Here's an interesting conundrum. My TV can automatically detect when 3D video is being played and offers to switch into 3D mode - but how does the detection work? This post will give you a few strategies for detecting 3D images using Python. Firstly, some terminology. 3D videos are usually saved either as Side-By-Side images, or Over-Under images. Colloquially known as H-SBS and H-OU. Here's …
Continue reading →
Blogging - because Google don't offer a bug bounty for spam reports... Back in 2007, Google introduced "My Maps": Easily create custom maps with the places that matter to you. Allow friends to see and edit your maps, or publish them to the whole world. Like most Google products, it was effectively abandoned after launch - receiving a superficial update in 2014. Now it is a haven for spammers …
Continue reading →
In the book "Mostly Harmless" an Earthman finds himself stranded on a distant planet with a primitive level of technology. He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could…
Continue reading →
One of the most important tools in the war for your attention is the ability to critically examine media and discover its provenance. Take this example - a friend of a friend was tagged in this Facebook post, and so it appeared on my feed: WOW! Right! Nature is Coooooool! Or is it? If "The Planet Today" were a reputable source of news, they would tell us who the photographer was. Or where…
Continue reading →
Look, I know your company wants metrics. I know your boss wants to see the exact percentages of people who click on links in your emails. Your sales team are desperate to track conversions. Someone wants to optimise your funnel for reasons which are unclear to you, a lowly engineer. So you make the mistake of adding tracking to every email you send out. Including sensitive ones. I recently…
Continue reading →
Another in an occasional series of blog posts where I discuss products I've worked on which failed. It was the early 2000s and the large mobile telco I worked for had just spent billions of pounds on a 3G license. 3G was the future! Sure, faster data would be nice, but the real money was to be made in Video Calling! What could Video Calling be used to improve? The answer was obvious -…
Continue reading →
It was back in the late 1990s when I first got started with ad blocking. I don't remember if it was the "punch the monkey" adverts, or the pop-unders for weird security systems that tipped me over the edge. All I knew was my computer was slowing down and I thought animated ads were the culprit. I found a USENET post which explained how to modify my totally-legitimate copy of Windows 98 to block …
Continue reading →
A quick tutorial in how to recover 3D information from your favourite 3D movies. In this example, we'll be using Star Wars - The Last Jedi. tl;dr? Here's the end result (this video is silent): https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/walker-text.mp4 Grab the code on GitHub. Let's go! Take a screenshot of your favourite scene. Something with a clearly defined foreground and…
Continue reading →
I promise you this is a true tale. Only the names have been changed... Many moons ago, when I was very young - and you were even younger... I was working for a Very Large Company. Our team needed some help building an app and a back-end service. We could have built this ourselves - but we were stretched a bit thin with other work. So we found a great technology partner. They'd helped us in the …
Continue reading →
If you've been online for any length of time, you'll have come across this phenomenon. A story is shared which is obviously humorous. Inevitably, some people treat it seriously. I remember being a child and reading the satirical magazine "Private Eye" - I was young and couldn't easily differentiate between the news reporting and the humour. That lead to nothing more than internal…
Continue reading →
A short meander through some of the more obscure miscellany within Unicode. Languages hang around far longer than there are native speakers, and symbols get reused and repurposed (🍆). Here are some of the delightfully old-fashioned symbols hidden in your thoroughly modern smartphone. Tapes Long before solid-state drives, we used to record data on long thin strips of magnetic tape. 🖭 📼 I'm sure…
Continue reading →
Update for 2019! Twitter have changed how they compress images. Some of the techniques in this blog post may be out of date. Let's talk image compression! Services like Twitter will often apply aggressive levels of compression in order to reduce their storage space and decrease download times. This can have negative consequences for usability and image quality. Here's an example - this detail…
Continue reading →
