A few weeks ago, I received an unsolicited email inviting me to try out an exciting new “quantum resistant” cryptography app called Cyph. Because I hate myself, I signed up. Of particular interest to me was the fact that the homepage loudly proclaimed that it was “Open Source” – and had a public GitHub repo.…
Continue reading →A question to the void. Are you entitled to get the source history of open source projects? Lots of Open Source licences give the consumer of software the right to a copy of the source code. For example, GPLv3 says that distributors of software have to: give anyone who possesses the object code … a…
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I’m hooking my solar panels up to Twitter! Installation Inverter Fronius provide a comprehensive API guide – I wish more companies did this. There are lots of unofficial libraries in a variety of different languages. I’ve written this code in Python3. This is a general tidy-up of the code I wrote several years ago. Here’s…
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I write book reviews on my blog. I also want to syndicate them to Goodreads. Sadly, Goodreads doesn’t natively read the Schema.org markup I so carefully craft. So here’s the scrap of code I use to syndicate my reviews. Goodreads API Keys Get your Keys from https://www.goodreads.com/api/keys You will also need to get OAuth tokens…
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Scratching my own itch here… GitHub users have a username (mine is @edent) and have a user ID number (mine is #837136). If you want to redirect a user ID to a username, you can use the little service I’ve cobbled together: https://edent.github.io/github_id/#837136 That will take your browser to my GitHub page, using nothing but…
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Play with the demo I was lucky enough to go to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting a few weeks ago. A perfect opportunity for a photo of me by that famous door. Being the vain man that I am, I wanted to set it as my avatar photo. But Twitter and other social…
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Last year, I wrote about how to extract Location History from Google. Once again, Google have changed their URLs to make it even harder to get one’s current location out of their data-greedy hands. It used to be the case that Latitude gave that information – but they killed it. Then they promised it in…
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There was an interesting discussion on HackerNews last week about the Linux Kernel coding style. During the discussion, I kicked off a minor holy war about whether one should vertically align code. I’m all for it! Let me explain why. What Is Vertical Alignment? Take this trivial example: int robert_age = 32; int annalouise_age =…
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Update! There’s a new way to do this – read my latest post to find out how. Two or three years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. They wanted to know if I’d be interested in working for the advertising giant. We played the usual game of dancing around salary and schedules,…
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It’s always very tricky when people who aren’t educators start banging on about what should or shouldn’t be taught in schools. My own school days are but a hazy memory of hormones, angst, and boring homework. Yet here I am, pontificating. With the current “fad” of encouraging children to learn to code, I thought I…
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