Personal

Like countless singer-songwriters before her, South Tyneside-born auteur Nadine Shah has used her lived experience as a springboard. Love Your Dum and Mad, her 2013 debut, channelled her grief after two friends took their own lives. Kitchen Sink, Shah’s 2020 outing, pilloried the absurdities of thirtysomething womanhood. Between records, she has been outspoken on racism and musicians’ dwindling incomes. Filthy Underneath is, though, her most personal statement yet. Topless Mother details a sub par therapy experience with…

The Central Bank of Nigeria on Wednesday announced that cash payment for Personal and Business Travel allowances (PTA/BTA) would no longer be allowed. The directive was conveyed in a circular addressed to all authorised banks, signed by Hassan Mahmud, the Director of the Trade and Exchange Department. To promote transparency and accountability in the forex market, the CBN directed all banks to process the allowances through electronic channels. “Memorandum 8 of the Foreign Exchange manual and the circular with…

Maria Diaz/ZDNETThe Gemini app, formerly known as Bard, is poised to become the next-generation digital assistant on Android devices. This new AI-centric landscape promises to make interacting with your smartphones and other devices considerably smarter and easier.But those AI apps come with a risk, which Google's new privacy warning illustrates perfectly.Also: The 3 biggest risks from generative AI - and how to deal with themThis warning comes by way of the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub and states -- very clearly -- that…

For the very first time, the entire contents of the eclectic personal library of naturalist Charles Darwin has been published online, and a massive 9,300 entries come with links to the works, making them freely available to read.In a painstakingly thorough project that's taken 18 years to piece together, lead researcher John van Wyhe from the National University of Singapore (NUS) says it single-handedly takes Darwin's library from a previously known 15% to an absolute 100%. The completed library is detailed in a 300-page…

The startup that develops the phone app for casino resort giant WinStar has secured an exposed database that was spilling customers’ private information to the open web. Oklahoma-based WinStar bills itself as the “world’s biggest casino” by square footage. The casino and hotel resort also offers an app, My WinStar, in which guests can access self-service options during their hotel stay, their rewards points and loyalty benefits, and casino winnings. The app is developed by a Nevada software startup called Dexiga. The…

Michael Palin, the Python turned TV documentarian, has long delighted in sharing tales of his family, whether through his diaries – he has published three volumes so far – or through his film American Friends, a fictionalised account of the courtship of his great-grandfather, an Oxford don, and his American wife. In Great-Uncle Harry, he turns his attention to Henry William Bourne Palin – known as Harry – who died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at 32. Palin was alerted to his great-uncle’s existence by a cousin who…

It’s mind-boggling to think that some human beings (considering today’s topic, hard to use that particular phrasing) can’t even do the bare minimum.Bare minimum, of course, refers to taking out the trash to its appropriate place, either inside the building, or right beside it. Nope, that’s not the case with some folks. Apparently, it’s easier for them to just chuck it over the fence into someone else’s backyard. Why… just why…? Taking out the trash is comparatively easy as chores go, but some folks still manage to…

Mozilla is rolling out a tool that can automatically monitor data brokers for your personal information and scrub any of your exposed details from them. Mozilla Monitor Plus expands on the Mozilla Monitor (formerly Firefox Monitor) service, which lets you know when your email address is included in a data breach.This new paid service, which costs $9 per month or $107.88 per year, aims to proactively make sure your personal information stays off more than 190 data broker sites. Mozilla says that's double the number of data…

User registration data, which was kept to enable quick rollout and registration for both systems, should a new variant emerge, has also been erased. Also: The top cloud storage services you can buy to protect your filesThe only data retained was collected via the TraceTogether system and used in relation to a May 2020 murder case. This information will be held indefinitely by the Singapore Police Force to facilitate potential legal applications, should the conviction or sentence be challenged years after the case has…

It goes without saying that memes are good for the soul. Sometimes you just want to stare at a phone screen up until maybe 3AM in the morning, reading about all of the relatable experiences other people have and then laughing at how you do that too.The internet’s actually full of opportunities for this, with one of the more perfect examples being the r/absolutelynotme_irl subreddit that’s totally definitely “not your selfies of the soul.” It goes without saying that memes are good for the soul. Sometimes you…