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…
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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 s…
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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 …
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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:…
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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 bio…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference between man and machine? In "I, Robot", Asimov sets out the Three Laws of Robotics – designed to protect humans from their robotic creations – and pushes them to their limits and beyond. After attending a…
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The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius. A fascinating look at a defining moment in technological development. Full of intrigue, double-crossing, maths, and science. It cracks along at a fair pace, sometimes lightly skipping over details. I would gladly have read this if it…
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I've just got a set of wearable NFC tags, and I've discovered something interesting about the way data is stored on them. tl;dr Overwriting a tag can leave old data intact, and still readable. Here's the decoded memory layout of a tag with data written to it. In this case, a (failed) experiment at storing a JavaScript pop-up. # NDEF message: [00] D1 01 7D 55 00 64 61 74 61 3A 74 65 78 74 2F 68 …
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Death’s End (死神永生) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. This is an unforgiving book. Did you remember every detail from the last two novels? No - better go back and take some notes! It is epic sci-fi. Boun…
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