Because podcasts are now cool™ again - I've decided to resurrect this feed. If you're interested in being interviewed - please get in touch with me. We can record in person, over the phone, or via Skype. In the meantime, here's the podcast's theme-tune to get you in the mood. And to test that I've set up everything properly. 🔊 Gran Vals ~ Francisco Tárrega🎤 Brian Streckfus 💾 Download this audio file. 🎧 Stick this Podcast Feed into your podcatcher. 🍏 Subscribe on iTunes. 🎵 Intro…
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I've started using BitWarden - the open source password manager. As I've been binge-watching Marie Kondo, I thought it was about time that I deleted all the accounts that I no longer user. I got rid of dozens related to previous employers. I hope the passwords wouldn't work after I left but 🤷♂️. I scanned through the list and deleted old bank details, failed social networks, and obvious duplicates. I'm left with seven-hundred and ninety-five different login details! How has it got this b…
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This is what I've been working on in my new job: Matt Hancock@MattHancockBig welcome to @NHSX - harnessing technology to deliver for patientsTransforming health and care@NHSXHello, World!gov.uk/government/new…❤️ 513💬 0🔁 24012:24 - Tue 19 February 2019❤️ 41💬 4🔁 014:50 - Tue 19 February 2019 BOOM! With a fancy announcement in the House of Commons and everything! It has been a lot of work - and I'm obviously not the only person involved - so I wanted to explain some of the lessons I learned alo…
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Here's an interesting user-hostile pattern which could easily be avoided if programmers and business-people thought like regular humans. I have a Pioneer / Onkyo sound system. It's pretty nice and comes with a (not too crappy) Android app to let me remote control it. One day, the app updated itself. The changelog was the usual bland "bug fixes and improvements" message, but when I opened it, this happened: Why does a remote control need to know my location? I assumed it was for some…
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I have a Tado smart thermostat - part of my smarthome project. As well as letting me set the temperature from my phone, it records environmental data, and provides a handy API for me to retrieve it. This blog post will show you why I've gathered the data, let you download the full dataset, and explain what I learned from it. Why do this? There's a long-standing plan to use waste-heat from a nearby supermarket to provide communal heat to our neighbourhood. A low temperature heat main…
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You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate – a human or an algorithm? An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence. Welcome to the age of the algorithm. An all-too-brief journey through the problems with modern AI. If you've been paying attention to the trade-press, many of the stories here will be familiar to you. But I found a few which genuinely shocked me - and I was g…
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You're sat in a pub, chatting with your mates. You start to moan about how the cheap lager they serve gives you a headache. All of a sudden, a stranger runs up to you and says: "Oh no! Headaches? Have you tried the refreshing taste of Pepsi® Cola? It's the Flavour That Keeps Giving™!" I suspect you would complain to the bar manager and then find a new watering hole. You might, perhaps, tell the stranger never to contact you again. And, yet, this is what happens fairly regularly on Twitter. I…
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Tado is a brilliant smart thermostat. But their API is very poorly documented. This is an updated guide for 2019. I am indebted to Stephen C Phillips' original documentation. Getting started You will need: A Tado (duh!) Your Username (usually your email address) Your Password A Client Secret Getting the client secret I'm using this client secret: wZaRN7rpjn3FoNyF5IFuxg9uMzYJcvOoQ8QWiIqS3hfk6gLhVlG57j5YNoZL2Rtc This secret may change in the future. In the examples, I'll shorten it to…
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The realization that Galileo had fathered two nuns made me question everything I’d been taught about him in school. What if he did everything he did as a believing Catholic? I wondered. Isn’t that a much more nuanced, interesting story? And how would his daughter nuns have reacted to his unorthodox notions about the heavens? To his trial for heresy by the Roman Inquisition? This is a quick biography of Galileo's later years. The titular daughter, sadly, is only present in a few letters and …
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Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Why We Sleep delves into everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence. I am going to die from lack of sleep. My brain will turn to jelly, my mind will collapse, and my body shortly…
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Mostly notes to myself, as a follow-up to this older post. This is a 3-step process. Add the file to an MKV Use MKVmerge: mkvmerge "audio.wav" --chapters "audio.cue" -o "audio.mkv" You can see that chapter names have been added to the .mkv if you run ffmpeg -i or mkvinfo. Split the MKV by chapter This generates one file per chapter: mkvmerge -D -S "audio.mkv" --split chapters:all -o "split-%02d.mkv" The -D switch means no video will…
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Back when social networks were new, Twitter was a great place to raise a complaint with a company. You could be sure that the Twitter account was run by someone who got social and, more often than not, would show tweets to the CEO. Sadly, Twitter corporate accounts now all follow the same script "Gosh! That doesn't sound good! Let us put this right. Please DM us your customer number, surname, mother's maiden name, and blood type and we'll get right on to ignoring you." Bah! LinkedIn doesn't…
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