I read a Guardian article about an artist who set up an analogue camera in front of their TV, set it to long exposure, and set a movie playing. The result was a rather wonderful collection of images. You can see more of Jason Shulman's works Is there a way to automate this process? Yes! […] Read More
I've grown to loath IFTTT. What started out as a cool way to plug internet things together has being an opaque an uncommunicative company with no real interest in customer service. That's not surprising, I suppose, its paying customers are the companies who can't be bothered to develop a proper API and so just shove […] Read More
I few days ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that one of my Tweets had been used as a citation in Wikipedia! I began to wonder - how often are Tweets used in citations? It's possible to search for your own Tweets using this (somewhat obscure) link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fedent Just edit the end of it […] Read More
Twitter, as part of its never-ending quest to alienate users and appease the rich and powerful, have shut down Politwoops accounts. Politwoops monitored politicians' Twitter accounts and noted when they deleted a tweet. Most of the time deletions were done for the same reason we all deleted content - mispellings, broken links, etc - but […] Read More
The idiot in question being... me! It's been ages since I did any real electronics. Most of my work involves software and pre-assembled bits of kit. I thought that it was time I reacquainted myself with the joys of electricity :-) Because I'm fundamentally lazy, I purchased the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 2 kit from Vilros. […] Read More
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I don't think […] Read More
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 […] Read More
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 […] Read More
As part of BlueLightCamp '14, a group of civil servants, hackers, and emergency service workers got together for a weekend of furious creation. I decided to look at flooding data. The recent floods in the UK are a brutal remember of the realities of climate change and our poor stewardship of the nation's waterways. The […] Read More
There are loads of really delightful Simplified and Traditional Chinese True Type Fonts available on the web. There's only one issue - the file sizes are really large. In many cases, too large to effectively use as a web-font. For example, this calligraphy style font is 3.4MB. The beautiful Paper Cut Font weighs in at […] Read More