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 to see if you, or your friends, have been cited. Note - the username is case sensitive, so "Edent" isn't the same as "edent". …
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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 occaisionally they caught politicians attempting to flush history down the memory hole. If you're a dab hand with Python, and have a server upon which to run …
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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. Lots of LEDs, some buttons, a nice case, all the cables, resistors, and all sorts of bits and bobs. Including a breadboard! What's A Breadboard? I remember - from…
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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 it's unreasonable to think that "ekip_uhokoqeq" and "utadaqusoxeh" are randomly generated sequence of characters. And, without wishing to judge, that photo…
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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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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 UK Government has a large collection of Flooding Data online - including some very detailed river-by-river data. Initially, we thought it would be a great idea if every river …
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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 14MB! That file-size is far to heavy to embed on a web page. Subsetting Generally speaking, font files like .ttf contain a representation of every single character. 0-9,…
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The Python Pals Divine A Date Penny was in a right grouch. Her voice wobbled as she unloaded her woes on to her best friend, Poppy. "It's all so unfair!" She started to sob. "Oh sweetie," said Poppy, "I hate to say this, but you're sounding like a right stereotypical teenager!" Penny cracked half a smile and blew her nose. "I know," she said "But it's true. What can't I date him?" Poppy sighed. Penny's mum had banned her from seeing this boy - and it was causing no end of bother. "Well, she …
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This is the second of my "Python Pals" short stories. They're designed to be solve-it-yourself puzzle stories to help kids learn the basics of programming. All feedback welcome! The Python Pals Write A Wrong Poppy's mother, Ada, was not happy. "I don't care about that," she shouted down the phone, "Why am I always the one who has to pick up the pieces?" She carried on ranting. Penny and Poppy were sat in the lounge. Even though the TV volume was quite high, they could still hear snatches…
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As mentioned earlier, I've been inspired by the Byte Brothers to create a mystery story which kids have to solve using their l33t h4x0r skillz in Python. This is loosely based on The Byte Brothers Go to a Getaway, by Lois and Floyd McCoy. My well-thumbed copy was printed in 1984. I'm not sure when I got it, but I remember being around 8 or 9 when I first started writing programs in BASIC. Sadly, BASIC is as outdated as the Lascaux Cave Paintings, so I've written this in more friendly…
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I'm currently getting involved in the Coding For Kids scene. I'm setting up a workshop in my local library to teach kids programming - specifically, the MIT language Scratch. I've been left slightly dissatisfied with the unstructured nature of the Scratch teaching materials. While it's quite fun to teach a cat to dance - it doesn't seem to be building up to anything. I'm also working with AppsForGood - it's a project run in secondary schools which aims to get students to research, design, and …
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