This is a retropost. It was written in 2022, but published later. Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode. Errr... OMG, yes! So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the GDS office, gushing about how much open source stuff we did - then got to watch him record a…
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Wouldn't it be good if digital currencies worked offline? I'm going to talk through a proposed user experience, and then discuss how it would work in practice. Let us imagine a future digital currency ₢. It might be fiat, it might be crypto, doesn't really matter. Alice loads up a smartcard with ₢100 and locks it. Alice gives Bob the smartcard. Bob uses offline verification to see that the smartcard contains ₢100 of unspent currency. Bob unlocks the smartcard and transfers the ₢100 to his ow…
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They say that The Best Camera Is The One That's With You - the same is true of Raspberries Pi. As much as I'd love a 4B, they seem permanently sold out. So I dug through my scrapheap of old tech and resurrected an ancient Pi2. It's old, outdated, slow, with limited RAM, and has a bunch of much-abused GPIO pins. But it works and - crucially - is still supported by Home Assistant OS. Well... ish! The official Home Assistant installation guide for the Pi says that you can use a: Raspberry…
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I don't understand capitalists. Taylor Swift - the popular beat combo - wanted to sell tickets for her concert. She priced the tickets too low. People purchased the tickets and resold them at a higher price - up to $28,000. Tay-Tay's fans purchased the higher priced tickets. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Why didn't the organisers of the concert just sell the tickets at the higher price? Why leave all that profit to be eaten up by scalpers? There are loads of methods for…
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This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect on how different authors tackle the same subject. The stories alternate between Chinese authors and English-speaking authors. Again, it feels a little disjointed. Will general audiences not read Chinese sci-fi unless…
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I'm a big fan of Untappd. It's a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I've drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints! After checking in, the app automatically posts to Twitter. But who wants to prop up Alan's failing empire? Not me! So here's some quick code to liberate your data and post it elsewhere. There are two ways - APIs and Screen Scraping. API First up,…
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The last part of my MSc Apprenticeship was my EPA Professional Discussion. It's designed to be a 90 minute chat to make sure you've actually learned something on the course. The official guidance is available. But I thought you might find it helpful to see the questions that I was asked. Disclaimer I jotted these down while doing the assessment. They are relevant to the Digital Technology Solution Specialist L7 MSc with a Data Analytics pathway. They will almost certainly be different for…
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