If you ever listen to the wonderful More or Less podcast, you'll have heard the term "Zombie Statistic." It relates to stats which are factually incorrect - yet keep being circulated. Despite being disproved, they rear their ugly heads again and again. You probably know a few - men think about sex every 7 seconds, London is France's 6th biggest city, Christians are the most persecuted religion,…
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Many years ago, as I was wandering around the Louvre, I came across a painting which bore an uncanny resemblance to me! Spooky, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's not the greatest likeness ever, but people who know me seem to think I look like the chap on the left. This got me thinking... Wouldn't it be great if when you entered an art gallery, a computer could tell you which painting you look most like? …
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Humans are pretty spectacular at image recognition. We have a seemingly innate ability to look at an image and tell if it is that of a human face - even if it has been severely distorted. Occasionally though, the software in our brains is a little too eager to see a face. This phenomenon is called Pareidolia. It's what causes you to see dragons when you look at the clouds, and a smiling…
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We moved house recently. It's always fun to see what choices the previous owners made - orange paint in the bedroom? Yeuch! While some choices are purely subjective - those light fittings? - other choices are simply illogical. Let's take water meters. Anyone in the UK can get a water meter fitted for free. The alternative is that the water company literally make up your bill! "Hmmmm, four…
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Hanlon's Razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It would be nice to think that all mistakes and errors we encounter are just the result of bone-headedness. Sadly, that's not the case. Quite often malicious people deliberately try to trick you into taking actions you would normally have ignored. In usability, we call this a "Dark Pattern". A …
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Hey kids! Did you know that the best way to report bugs to Google is via passive-aggressive blog posts? Yup, s'true. They don't offer support for any of their products*, so your only hope is getting your complaint to the top of Reddit / HackerNews / Cool Site of the Day and hoping that particular Google Product Manager is taking note. So - here's my rant :-) Google now let you pay for apps…
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There are plenty of QR generators which will render the code in ASCII, but I wanted to try something a little different. Is it possible to hide ASCII Art into QR Codes? Errr.... yes... It's pretty damn simple! I was surprised I couldn't find anyone else doing this. (\_/) (='.'=) (")_(") Becomes: Which, when scanned, renders as: Now, there are limits as to what you can put into a QR…
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As part of BlueLightCamp '14, a group of civil servants, hackers, and emergency service workers got together for a weekend of furious creation. I decided to look at flooding data. The recent floods in the UK are a brutal remember of the realities of climate change and our poor stewardship of the nation's waterways. The UK Government has a large collection of Flooding Data online - including…
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I've written before about my love for the MS 4000 Ergonomic Keyboard. It's the only keyboard I'm comfortable typing on for extended periods of time. Sadly, one of mine has started to get a bit old and frail - the letters are rubbing off and the keys are getting a bit spongy - so I sprang for a new one. On getting the new one out of its box, I couldn't help but notice that it had undergone some…
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VWTech Co Ltd are yet another company out of Shenzen, China, selling weird and wonderful gadgets at knockdown prices. I decided to treat myself to one of their "Unique Real Handmade Natural Wood Wooden Hard Bamboo Shockproof Case For Samsung Galaxy Note 3" It promised to be a laser-cut and engraved, bamboo case for my Note 3. For £10, I thought it was worth a punt. After waiting a week for …
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A (very minor) privacy issue I found with the iTunes API - disclosed on 7th April. Apple provide an API to allow users to search the iTunes store. Let's suppose that a user wishes to search for Music Videos from The Beatles. The search itself is performed over HTTPS. https://itunes.apple.com/search?entity=musicVideo&term=beatles This means that anyone sniffing the connection won't see what…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I've just come back from an amazing BlueLightCamp 2014 - held in the splendid offices of the Ordnance Survey. Themed unconferences are nothing new - but I think this was one of the first that I've been to focussed on such a vital topic - the Emergency Services. You can read a full write up of all the sessions…
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