I’m putting on my tin hat, tyin’ up my cable tie, dowsing out my tails

Sing along if it distracts you

Photo © 2025 Warren Sammut

Can you teach my robot to pogo?

This is a ridiculous question, of course, since I do not own a robot. But it amuses me that if I did have one, there might be a way of hacking its programming into making it jump up and down on the spot. While it might surprise my cat to witness, say, a robot vacuum cleaner doing such a thing, the concept surely opens up new possibilities in the field of domestic robotics. It could have a go cleaning the curtains, for example.

Apologies, I had not intended to kick off this week’s column talking about vertical-dancing robots. But with real-world events swirling history down the effluent drain of doom – clockwise or anti-clockwise, depending upon the hemisphere in which you are located – my mind seeks escape through distraction.

Hence late-70s punk bots. They could wear torn t-shirts, tartan leggings and piercings.

Another distraction that came my way to rescue me from reality was the news that a previously lost wooden panel from a Renaissance painting known as ‘The Dance of Death’ may have been rediscovered in Hexham Abbey.

It’s the juxtaposition of ‘death’ and ‘Hexham’ that amuses me. They could just as easily have discovered a hexed painting in Deadham, for example, or a fatal sculpture in Damned End, or a cursed pottery ashtray in Ohnoimfuckedshire.

One thing that is definitely cursed is cybersecurity. There was a time not long ago when I would write investigative stories about major hacks but they have now become so commonplace that they’ve lost their newsworthiness. Fresh breaches in cybersecurity pop up in my notifications throughout the day alongside weather updates.

Only the ironic ones gain my attention these days. Such as the recent news that WorkComposer, a workplace spy, sorry, surveillance tool, left over 21 million customer screenshots of their employees’ live computer displays exposed in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket.