Another in my occasional series on the usability of toilets! It's hard wandering around seeing the mistakes which are made by designers. Perhaps it's poor keming on fonts, or a hotel room light switch which makes no sense, or - in my case - bogs. Lots of toilets incorporate a "dual flush." Press one button to unleash a deluge sufficient to sink all but the hardiest of bowel-movements, press a…
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In the glorious past, Amazon had an API for interacting with its "Wishlist" service. Not any more though. So, here's the inspiring story of how a rag-tag band of adventurers brought it back from the dead! Several years ago, Justin Scarpetti created a tool to extract data from an Amazon wishlist - the imaginatively named Amazon Wish Lister. It used that most vulgar of programming practices -…
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Go take a look at this tweet https://twitter.com/edent/status/650948940431511552. You can't - I deleted it! I've been looking at how to track politician's deleting tweets, when it occurred to me - is there any way to prove that a Tweet ever existed? It's possible to automatically take a screenshot of a page, but screenshots can easily be manipulated. So, can we preserve deleted tweets with…
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I've been looking for a way to programmatically take screenshots of websites. Most of the solutions I've found won't work on headless servers, require complex libraries to be installed, or cost money. So, what do we do when faced with a knotty programming problem? Hack it! Google has a "Pagespeed" service, it allows any webmaster to get a comprehensive report on how Google assess their page. …
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Occasionally, I get some really interesting freelance gigs. It turns out there's a rising market for conference hack-days. New company Digiotology paid me - and several others - to participate in a hackathon based at the Extreme Medicine Conference in London. Conference goers could attend lectures, visit exhibitor stands, and come discuss their needs with a group of friendly hackers. We…
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A little curio for you all. A StackOverflow user has pointed out that certain Twitter profiles contain very odd Unicode characters. What on Earth is going on? Let's take a look at Bill Clinton's profile on Twitter. Ok, that looks pretty normal. But let's take a look at the HTML source. Huh... What are those funny characters? Unicode Character U+0003 is "End of Text" - it's one of the…
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