Cipher Mysteries

Two more Voynich novels (both by debutant novelists) for our Big Fat List, one from late last year and one just about to come out... First up there's Harold W. Allen's (2009) "The Renaissance Manuscript: A Novel Concerning the Origin and Meaning of the Voynich Manuscript", which I have to say seems to be competing against Kennedy & ...

Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on "hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets", hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book "Decoding The Lost Symbol"... OK, I'm sure you've rumbled the secret already: that it's basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox's book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers ...

Don't blame me, I was vaguely interested to see what the top ranking Google search results for "conspiracy" were, when I just happened to glance sideways at the topmost Google Adwords advertisement:- Don't pay the Illuminati Loan or credit card over £5,000? We can write it off for free In spite of myself, I very nearly snorted with laughter.  Bless 'em and their ...

For the first time in weeks, I had a spare hour to myself last night - and it just happened to coincide with the screening of "Micro Men" on BBC4, a dramatization of the Acorn vs Sinclair personal computer wars of the early 1980s. Particularly poignant for me, because I wrote two of Acornsoft's early BBC Microcomputer games - ...

Just to let you know that, following the malware attack that Cipher Mysteries recently suffered, I've now moved the entire blog over to a completely new server. Of course, though this should have been straightforward, in practice these things always take days more than they should. Oh well! To tell which of the two versions you're looking at, I've ...

Just a quick note to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers (and if you're one of those 20-odd people who seem to drop by nearly every day but without actually subscribing - why not have new posts appear in your inbox? It costs nothing, just click on the box at the top right or get the Cipher Mysteries RSS feed through a feed reader.)  You ...

Just to let you know that the normal summer "news drought" appears to have arrived a little early this year - apart from a couple of shiny new Voynich theories working their way through the pipeline and some long overdue book reviews to write up (most notably Christopher Harris' novel "Mappamundi"), there's really nothing much happening. So... please don't be unduly ...

Writing a Wordpress blog should be easy - but it genuinely takes about ten or so plugins to start actually doing things in a SEO-sensible way. A basic list I'd recommend would look like:- Akismet All In One SEO Pack CSS Compress Google XML Sitemaps Robots Meta SEO Friendly Images Wordpress Tweaks Wordpress Automatic Upgrade WP Super Cache WP Security Scan  ...though I have to admit I have a further 17 plugins ...

One hugely influential piece of modern writing is Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar":the central metaphor contrasts huge, monolithic, closed-source software developments (i.e. "the Cathedral") with agile, distributed, open-source software developments (i.e. "the Bazaar"). Raymond's metaphor is just a metaphor: but all the same, there are plenty of none-too-subtle quasi-religious overtones at play here, which tend to colour ...

Here's a link to an unknown (and as-yet-unpublished) Voynich "literary mystery" for late 2009: Adam Hammonds posted a brief description of his Voynich / Tepenecz book "Impossible Objects" on his blog. But... Adam who?, I hear you ask. A little Google-fu reveals that he lives in Brooklyn, and has been posting to the 'Absolute Write' writers forums since ...