Behold! Thanks to the power of the Watchy development platform, I now have all my 2FA codes available at the flick of my wrist! HOWTO This uses Luca Dentella's TOTP-Arduino library. You will need a pre-shared secret which is then converted into a Hex array. Use the OTP Tool for Arduino TOTP Library to get the Hex array, Base32 Encoded Key, and a QR Code to scan into your normal TOTP…
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I have the new Watchy eInk watch. It has a cute little screen with a resolution of 200x200 pixels. How much text can we cram in there? A typical watch face looks like this: My new watch face is far superior and looks like this: That's using the GNU Unifont - which works brilliantly on tiny devices. HOWTO Download the GNU Unifont Download and compile HarfBuzz Run the HarfBuzz Font…
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Last year, I blogged about how I turned an old eReader into an Information Screen. I've since updated the display to show me three different sets of transport information. At a glance, I can see the next bus, whether there are delays on the Elizabeth Line, and if my regular trains are running. Here's how all three APIs work. Bus The bus is the easiest one of all. Transport for London (TfL) …
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This play is exhausting. It is an absolutely relentless comedy. I don't mean a few scattered laughs, I mean a full-on assault on your comedy nerves. It starts as a high-energy farce and escalates and escalates and escalates until you can't trust your senses any more. If you're unfamiliar with the plot - as I was - it's a remake of a 1970s piece of agit-prop theatre in which the death of a…
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Way back in the 1990s, my family visited the USA. It seemed at every single large shop there was a person stood inside whose sole job was to say "Welcome to STORENAME! How are you doing today? We're so pleased to have you shop with us!" - their face plastered with an enormous grin. It was quite the culture shock. To us, it felt weird, insincere, and creepy. But, like the over-enthusiastic…
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This was a cheap Kindle deal, so I took a punt. It's a collection of stories whose titles mirror the tracks of Please Please Me. Except... They kinda don't? A couple of the stories are explicitly Beatle-y, the others aren't. The titles don't seem to bear any resemblance to the stories told. Indeed, one was obviously originally named "Octopus's Garden" - featuring a rather good tale of a man who…
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I thought I wasn't clever enough to read this book. The intro and first section are very challenging if you're not already familiar with philosophy and literary criticism. However, I struggled through and found something quite wonderful. Let's start with what this is about: I advocate for the development of computational poetics: a strategy of interpretation capable of reaching past surface…
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With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but…
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The last smartwatch that I tried was some awful early Sony device with a locked-down ROM. The battery died after a day and I couldn't find the proprietary charger. It slurped up all my data. It was garish to look at. And it was expensive. The Watchy is the opposite in every single conceivable way. It is an Arduino powered, open source, eInk display, with no data guzzling tendancies. And is only …
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I'm obsessed with the idea that human progress could be accelerated - if only we realised how to properly combine existing technology. I don't want to go "Ancient Aliens" here - but even a cursory reading of scientific history will show you were humanity's progress could have been dramatically fast if only knowledge was more widely shared and recognised. The book "How To Invent Everything" makes …
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There was an interesting discussion at UKGovCamp a few months ago. UKGC is an unofficial yearly gathering of public sector people, who chat informally about thorny issues at work. Suppose a digital design team has to support a policy which charges people money every time they do a thing. Let's say driving a car across a bridge. There's all sorts of cool tech that you could use in order to make …
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Perhaps you are aware of the Mandela Effect - a psychological phenomenon where you are convinced you remember something which never actually happened. This, combined with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon - where you suddenly start noticing something unusual - can cause extreme cognitive dissonance. What does the verb "to trespass" mean to you? I always thought it was the act of going somewhere p…
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