Earlier this week I tried my hand at printing fossils. The print didn't perfectly, but it was quite encouraging. Museum Victoria - an Australian institution - has released a 3D scanned trilobite on Thingiverse. I trimmed the model - to make the bed shallower and the sides neater - and hit print. I'm pretty impressed with the results: My remixed model is also available on Thingiverse if you'd like to have a go at printing your very own fossil. I'm impressed with the fidelity of the …
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A couple of years ago, we had solar panels installed on our roof. We based our power generation estimates on the Europa Solar Calculator which estimated that they would generate around 2,700 kWh per year. Every few months we take a reading and see how the panels have been performing. Our meter reading for the end of May was 4,271kWh - our reading at the end of August was 5,791. That means this summer we generated 1.5MWh! Let's put that into context. The average UK domestic household uses …
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I've just discovered the amazing 3D Fossils site of the British Geological Survey. The GB3D Type Fossils Online project, funded by JISC, aims to develop a single database of the type specimens, held in British collections, of macrofossil species and subspecies found in the UK, including links to photographs (including 'anaglyph' stereo pairs) and a selection of 3D digital models. What that means is that they have thousands of British fossils available as freely downloadable 3D models! Even …
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As part of my quest to ensure I have a reasonable backup of all my social media data, I've been investigating ho easy it is to export photos from TwitPic. I've been using TwitPic since 2008 and have uploaded 1,200 images there. There's no official export function for TwitPic. The services which used to exist relied on their RSS feeds - which have since been killed off. This little Python script uses some undocumented APIs to grab all your images, save them in a directory, and make sure they …
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Late last week, I released an eBook copy of the Voynich Manuscript on Amazon. I sent a few tweets encouraging people to either download it for free from my website - or buy a copy from Amazon. Amazingly, given the choice, some people decided to throw a couple of quid my way! Once I saw that people were retweeting me, I rushed over to the Amazon stats page to see how I was doing. Holy cow! Not only had I actually sold some copies, but it was enough to propel me to the top 10 of several…
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Three years ago I promised to convert the Voynich Manuscript into an ebook. The recent news that it may have been deciphered spurred me to finish my project. So, here it is, the world famous mystery that is the Voynich Manuscript now in convenient eBook format. PDF - suitable for Kindle, nook, Kobo, Android, iOS and for most devices (60MB) CBZ - suitable for comic book readers, tablets, etc. (60MB) As the book is pure images, I decided not to convert to .mobi or .epub. Those are …
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The BBC is reporting that the Government is so afraid of prisoners having access to concealed mobile phones, they want to introduce a ban. UK officials are considering banning the sale of small mobile phones designed to resemble car key fobs. A government spokesman told the BBC that it was discussing the issue with the National Trading Standards Board and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It follows a report by the Times suggesting some of the Chinese-made products were being advertised…
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In Britain - and many other countries - the police can legally force you to divulge your passwords. Whether it's to an encrypted file, a social network, or your email account, the state can legally rifle through your most intimate thoughts and (potentially) pose as you online. As we've recently seen, this can be done under the threat of prison - even if you've not been charged with any crime: "They got me to tell them the passwords for my computer and mobile phone," Miranda said. "They said…
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Three years ago, I wrote about the deficiencies in Microsoft's Tag system. It was painfully obvious even then that MS had no desire to back the "standard" they'd tried to create. They couldn't even be bothered to leverage the then-new Windows Phone to get the reader into customers' hands. Their terms and conditions at the time said We will also use commercially reasonable efforts to make these basic features available until at least January 1, 2015, and provide two years prior notice before …
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You can't. I mean, not officially. There's nothing in the API documentation, and all my attempts to contact Twitter on this matter have been ignored. If you're getting abuse on Twitter you have to use the official Twitter clients to report people. No matter that 3rd party clients may be better at protecting your privacy, offering you a sanitised view of the people tweeting you, or enable you to block offensive words or phrases. In Twitter's increasing war on the developers who helped build …
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OMG! Some star LOVES Samsung. Back when Twitter started, they used to advertise which Twitter clients people used. You could see that Stephen Fry preferred Feathers, and that I used Dabr. All was well. Then, of course, Twitter went to war with its third party developers. They cut their API limits, reduced their functionality, and obliterated all mention of third party clients. Which means that you can't see that certain "celebs" are hypocrites. Looking at the underlying data of the…
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Some days, I think it must be fantastic to work for an organisation which just doesn't care any more. The sort of place which thinks, "sod it, it's not like we need more readers or more money." That is, I imagine, what it's like to work for The Times. For the last 3 years, The Times' articles have been (mostly) behind a paywall. People have been predicting its demise for just as long, but it shows no signs of going away - no matter how few people pay for content. The overall thrust of The…
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