Hello readers! Way back in 2015, I wrote a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game using Twitter. I think it is fair to say that it is the best computer game I've ever published. And probably the only time I'll ever be reviewed in The Guardian and Kotaku! Anyway, a year ago I was contacted by an art student. They wanted to adapt my game into a comic for their art class. How could I refuse? This…
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Electricity demand varies throughout the day. When demand is higher, electricity prices go up. Most UK consumers are insulated from this variability - we pay a fixed price per kWh no matter what the actual wholesale cost. But it doesn't need to be this way. Exposing users to the immense variability in pricing is probably too dangerous - as seen in Texas recently. Imagine if your electricity…
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My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules). Last year, I read an astonishing 85 books! That is too many books. This year I was doing lots of reading for my MSc - which was mostly academic papers. I also didn't have any long relaxing breaks. But, nevertheless, I'm happy to have read 42 books. Not bad! A few stats. The gender split was roughly 50:50. Some of the books were…
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It's my birthday! Therefore it marks the end of another year of me hurtling around Earth's yellow sun. So, as is customary, here's my year in review. (more…) …
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The social network service "Mastodon" allows people to publish posts. People can reply to those posts. Other people can reply to those replies - and so on. What does that look like in the API? Here's a quick guide to the concepts you need to know - and some code to help you visualise conversations. When you scroll through the website, you normally see a list of replies. It looks like this: …
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1861: "On the one hand, slavery is bad. On the other hand, cheap cotton from the South keeps the UK economy working." 2022: "On the one hand, invading Ukraine is bad. On the other hand, cheap gas from Russia keeps the UK economy working." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose… This is an incredible book. I knew very little about the American Civil War - this is a thorough history of that blo…
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Because I don't trust Alan, the Hyperprat who now runs Twitter, I decided to download my Twitter archive before setting my account to dormant. About a decade ago, I wrote about how the Twitter archive works and where it is deficient. Things have got better, but there are still annoying limitations. For example, Hannah Kolbeck - founder of the Alt Text Reminder Bot recently pointed out that…
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Two years ago to the day, I built Twistory - a service for seeing what you posted on Twitter on this day in previous years. If you've ever used Facebook, you'll know how it is supposed to work. You see posts which show that exactly 5 years ago you were starting a new job, 6 years ago you were at a wedding, etc. The Twitter version never really worked properly because the Twitter API doesn't…
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This is an astoundingly delightful book. It takes Nagel's classic question "What is it like to be a bat?" and takes us in to the heart of the hive. Humans can only understand our own lived reality. So here we have bees' behaviour translated into schemes and intrigues which would not be out of place in a medieval court. Bees wings are roaring engines, and their enemies are the hoards of…
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This was a rare DNF for me. I'm sure there's a brilliant story in there somewhere but it became too much of a chore to read. The prose is excruciatingly complicated. Half a dozen times in one page I had to use my eReader's dictionary to look up an archaic word. Perhaps that's part of the metastory? How much we rely on our external brains. The book is weirdly formatted. It uses different fonts…
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I am weak. I flounced off WhatsApp at the start of the pandemic due to Meta's shitty policies. Many of my friends made the move to Signal and some stuck with Telegram. But lots of them preferred WhatsApp and didn't want yet another inbox - especially one which was only connected to their weirdo privacy freak friends. I like Signal. It does everything I need. But some people are reluctant to move …
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WordPress's Jetpack plugin allows you to easily syndicate your blog to Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Email, and a few other services. But there's no native way to publish directly to your Mastodon feed. This is a guide to how I got my blog to publish every new post to Mastodon with a nicely formatted preview. This uses Jan's "Share on Mastodon" plugin which you'll need to install and configure. …
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