I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200x200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there? A typical watch face looks like this: My new watch face is far superior and looks like this: That's using the GNU Unifont - which works brilliantly on tiny devices. HOWTO Download the GNU Unifont Download and compile HarfBuzz Run the HarfBuzz Font Subsetter ./hb-subset unifont-15.0.06.ttf…
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Last year, I blogged about how I turned an old eReader into an Information Screen. I've since updated the display to show me three different sets of transport information. At a glance, I can see the next bus, whether there are delays on the Elizabeth Line, and if my regular trains are running. Here's how all three APIs work. Bus The bus is the easiest one of all. Transport for London (TfL) have a set of free APIs. No registration required! You will need to know the ID of your local bus…
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This play is exhausting. It is an absolutely relentless comedy. I don't mean a few scattered laughs, I mean a full-on assault on your comedy nerves. It starts as a high-energy farce and escalates and escalates and escalates until you can't trust your senses any more. If you're unfamiliar with the plot - as I was - it's a remake of a 1970s piece of agit-prop theatre in which the death of a suspect in police custody is investigated. The titular Anarchist died after falling from a 4th floor…
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Way back in the 1990s, my family visited the USA. It seemed at every single large shop there was a person stood inside whose sole job was to say "Welcome to STORENAME! How are you doing today? We're so pleased to have you shop with us!" - their face plastered with an enormous grin. It was quite the culture shock. To us, it felt weird, insincere, and creepy. But, like the over-enthusiastic whooping and cheering from US sitcom audiences, it seemed to be an accepted part of the culture. A few…
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This was a cheap Kindle deal, so I took a punt. It's a collection of stories whose titles mirror the tracks of Please Please Me. Except... They kinda don't? A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the stories told. Indeed, one was obviously originally named "Octopus's Garden" - featuring a rather good tale of a man who dreams he's an octopus, and vice-versa - but has been shoved into the "There's A Place" slot. There …
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I thought I wasn't clever enough to read this book. The intro and first section are very challenging if you're not already familiar with philosophy and literary criticism. However, I struggled through and found something quite wonderful. Let's start with what this is about: I advocate for the development of computational poetics: a strategy of interpretation capable of reaching past surface content to reveal platforms and infrastructures that stage the construction of meaning. Where…
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With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to …
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