The problem of super heroes, super villains and their amazing inventions

When we tell a story we are reaching out our hand to the reader and asking them a question. Will you come on an adventure with me? It’s the grand conceit of writing, we want you to switch off certain parts of your brain for a while and come for a ride with us while…

Questions that get the little grey cells firing

Apparently Google has over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs in its index. Of course not all of those URLs correspond with pages of information and the 1 trillion figure was quoted in 2008, the amount of information on the web in 2019 must have far surpassed that. It’s important to remember that Google only indexes…

Spam/scam emails are weird

If you have an email account then the chances are high that you’ve received a spam or scam email.  Whether it’s an enticing offer to enlarge your penis (go for it girls!) or there is an African prince who’s just desperate to give you millions of dollars but needs your account details first, everyone has…

The wasteful immorality of (Canon) printers and printer ink

Like many people I have a printer at home.  It’s a Canon 3660, it’s simple, easy to use and was cheap to buy.  My kids will be returning to school in a couple of weeks (at the time of writing) and the printer has run out of ink.  Not wanting to have to rush to…

My feature wishlist for (PC) games

I have a confession to make, I’m a gamer and I play computer games. In fact I spend a substantial fraction of my free time playing them and have done for over thirty years. From Pong to Fallout New Vegas I’ve literally played thousands of games spanning every genre you can think of (well nearly…

I propose a new citizenship test

So another Australia Day has rolled around and as I watched the groups of people frolicking and enjoying themselves down at New Farm park it got me thinking about the citizenship test that all wannabe citizens must take. As full disclosure, Rebecca and I became citizens about five years ago. It was pretty simple, we…

The Sun, an homage to Isaac Asimov and his love of numbers

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us that space is: “big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…” Wolfram Alpha, that enigmatic fountain of factoids, seems…