There are two very clear signs that I'm getting old. The first is that I bought a domestic robot to help me with the chores. The second is that, rather than spending my evenings and weekends reading decades old forum postings, reverse engineering serial interfaces, and soldering components together - I plunked €99 on a bit of kit which "just works". Enter the Thinking Cleaner - it's a replacement faceplate for Roombas which adds WiFi and a sweet hackable API. This post looks at how the unit …
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Many years ago, as I was wandering around the Louvre, I came across a painting which bore an uncanny resemblance to me! Spooky, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's not the greatest likeness ever, but people who know me seem to think I look like the chap on the left. This got me thinking... Wouldn't it be great if when you entered an art gallery, a computer could tell you which painting you look most like? Well, I think it would be great. This is my blog, so what I say goes! Getting The Data I'm using …
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Humans are pretty spectacular at image recognition. We have a seemingly innate ability to look at an image and tell if it is that of a human face - even if it has been severely distorted. Occasionally though, the software in our brains is a little too eager to see a face. This phenomenon is called Pareidolia. It's what causes you to see dragons when you look at the clouds, and a smiling face when you see :-) Recently, I've been running facial recognition software on artworks held by…
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices every single day. Even if cold-fusion brings us unlimited free energy - plugging your gadgets into a wall just seems so primitive! That's where BlueTooth Low…
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What a crazy weekend! I made the last minute decision to attend Rewired State's "National Hack The Government 2014" hackathon. Rather than hack on any of the provided datasets, I wanted to work on an interesting way to present all the security flaws I had found in Government websites. I teamed up with Mark, Marcello, and Orlando - together we created "Corkr - Plugging the Government's Digital Holes" We were looking for different and interesting ways to visualise the data. Interactive…
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I was recently given 3 rather locked-down network cameras. Each camera was pre-programmed to communicate with a specific website, and only attach to a predefined wireless access point. Naturally, there was no supplied username or password. I thought about how I might get access. Using a man-in-the-middle attack to sniff the password, or trying to dump the firmware and examine that. Sadly, all the vulnerabilities previously reported no longer work. After a little bit of thought, I went for…
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Perhaps the most legendary piece of plastic in the hacker community is the humble "Cap'n Crunch" whistle. The free-in-cereal whistle was able to emit a piercing shriek at 2600Hz - the exact tone required to unlock the US phone network. So, because it's all I seem to do these days, I turned my my trusty RepRapPro and decided to see whether it was possible to 3D print a whistle which could produce the same frequency. I found a customisable whistle on Thingiverse and customised it to include…
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Remember text adventures, eh? They were pretty nifty! "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" >Go East "You have been eaten by a Grue. A dwarf starts singing about gold" Smashing! Just like the pictures are better on the radio, so the graphics are immeasurably superior when they're in your head. Don't get me wrong, I love the 5.1 surround sound snarl of a rabid beast rendered in 1080p - but nothing is quite as good as using your imagination. Text Adventures - or, more…
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Friend, colleague, and fellow geek, Sam Machin has introduced me to the wonders of the OBDII port! Essentially, OBD (On Board Diagnostics) is a port which is found on every car produced since the late 1990s. It allows garages to see all sorts of diagnostic information about your car, its engine, and all other manner of petrol-headed goodness. It's designed to be easily accessible and conform to a common standard. So, it's no surprise that a whole cottage-industry has developed around this…
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This weekend, I went to Rewired State's Parliament hackday. I teamed up with amazing front end designer Max Bye and statistician par excellence John Sandall to create a data visualisation of Parliament's Demographics. Are the houses representative of the people in terms of gender diversity? Are the Labour Party younger than the Conservatives? Are the parties in the Lords particularly dissimilar? You can play with the hack or watch a video demonstration. Each bubble represents a…
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At Over The Air I demonstrated what I considered a novel use for one of Android's sensors. I wanted to create a Theremin - a type of musical instrument which is played by moving one's hand over it - changing pitch and tone by moving nearer or further away. My first attempt used the proximity sensor. However, on all the Android phones I tried the sensor's accuracy was binary - it could sense if something was close by, but not say how close. So, what else could I use to detect how near or…
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My new project - QRpedia - gets its first official outing at Derby Museum's Backstage Pass this Saturday. Do come along if you're in the area. Before then, I thought I'd give you a sneak-peek at what's happening. In February, there was a discussion on this blog about using QR codes in museums to link to Wikipedia pages. Things have rather snow-balled from there. Working with Roger Bamkin, we've created a working prototype which is ready to take over THE WORLD! (more…) …
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