I wanted to see what I was Tweeting on this exact day last year. And all the years before. So I built a website! It’s a disgusting hack, and I’m truly sorry for unleashing it on you. Using the API You can’t. The Twitter search API only goes back 7 days. This whole idea would…
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I’m not sure if I’m the first person to do this – but I’m going to claim credit anyway! Hello! This Tweet has been signed with my PGP Key. pic.twitter.com/ed4rcldlvw — Terence Eden (@edent) May 14, 2020 You can verify by pasting the alt text into keybase.io/verify – or by using your favourite command line…
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Twitter’s search interface has all sorts of lovely and obscure options. My three favourites are “min_retweets:”, “min_replies:”, and “min_faves:” Using those filters, you can create a search for Tweets which meet a certain threshold. For example, here are my Tweets which have been liked more than 500 times: twitter.com/search?q=from:edent min_faves:500 Here are the ones which…
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There are lots of celelbrities and famous academics on Twitter. Then there’s Professor Richard Feynman. Who died in 1988. Every so often, one of “his” pearls of wisdom is regurgitated into my Twitter feed. When you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others. It's the same thing when you…
Continue reading →Way back when Blackberry was the smartphone, my team at Vodafone obsessed over the idea of the “Unified Inbox”. “What if,” the marketing chaps said, “you could see all your notifications in one place!” Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were…
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Once in a while, I’ll see someone Tweet a “link” to file:///C:/users/… – that’s the Microsoft Windows way of representing a location on a filesystem. Usually this means that the user has tried to either drag ‘n’ drop something, or copied a link from their file explorer. There are some (mild) infosec risks you should…
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How many characters can a Tweet contain? It used to be 140, back in the good old days. Now it’s 280. Unless you’re Japanese. Let me explain… I run OpenBenches – a site which collects memorial benches. When a user adds a bench, the inscription is automatically Tweeted. If the inscription is longer than 280…
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You can’t post raw audio to Twitter directly. It sucks. Sure, you can post links to audio, but it’s not quite the same. Here’s a couple of Linux one-liners which will turn audio into simple video suitable for uploading to social media. Waves This converts audio to a waveform: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex “[0:a]showwaves=s=640×480:mode=line,format=yuv420p[v]” -map…
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Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/ is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. I recently saw someone tweeting the hashtag #ManchesُterDerby Do you see an odd character in the middle? It’s an Arabic Damma (U+064F) – a vowel character. Although it comes after the “s” in Manchester, it…
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For the sake of my mental health, I’ve blocked a few people and organisations on Twitter. They can’t see what I do, and I can’t see them. I’m sure you’ve done the same to a celebrity or pundit you just can’t stand the sight of. Perhaps you have an abuser you’d rather not have thrust…
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