HOWTO: Make a Doctor Who "Bells of St John" Style WiFi Name


No spoilers, sweetie 🙂 This evening's Doctor Who - The Bells of St John - revolves around mysterious WiFi signals. Alien SSIDs which, if you connect to them.... well, watch the episode to find out! In the show, they look like these: So, can we do the same thing for our home WiFi network? Yup! […]

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Photographing The Moon With A Phone*


*And a telescope.... The photo on the left is me just pointing my Galaxy Note II at the sky - the one on the right uses the same phone, but with a bit more kit... Last year, I bought myself a small telescope as a birthday present. I wanted to use it to take photos […]

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How To Orient WiFi Antennae


There's a lot of snake-oil in the technology world. From gold plated fibre optic cables to anti-radiation phone cases - there are a whole lot of people willing to exploit technical ignorance in return for money. There's also a lot of misinformation, folklore, and crazy thinking which confuses us when we try to interact with […]

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Preparing for the Collapse of Digital Civilization


While visiting the USA, I came across a delightfully bizzare TV show - Doomsday Preppers. For those who don't know, this pseudo-documentary follows the lives of certain... eccentric... families who believe that the end of civilization is coming and they better get busy preparing for that eventuality. Whereas you and I might keep a bit […]

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New! Samsung Security Flaw - Disable Lockscreen - Total Control


A finger pointing at a Samsung phone's dialer.

I have discovered another security flaw in Samsung Android phones. It is possible to completely disable the lock screen and get access to any app - even when the phone is "securely" locked with a pattern, PIN, password, or face detection. Unlike another recently released flaw, this doesn't rely quite so heavily on ultra-precise timing. […]

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Surrey Police and the Case of The Misleading Pie Charts


Surrey County Council have sent every household in the county a booklet explaining how our council tax is being spent. Within it is a highly political comment from Kevin Hurley, the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner. He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it […]

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Experiments Using (not quite) Google Glass


Way back in 2010, I got a pair of video recording sunglasses. I've been occasionally using them to "lifelog" what I'm doing. With the advent of Google's Project Glass, I thought it would be interesting to wear them to a fairly techy event - Not At SXSW London - to see what the reaction would […]

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Is there a future in .tel?


It's been four years since I got a .tel domain. Way back then, I wasn't that keen on the idea - I thought the implementation was iffy and the design pretty naff. Since then, the site has got easier to use and now looks a lot better - especially on mobile. When http://edent.tel/ came up […]

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Podcasting on the Voicemail


A reel-to-reel tape recorder.

My new commute involves a lot of driving, which means I've started listening to podcasts again. One of my favourite mobile related podcasts is The Voicemail - it's a quick half hour chat between two mobile industry experts; Stefan Constantinescu and James Whatley. Stefan has been travelling for the last few weeks, so James has […]

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Inkscape - cropping SVG files on the Command Line


Logo for Inkscape.

A little post as an aide-mémoire. I've found a lovely set of SVG playing cards. The only problem is each image is displayed within a page. This means the relatively small cards have an enormous white margin. Within Inkscape (the vector image editor for Linux) it's possible to crop the margins by going to: File […]

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