It is time for me to have a clear out. I've got hundreds of books which I've replaced with eBook, CDs which I never listen to, and DVDs I'm ashamed to own. Selling them individually on eBay or Amazon sounds like a lot of hard work... That's where Zapper and MusicMagpie come in. Both offer the same basic service: Scan the item's barcode with… Read more »
What Time Is It?
For a bit of light reading, I've been going through some of the documents published by Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry. There are thousands of Telegrams, eGrams, Teleletters, and other miscellaneous communications. For those unfamiliar with the jargon, the inquiry have helpfully published a guide to reading the evidence. In it is this delightful titbit about the timestamps used on telegrams. That's not a… Read more »
Debuffs, Enchantment, Equipment, and Players - an RPG Player's Guide to User Stories
If you've spent any time in a modern design environment, you'll be familiar with the idea of User Stories. As a first-time user, I want to log in with Facebook, so that I don't have to set up a new account. Fairly easy, right? Stick enough of those up on a wall and you've got yourself a party! If you've ever played an RPG… Read more »
Scaling Is A Human Problem Too
This morning I received an email which made my heart sink. In order to co-ordinate things better, we'd like to invite you to our exclusive Slack Channel! A variety of rude words danced around my brain. I think this makes the, what, 9th? 10th? Slack that I'm part of. Don't get me wrong, I like Slack as a service - but it only really… Read more »
Should you open your WiFi during a disaster?
There has been a terrible natural disaster in Italy. A huge quake has broken a city. Rescue teams race to the scene to try to save lives and stabilise the situation. During the rescue efforts, the Italian Red Cross sends this tweet: #Terremoto, per favorire comunicazioni e operazioni di soccorso vi invitiamo a togliere la password della rete wi-fi pic.twitter.com/U9baz8F7WG — Croce Rossa Italiana… Read more »
Technology Preview - The ReSpeaker
We're entering a golden era for small-batch artisinal hardware. Anyone with an idea and a modicum of talent can build hardware and get it shipped around the world at a reasonable price. Enter "The ReSpeaker" - an open source alternative to Amazon's Echo. It promises ultimate hackability, speech recognition, and IoT control, wrapped in a cheap single-board design. ReSpeaker is an open modular voice… Read more »
Review & Teardown: Oittm Bluetooth Headphones RE-E01
This is a sponsored post by LOPOO UK who've asked me to review their Oittm Bluetooth Headphones. There's a lot of technology packed in for £19.99. Bluetooth 4.1 - compatible with Android and iPhone. cVc noise cancellation - for improved call quality. A physically tiny 70 mAh battery - good for around 3-6 hours of use. I found it fully charged in around 2… Read more »
Easy ways to add watermarks to images and videos in Linux
Mostly notes to myself :-) Here is a quick way to add watermarks to photos and videos. All Linux command line based - so perfect if you've got a lot of images you want to manipulate. Here is a delightful photo I've taken of a bee covered in pollen. I want to add a little copyright notice to it in order to discourage people… Read more »
Reducing the filesize of complex 3D .OBJ models
Loading large 3D Models in the browser is extremely resource intensive. 2D images are trivial to resize and resample with negligible loss of perceived quality. 3D resizing is complex. As part of my "Pirate Museum" I wanted to display 3D scans of statues using WebVR. The only problem is, these files are huge. Take The Dancing Faun - at full resolution, that's around 230MB.… Read more »
IANA Insanity - or, how I learned to stop .worrying and .love the .new .internet
In The Beginning There was the .com and the .org and the .net and it was good. And, I mean, there were probably a few others - but that's all people cared about. Go Forth And Multiply And THE LORD sayeth "Hey, do people want country codes? Like .UK, .FR, .DE?" And the people were all like "Duh! Yeah!" Except for the people of… Read more »





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