Update! There's a new way to do this - read my latest post to find out how. Two or three years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working for the advertising giant. We played the usual game of dancing around salary and schedules,…
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My current ISP is Virgin Media. They get a lot of stick for being a bit useless - but I can't fault the speed of my domestic connection. They recently upgraded me for free to 152Mbps downsteam (and a less impressive 12Mbps up). As part of this upgrade, they sent me an email stating: now…
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So, I've submitted my first patch to the Linux Kernel! It's trivial set of documentation improvements - mostly done so I could see if I've got everything set up correctly. This blog post is more of an aide memoire than a fool proof guide - I hope future me finds it useful! Install and Configure…
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I looked at my Solar Generation meter and winked. My new Google Glass snapped this picture 116 days ago, on the darkest day of the year, we had our solar panels installed. They have just ticked over the 1MWh mark. The average British house uses about 10kWh a day. By our estimates, our house uses…
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As part of my "National Hack The Government" win, I was awarded 100 DogeCoin! Although not my first foray into the exciting world of CryptoCurrencies, I'd never received DogeCoin before. I decided to set up an online wallet to temporarily store my loot while investigating more secure options. More or less at random, I went…
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I'm a big fan of the EU. For all its flaws, it has kept the peace for decades. Not only does it prevent physical wars - but it reduces the harm caused by companies warring against each other. Like most legislatures, it works on glacial timelines. Not only tackling the problems of the past, but…
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We're all changing our passwords in the light of Heartbleed, right? Good! If you are a developer or designer, I want to explain to you exactly how not to create a password dialogue box for your users. We're all used to seeing this: Input password: Change Password This is incorrect! Why? Because it leads to…
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Rewired State have just announced "End Of The World Hack" We know the earth is about to be bombarded with solar flares and magnetic storms of varying ferocity on July 4th, 5th and 6th 2014, by which time the infrastructure of the energy and communications networks will have been completely decimated across the entire planet.…
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Currently, I have four ways to monitor the total power generated by my solar panels. Check the meter. This is the most accurate way - but it is located inside a cupboard. Read the total from the Fronius API. Unfortunately, this rounds off to the nearest kWh, so isn't brilliantly accurate. Use the Fronius API…
Continue reading →As some of you may know, I'm writing a series of short stories to help young people learn how to code. One of the things I wanted to do was introduce the concept of using RESTful APIs. It's so powerful to show people that they can retrieve information from the Internet and then manipulate it…
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