As regular readers know, I've turned a BLE Beacon into a wireless business card. Physical Web used the Bluetooth beacon standard to continually broadcast not an ID number, but a URL. If you're in my proximity, you can grab my contact details. The one problem with the beacon I have is that it has an exposed button. Every time it got bumped in my pocket, the token would emit a couple of shrill…
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Selfie sticks - like most modern inventions - are utter tosh. But they've rapidly brought down the price of Bluetooth buttons. So who am I to complain? Let's take the venerable AB Shutter 3 - You can find it on Amazon for around £2 including postage - or around $2 on AliExpress. Frankly, that's stupidly cheap. OK, let's put this to work as something other than a vanity clicker! There are no …
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Last week I was invited to attend a product launch by BQ. They're a small company based out of Spain who create some curiously innovative products - including smartphones which natively run Cyanogen. I'm particularly looking forward to reviewing their Ubuntu Tablet later in the year. The thing which really caught my eye was Zowi (pronounced Zoë). It looks like this: And it dances like this: …
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(A somewhat rambling post about a very inconsequential problem.) I'm slowly building a Smart Home. I've security cameras emailing me when a cat has the temerity to walk past a window, a Roomba which tweets me, a thermostat which knows if I'm working from home, and a car which knows when to charge from my solar panels. Now it's time to focus on something a bit more useful - lighting! A few…
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The British courier firm Yodel are one of the most disreputable delivery companies in the country. Owned by the same tax exiles who run The Telegraph newspaper, the company is frequently complained about and has an unenvious reputation for poor service. The rot seems to start firmly at the top, with CEO Dick Stead. A few months ago, a company arranged to send me some delicate electronics for…
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(To the tune of the popular Elton John song.) I've often joked that if my employers could pay me in Amazon vouchers, it would save me a lot of hassle. I'm one of those insufferable people who prefers a delivery driver dropping off a single light bulb rather than having to pop to the shops like some sort of savage. But now the dream is over. Amazon have bundled their sub-standard video…
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You know how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic, nor particularly for the people, nor a republic? Yeah, so it turns out the "Universal 3D" format is pretty far from Universal! A little backstory... The Europeana Carare Project has some gorgeous 3D scans of ancient monuments and heritage sites. The only problem is that the 3D files are trapped inside PDFs. Yup -…
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New tech site Gadgette has a great article on how to type Emoji on Mac and Windows - but they (understandably) didn't cover Ubuntu. So here I am to show you how. Get The Fonts If your computer doesn't have the requite font, install the latest version of Symbola. Simply open up the .zip file, double click on the .ttf font, then choose "Install". Find The Character You almost certainly have…
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(To the tune of the popular Mary Poppins song.) How much does it really cost to drive an electric car? Well, I've had my BMW i3 for a few months, so I thought I'd crunch the numbers. As part of the UK Government's OLEV scheme, there's a subsidy for installing car charging points at home. One of the conditions of the subsidy is that a smart meter is installed which reports back details about…
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There's one of those "I've come up with a perfect analogy for life" blog posts going around. It's sort of like those stock photos with an "inspirational" quote on it - but in long form. Apparently, Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess. It's all vaguely plausible, life-lessony, woo - which tries to map one person's journey onto a greater human experience. Frankly, it's unmitigated…
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The UK's official web infrastructure is in a shockingly poor state. I've been doing some light digging into the security of UK Schools' websites. As I've written about ad nauseum, the Government takes almost no interest in the way some of its official websites are managed. The Department for Education is particularly inept when it comes to technology which - given that our country's future…
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I spent my Saturday crewing the reception desk at the amazing UK GovCamp Unconference. Part of our task was to check people in, hand them their name badges, schwag, and offer them a free conference T-Shirt. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of conference Ts stuffed in a drawer somewhere. They're all the same - a funky logo on the front, and usually a list of sponsors on the back. …
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