I love OpenFreeMap it is a quick, easy, and free way to add beautiful maps to your Open Source projects. With the latest release of MapLibre-GL I wanted to see if there was an easy way to use both to make an interactive globe with clustered markers. Spoiler alert: yes! Basic Globe Here's a basic example which I've trimmed down from this example. When you load the below code, you'll get a…
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A million years ago, I was helping advise an analogue office who were thinking about making the great leap forward to the digital future. I was sat in the boss's office extolling the virtues of digitisation. "How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently. "Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a…
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I think everyone reading this post has accidentally messed up when sending an email, right? I noticed this story recently: The Metropolitan Police has apologised to victims of the Westminster "honeytrap" scandal after it accidentally sent an email which named all of them. … the sender, a detective sergeant in the Met’s Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection unit, included the recipients’ names …
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Android is belatedly getting a Bluetooth tracker feature which doesn't rely on proprietary apps. Long-time readers will know that back in 2016 I reviewed both the Chipolo and the TinTag. Both of those were adequate at finding things which were in range of your phone, but hopeless at finding lost items - because they required everyone to have a special app installed. But now, under pressure from …
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"Mirror Mirror on the wall. What's the hottest gadget of them all?" Do you need a mirror which is connected to the Internet? Yes. Obviously. What's the point of having anything which doesn't have an IP address‽ The good folks at Infrared Group don't want me shivering while I blog, so they've sent me their latest Far Infrared heating panel which, obviously, is also a smart mirror. 350W of heat, e…
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I love ripping off good ideas from other people's blogs. I was reading Alvaro Graves-Fuenzalida's blog when I saw this nifty little force-directed graph: When zoomed in, it shows the relation between posts and tags. In this case, I can see that the posts about Small Gods and Pyramids both share the tags of Discworld, Fantasy, and Book Review. But only Small Gods has the tag of Religion. …
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I've got a bunch of travel coming up to exotic locations. Previously, I've bought a local SIM card when I've landed - but they're often expensive, fiddly to fit, and queuing in an airport isn't much fun. I've also bought pre-paid SIMs which have a fixed amount of data or only last a specific amount of time. But the big problem with those solutions is that you lose a fair bit of value unless you …
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My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity, focus, mise-en-scène, proper lighting and a thousand-and-one details that I've …
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Lots of people using banking apps on their Android phones. They're a convenient way to check your balance, transfer money to people, and get alerts about fraudulent transactions. But, like anything related to money, they can be abused. Nowadays, thieves are not only snatching phones, but forcing their owners to transfer money to the thieves. This is not an isolated incident. How can you…
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This starts out as a delightfully silly and charming book about the bureaucracy of Time Travel and ends up as something darker and more thought provoking. What would happen if the UK Civil Service had access to TIME TRAVEL!?!?! It's a brilliant idea for a novel and is written with a seemingly-real understanding of the number of forms, systems, emails, and subterfuge needed to set up such a…
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I read this brilliant blog post by Wouter Groeneveld looking at how many dead links there were on his blog. I thought I'd try something similar. What is a broken link? Every day, I look at the On This Day page of my blog and look at that day's historic posts. I click on every link to see if it is still working. If it isn't, I have a few options. If the site is working, but the content has…
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Either I'm particularly thick, or this is the most over-written and under-explained academic claptrap I've read in some time. Some of the language is pure poetry: the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion It doesn't actually mean anything. You have to be able to parse unexplained concepts like "an oedipal calendar" and deal with interminable footnotes…
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