I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved integer differences and decimal expansion. (Note that this is open until 4 April 2021.)
I vaguely wish I'd known that the most recent shopping trip I'd made would be the last one for the moment.
1946 mystery, second in the series centred on Francis Pettigrew, a not-terribly-successful barrister. As the war begins in earnest, Pettigrew is made legal advisor to the Pin Control, the vitally important new government department controlling the production of, and preventing anyone from profiteering on, pins. But murder is never far away.
1968 audio thriller by Francis Durbridge: Paul Temple is a professional novelist and amateur sleuth. People are being murdered, and the only clue is the name "Alex" left with the body.
Officially last week it was still only possible to book a vaccination if you were over 55. When I'd tried it the week before (giving NHS number and birth date) I was quite properly told to come back later. But…
1937 Napoleonic naval fiction, first written but sixth by internal chronology. Hornblower, commanding the frigate Lydia, is sent to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua to aid a local insurgency against the Spanish.
2016 SF. Simon Forrester is rather forgotten beside his mother the warship captain and his sister the space marine, even if he is unreasonably good with computers. So he sets off to make his own way…
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved fractional exponentiation and sweating with the oldies. (Note that this is open until 28 March 2021.)
2021 SF/mystery; sixty-third story or 52nd novel of J. D. Robb's In Death series (SF police procedurals). A sculptor is killed in her studio; it looks as though her lover did it. But there's more to be found behind the obvious case.
More boardgames played from home.
Now that millions of people in the UK have had their first COVID-19 vaccination, our tireless team of imaginary researchers has had plenty of opportunities to examine the tracking chip that is, we are assured by many people with no possible ulterior motive, being implanted with every shot.
2019 supernatural mystery in modern Edinburgh, ninth in Oswald's Inspector McLean series. A girl is found in a forgotten cellar, partly mummified even though she died quite recently. Then another turns up in the same state.
This Meetup-based boardgames group remains on-line for the moment; as usual we got together on Jitsi and then played some games online.
1919 boys' adventure. Martin Hamer's airship design is stolen (and covertly constructed), along with the niece of Mortimer Carne, the industrial magnate whom the inventor had hoped to get to build the thing. Clearly the thing to do is build another airship and track him down.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved the Stern-Brocot sequence (which Dijkstra named "fusc") and a variant of Nim. (Note that this is open until 21 March 2021.)
The 1 Player Guild is a group of solo game players, communicating through BoardGameGeek. We're, or at least I am, counting all the on-line get-togethers as the "6th", so this was 6b.
With images; cc-by-sa on everything (insofar as I'm even allowed to assert that given that they're screenshots).
1993 mystery, fifth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir private investigation). Carlotta's hired by a woman whose daughter died in hospital, to try to get some closure; but soon the key witness dies and the client goes missing.
(Guest post from Gus.)
As of this week, I fall into a cohort eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine, one of the few things that makes me feel batter about being fifty-mumble. I like vaccines.
One of the podcasts I work on has been on iTunes for a while, which was done back when it was easier. Now the other two are as well, and they're all on Spotify too. Here's how to achieve this, from a standing start.
2012 urban fantasy, second of its series. Angel Crawford, now a zombie, is finally getting her life sorted out: working at the coroner's, eating spare brains, planning beyond the immediate fun thing. But her life still has ways of getting complicated.
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved lots of modulus arithmetic. (Note that this is open until 14 March 2021.)
I recently moved discussion.tekeli.li to a new host. Here's how I did it (with the false starts removed).
2013 steampunk fantasy, fourth and last of its series. Civil war has broken out between the Awakener cult and the government, and it's not entirely Captain Frey's fault.
2005 alternate-history science fiction war story. The "uptimers" from 2021 are helping their Allied counterparts from 1942, but both sides have future tech and people to exploit.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)
I’ve been doing the Perl Weekly Challenges. The latest involved an obscure class of number and a self-consistent string format. (Note that this is open until 7 March 2021.)
1964 mystery, fifth in the series about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett. When the film's leading man stumbles across the platform and dies under the wheels of an Underground train, it's clearly an accident. But then the continuity girl falls to her death from her flat…
(Guest post from Chris.)
The Covid19 vaccine: it's a big deal, right? Right. But the actual vaccination, it turns out, isn't. Perhaps my experience will give anyone anxious about it a reason to worry rather less. If you have had a flu jab, it's very similar.