Regular readers will know that I have solar panels and an electric car. Is there any way to hook the panels up so they directly charge the car? Can I set my electrical system up to divert surplus electricity into the car when my house isn't using it. This is what I do with my hot water iBoost - when household energy usage is low, it automatically switches on my immersion heater. Can I rig up…
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Another in my occasional series on the usability of toilets! It's hard wandering around seeing the mistakes which are made by designers. Perhaps it's poor keming on fonts, or a hotel room light switch which makes no sense, or - in my case - bogs. Lots of toilets incorporate a "dual flush." Press one button to unleash a deluge sufficient to sink all but the hardiest of bowel-movements, press a…
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In the glorious past, Amazon had an API for interacting with its "Wishlist" service. Not any more though. So, here's the inspiring story of how a rag-tag band of adventurers brought it back from the dead! Several years ago, Justin Scarpetti created a tool to extract data from an Amazon wishlist - the imaginatively named Amazon Wish Lister. It used that most vulgar of programming practices -…
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Go take a look at this tweet https://twitter.com/edent/status/650948940431511552. You can't - I deleted it! I've been looking at how to track politician's deleting tweets, when it occurred to me - is there any way to prove that a Tweet ever existed? It's possible to automatically take a screenshot of a page, but screenshots can easily be manipulated. So, can we preserve deleted tweets with…
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I've been looking for a way to programmatically take screenshots of websites. Most of the solutions I've found won't work on headless servers, require complex libraries to be installed, or cost money. So, what do we do when faced with a knotty programming problem? Hack it! Google has a "Pagespeed" service, it allows any webmaster to get a comprehensive report on how Google assess their page. …
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Occasionally, I get some really interesting freelance gigs. It turns out there's a rising market for conference hack-days. New company Digiotology paid me - and several others - to participate in a hackathon based at the Extreme Medicine Conference in London. Conference goers could attend lectures, visit exhibitor stands, and come discuss their needs with a group of friendly hackers. We…
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A little curio for you all. A StackOverflow user has pointed out that certain Twitter profiles contain very odd Unicode characters. What on Earth is going on? Let's take a look at Bill Clinton's profile on Twitter. Ok, that looks pretty normal. But let's take a look at the HTML source. Huh... What are those funny characters? Unicode Character U+0003 is "End of Text" - it's one of the…
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I'm incredibly disappointed with "Doctor" Emmett Brown. His forays into time-travel could have extremely profound consequences for the space/time continuum. Worse than that, his time machine has a crap user interface. In this clip from "Back To The Future" we get a brief glimpse at the controls for setting the destination date: Ok, we can forgive Brown for not sticking to ISO-8601 - that is…
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Four years ago, I wrote an article for Moo.com about using QR Codes on business cards. At the time, it was the easiest way to get VCARD information from a physical card and onto a phone. I notice that Moo are now selling NFC enabled business cards. As regular readers know, I'm not a great fan of NFC - mostly because it's so expensive. The NFC cards are £1.20 each - the regular cards cost just …
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A few months ago, I blogged about how cost efficient electric cars are. Last week I took delivery of a BMW i3 REX - so here's a quick review of the vehicle. A warning, I'm a grumpy, demanding, sod. I really like the car - but that doesn't blind me to its flaws. But first, and brief diversion into PHYSICS and MATHS! Physics Imagine a kilogram weight (1Kg) sat on an ice rink. You want to…
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(Because what the world needs is another CoC thinkpiece from a straight, white-passing, cis-gendered man.) This is a rambling blog post inspired by Cate Hudson's "Codes of Conduct and Worthless Manfeelings". You should read that first, it's pretty good. Don't worry, I'll wait. (In which I do my best not to insult all my friends and colleagues.) I go to lots of conferences. Fewer than I…
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I was at a hackday recently. During one of the talks, a speaker from a small company made a fairly stinging criticism of a large tech firm. As it happened, one of the audience members was an employee of said behemoth and heckled the speaker. After the presenter told him to shut up, he spent the rest of the session snarkily subtweeting his objections to her arguments. Geeks are people who run…
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