that — you’d be so much happier? How often is it something you’ve heard before? I get a steady stream of well-meaning…

If the surveillance state is paying attention to everything we say, we might as well tell the surveillance state what to do. Even in a surveillance economy, the ideas have got to come from somewhere — and they don’t seem to be coming from above. Look around you. Watch the…