Well. That was an intense NaBloPoMo! I published a blog post every day in November - as I have for the last few years - but this was unlike anything that went before. I had over 50,000 viewers in a single day due to one of my posts, got hit by reddit and HackerNews, and even got asked to do some paid blogging! I started this month hoping to average 1,000 page views per day. This was so I could hit the (pretty arbitrary) milestone of half a million page views. This is what my November…
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Compare and contrast... [The] Xerox 914 copy machine [...] was used in soviet embassies all over the world. The machine was so complex that the CIA used a tiny camera designed by Zoppoth to capture documents copied on the machine by the soviets and retrieved them using a "Xerox repairman" right under the eyes of soviet security. Xerox Helped Win The Cold War And Samsung printers (as well as some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung) contain a hardcoded SNMP full read-write community…
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In July this year, I spoke at the 25th Privacy Laws Annual Conference. One of the things I most love doing is causing an audience to gasp with shock. I was asked about how businesses should best go about protecting the privacy of the customers - somewhat provocatively I replied "Why should they? Customers don't care." I then showed them the Twitter feed of @NeedADebitCard - all it does is retweet people who have taken a photo of their debit or credit card and then posted it onto Twitter. …
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Last year, I quickly created a blue-screen cut out of a strange photo of the police. Today, I was alerted to this rather lovely photo. Apparently, some 6 years ago, the police confiscated this "deadly martial arts weapon capable of decapitating a man." Well, I couldn't resist! Perhaps this can become one of my blog's traditions? So, here's a quick and dirty removal of the bluescreen. If I think of any more funny images, I'll stick them in this imgur gallery. …
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This weekend, I went to Rewired State's Parliament hackday. I teamed up with amazing front end designer Max Bye and statistician par excellence John Sandall to create a data visualisation of Parliament's Demographics. Are the houses representative of the people in terms of gender diversity? Are the Labour Party younger than the Conservatives? Are the parties in the Lords particularly dissimilar? You can play with the hack or watch a video demonstration. Each bubble represents a…
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The fifth anniversary of my blog went by without me noticing. I don't know if I'm a narcissist, but I quite often find myself re-reading old entries. Sometimes it's because I've Googled for the solution to a problem, only to find I helpfully blogged about it yonks ago - other times I'll read an article and think "Hmmm, I wrote on that subject a while ago," and go off to find what I used to think. With over 560 entries - ranging from single images to thousand word screeds - it's tempting to…
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Twitter makes a lot of money out of me. At least, I assume so. The code I helped write, and the sites I run, are used by millions of Tiwtter's users. I've sent a tonne of traffic their way, and what has Twitter given me? Not even a "thank you." Seriously, no one from Twitter has ever said "Thanks for all the customers. Thanks for helping develop our presence in certain markets. Thanks writing tools that keep our users playing on our service. Thanks!" Compare and contrast to App.net. The …
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I was chatting with a friend who expressed what I'm finding is a fairly common opinion. Well, yes, I'd love to move to Android - but all my content is in iTunes. I discovered that it wasn't apps which were the problem - buying them again is a pain, but most are free. It's media content which traps people into staying with services that they no longer want. Music, movies, TV, and podcast subscriptions. All tied up in Apple's little ecosystem. A very pretty noose to keep people chained to…
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One of the things that jollies me along during NaBloPoMo (where I have to write a blog post every single day in November) is seeing that people are reading my blog. I like watching the visitor counter tick gently upwards. I also love to see people discussing, arguing, and commenting on the posts I write. When I started this month, I looked at the blog's statistics and decided I wanted to get 30,000 views in the month of November. I normally average 600 views per day. So, how to get that up…
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I don't watch much TV. During the last episode of The Apprentice, my Twitter-feed was suddenly flooded with people talking about Nick Holzherr's app "Whisk". Apparently it was some kind of recipe / shopping / mash up thing called Whisk. Sounded good. Sounded familiar. Then I remembered this from CadburyHack Cadbury UK@CadburyUKBest use of APIs at #CadburyHack - Whisk team for their recipes mashup pic.x.com/e9ztkuy3❤️ 0💬 0🔁 017:23 - Sun 27 May 2012 Now, I didn't see either the TV show or the…
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I'm not a big fan of URL shortners - bit.ly, t.co, goo.gl, ow.ly, etc - I understand the need for them, but they seem to offer a fairly poor service in terms of privacy and usefulness. Take this recent example from Vodafone. Aside from the obvious downsides (user doesn't know where the link will take them, if it's compatible, link looks like gobbledegook, etc) there is a rather more interesting issue. Goo.gl - along with many other URL shortners - give everyone access to your statistics. …
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I've just seen this amazing short film - The End by Ted Evans Ted also has a blog which talks about all the awards The End has deservedly won. The premise of the film is simple - what if there was a cure for deafness? What if that cure was mandated? What if you refused? All good sci-fi stuff - with neat parallels to today's society. What really got me thinking was the way technology can have a profound - and often detriment - impact on communities. I'm not going to get into the politics…
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