I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission. I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset to get into - almost all games are competitive. But with the help of an amazing team, …
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I want to correct a common misconception. Many people think that you can dial the emergency services even if you do not have a SIM in your phone. I see this advice scattered around the web - often telling people to keep an old, SIMless phone for an emergency - and it is dangerously wrong. If you are in the UK, you must have an active SIM in your phone! Your SIM does not need to be in credit,…
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A few weeks ago I tried some delicious vegetarian caviar. Beautiful - but expensive. I began to wonder how hard it would be to make my own flavour pearls. Well, all good experiments start by buying a beginners' kit. Before attempting basic "spherification", I decided to attempt something much more simple. Agar-Agar veggie strips. 400g Apple Juice 100g Caster Sugar 7g Agar-Agar Powder The …
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I've just finished reading the most wonderful short story - Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang. In it, he speculates on what would happen if The Tower of Babel were completed. For those unfamiliar with the legend, it tells of a people who tried to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. The book talks about the people who live partway up the massive tower, unable to comprehend what life is…
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Scratching my own itch. I have a bunch of directories which I want moved into alphabetic sub-directories. This is handy is you have a bunch of MP3s, books, or other catalogued files. This bash script moves a top level directory (and all the files and subdirectories under it), to a folder based on the (upper-case) version of the first character of the directory name. #!/bin/bash for dir in */…
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As ever, notes to myself. I hope you appreciate this future me! Photographs often contain EXIF metadata - really useful for finding out when a photo was taken. It turns out that you can add similar metadata to MP4 format videos. Here's how to do it with ffmpeg on Ubuntu Linux. The magic option is -metadata creation_time="2015-12-25T12:34:56" Stick that in when you're encoding your video and it …
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I've grown to loath IFTTT. What started out as a cool way to plug internet things together has being an opaque an uncommunicative company with no real interest in customer service. That's not surprising, I suppose, its paying customers are the companies who can't be bothered to develop a proper API and so just shove some integrations up there. But it is annoying for those of us who want…
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Amazon now let you secure your account with Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA). This means you can log on with a one-time password which changes every minute. For some reason, Amazon call it Two-Step-Verification (2SV) - but it is exactly the same as all the other 2FA solutions. The Process There's no direct link to 2FA settings. So the process is slightly convoluted. Assuming you are signed in …
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Music streaming service Spotify has launched a new range of adverts which have gathered mixed reactions. On the surface, they seem like the usual bland corporate attempts at chumming down - trying to cynically pass off advertising as friendship. It's kinda funny, right? Teresa López Ortega@TLopezOrtegaAt least a funny way to display the privacy we're allowing companies to violate: …
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The Internet Fridge is a standing joke among technologists. I was writing about them in 2002, and they still haven't appeared! So I'm going to show you how I built one. Stop giggling at the back! All I want is for my fridge to notify me if the door has been left over for more than a minute. I'm building this with an Onion Omega2 - but you could just as easily use a Pi Zero or any other board. …
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I've been sent an Omega2 Plus from Onion.io - it is a $9 Linux computer with built in Wi-Fi, Made for IoT. The obvious comparison is with the Raspberry Pi - and the ultra-cheap Pi-Zero. The Omega2 has a few advantages. It has a (small) amount of built in memory - so even if you don't have an SD card to hand it is still usable. WiFi is also built in - only 2.4GHz, but good enough for most…
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Has it really been 6 years since I last had vegetarian caviar? That's far too long! Sadly, the manufacturers of that particular brand have disappeared - so I was overjoyed when I discovered the UK-based Vegetarian Caviar Club. There are four flavours available, and jars cost between £6 and £7 plus postage. Let's get one thing out of the way first - I've never had real caviar. Not the h…
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