And there goes another piece of my childhood. Like a lot of people of my generation, I grew on on Gerry Anderson’s TV shows such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. Made in what was described as Supermarionation, these used puppets as their characters, with some pretty damn good for the time visual effects and nifty model work. They were fun, and an inspiration to many. Alastair Reynolds, an author I’ve mentioned once or twice, said this on Twitter:

I doubt very much that I’d be writing SF if it wasn’t for Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 and the rest.

— Alastair Reynolds (@AquilaRift) December 26, 2012

And that says all that needs saying.

Thunderbirds’ creator Gerry Anderson dies

I got the DRM-free ebook version of this in a rather nice bundle deal from Humble Bundle, where the deal is that you pay what you want to for the current offer. A proportion of the money goes to the authors (or developers when the deal is for software) and some to charity. You even get to choose how much of your payment goes where.

Anyway, this reached the top of my virtual reading pile the other day, and grabbed my attention immediately. Like Cory’s earlier Little Brother, which I neglected to review when I read it, it’s what publishers like to call a Young Adult (or even YA) novel – aimed at the more or less teenage market. But that shouldn’t put you off, even if you’re a wee bit past your teenage years, as I am.

It’s set in a near-future Britain, where some legal trends have got a lot worse. Get caught downloading too much copyright material and without so much as a sniff of due process, your internet connection will be cut off. And that’s an even bigger problem than it would be right now, as many people work online from home doing low-paid call centre work. Not to mention that if you don’t have a job because you don’t have an internet connection, you’ll have a bit of a problem applying for benefits because all the forms are online only. And if you’re a kid studying for exams, well, guess what? It’s not as if the public library was open for anything approaching useful hours…

So when Trent, a 16 year old obsessed with the work of actor Scot Colford, and who creates videos from downloaded material manages to get his family disconnected from the internet, everything falls apart.

Trent runs away to London, where, after the usual trials, not to mention tribulations, finds new friends and some serious purpose. Adopting the alias Cecil B DeVil, he makes better movies, and gets into some serious activism, just in time to fight the latest piece of deranged legislation.

It’s all nicely told in the first person. Trent/Cecil makes a good PoV character – he’s a smarter and better person than he thinks he is, which makes him someone you actually care about. He makes some mistakes, he makes some movies, and he makes a lot of friends. But can he and his friends overcome the power of the law? You’ll have to read it to find out.

It’s a good story well told, and kept me up far too late at night, eager to learn what was going to happen next.  It even manages a shout-out for the wonderful Rumpole of the Bailey, which earned Cory at least 50 extra points from me.

About the only negative comment I have is that Cory’s conversion from Canadian to Brit isn’t quite complete. At one point, he has a character say

I did just write my A level on phyiscs

which doesn’t sound at all right in UK English. I know that Canadians refer to “writing” an exam where Brits would say “taking”, so I recognised the idiom. And at another point, some one uses the phrase “swear darn”, which sounds very odd indeed. I’ve heard “swear down”, which is itself odd, but makes some kind of sense. Hint: if a Brit says “darn”, the next word is likely to be “socks”. But these are minor quibbles, and they didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all. I’m sure Cory will become more authentically British after a few more years.

After a couple of days of not going anywhere, a short walk seemed like a good idea this morning. We[1] timed it quite well, as it was just starting to rain as we got back to the house.

Today’s picture is a badger[3] lurking in a bus shelter thingy.

Badger

[1] My brother[2] and I, that is
[2] Hi Geoff 
[3] Badger, badger, badger, mushroom, snake, etc

If you have a Kindle, you should have a look at Amazon’s current The Twelve Days of Kindle promotion. There’s a nicely large selection of books with prices starting at 99p – and some of those were around £6.99 previously, so there are some actual bargains on offer.

For instance, I just bought The Horologicon, Mark Forsyth’s follow-up, or companion volume, or something to his excellent Etymologicon, which I enjoyed enormously. I’d been thinking of buying it anyway, and the 99p offer made my mind up for me. I also got a Neal Stephenson novel for 99p, also nicely reduced.

Standard disclaimer applies – I get a cut if you buy anything via an Amazon link from this site.

OK, this is the spoiler-free version. A more detailed post will follow when I’ve watched it again with extreme use of the pause button.

So, all good fun. Lots of running around, more Victorian atmosphere than a tank full of London air circa 1895, loads of gags and an unexpected return.

But the expected return of Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara was the high point. Steven Moffat had dropped a few hints relating to Jenna’s appearance as Oswin Oswald, the soufflé-obsessed, err, well, Dalek[1], actually, in Asylum of the Daleks, and how obviously she couldn’t possibly be the same character, right? And err, that’s all I’m going to say about that, other than we still have a lot to learn about Clara.

More about this will follow…

[1] Eggs, stir, minute….

It seems like only a couple of days ago[1] that I was muttering about how WordPress 3.5 had stopped inserting the title attribute of images inserted into posts. While this was only a minor inconvenience, it irritated me enough to (a) moan about it and (b) try to change it.

I’d done a fair amount of reading, which led me to believe that a simple function (and it would have to be simple, given my coding skill level) should be able to do what I needed. One of the great things about WordPress is that it’s designed to be fiddled with. It offers numerous “hooks” and “filters”, which, put in the basic terms that a non-programmer like me can understand, allow you to change almost everything it does. Want to insert some extra text? Want to stop something displaying? Chances are that there’s a hook or filter you can use.

In this particular case, it seemed that what I needed to play with was the

media_send_to_editor

filter. And after much googling, and much trial, and and even more error, I came up with a function that does exactly what I needed. As I didn’t want to break things, rather than adding it to my general purpose Functionality plugin, I created it as a shiny new plugin all to itself. And sure enough, with this plugin activated, when I insert an image, the title attribute is inserted. This ensures that the tooltip appears, and lightbox plugins no longer get confused.

It’s such a short and simple thing[2], that I can include the whole of it here:

Download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory

This has only been tested on my own sites, where it didn’t appear to break anything. Use at your own risk. If you happen to be a real programmer, you may point and laugh as much as seems appropriate. Or if you’re a real programmer and you have advice or suggestions to improve what I’ve done, I’d be happy to receive them.

[1] Probably because it was
[2] It would have to be, for reasons previously mentioned

Merry Christmas[1] to all my regular[2] readers[3]!

I thought I’d better get today’s report in before the turkey, wine and other such things make me even less coherent than usual. Here’s a cool pressie I got from my niece Rachel:

It’s a mug

No, it’s not an actual shiny new lens for my 5D Mark III, it’s a mug in the form of a Canon lens, which is a cool thing to have. I’ve seen these on sale in various places, but never got round to buying myself one, so I was especially pleased to have it. Thanks, Rachel [3]

[1] Or whatever you’d like to call it
[2] Or irregular
[3] Not that Rachel probably reads this nonsense much

I haven’t actually ordered this[1], but it is a wee bit tempting.

Buy the DSLR Wheel of Filters at the Photojojo Store!

This brings the low-fidelity soft and squishy imagery of Holga cameras to your Canon or Nikon[2] DSLR, which is either mind-bogglingly stupid or really cool. Or maybe both. It does seem a little perverse to slap a deliberately low quality lens and some filters on the front of a modern high-quality camera, but I can see that it could be fun. And it avoids all that faffing around with actual film which is what puts me off taking my actual Holga out.

I suspect if I did get it, it would be another toy like the Lensbaby which gets the occasional outing when the mood strikes me, rather than a regular companion. But it’s cheap enough for that – with the cheapest shipping option to the UK, the cost is under £35.

And what do you know, I seem to have talked myself into it. About half way through the last paragraph, I decided I should probably have one, and I placed an order. I’ll no doubt mutter about it when it arrives and I’ve had a chance to play with it.

And if you’d like to buy this, or an of the other things on offer from Photojojo, here’s a magic link that will give you $5 off your order:

[1] Well, I hadn’t when I typed that sentence
[2] Sorry, Brian – no Pentax option on offer

Well, here we are again with just one day to go before that precious, wonderful point on the calendar: the Doctor Who Christmas Special. There’s loads of stuff to enjoy on the BBC Adventure Calendar, and apparently lots more material will be available on the website after the episode is shown tomorrow.

Today has been a nice day in, so the step count is negligible and won’t be posted because it would look silly. Here’s a picture of St Mary Street in Cardiff with a street market going on, and a nice collection of flags on show.

Flags out

I’ve been expecting this to happen sooner rather than later, and it seems that contact form fixage post sent me over the edge. Yes, according to the General Stats plugin, I have now written over one million words on this site, or, as I’m inclined to call it, One Megaword.

Megaword

According to various sources, that’s more than twice the length of The Lord of the Rings, though shorter than Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which I need to mutter about at some point.

Or to put it another way, if I’d put all those words into a more coherent form, I might have written a few novels.