Whatever nonsense Andrew is up to these days
Years ago, I was gifted a Lenovo/Google Assistant smart clock. It was good! It's not necessary by any means, but I liked that it was a smart speaker with physical buttons, and I liked that I could set alarms by talking to it instead of memorising the arcane button sequences many digital clocks expect you to know. I liked that it had a nightlight built in. It no longer works. I don't know why. It…
For Christmas, I received one of those Lego Game Boys. It's a really nice object! It's almost the right scale to be a real Game Boy, with a few fudges to fit the brick size. The most impressive thing is that (decals aside) I don't think there is a single unique brick in this model. It also comes with three lenticular screen inserts — these are plastic sheets which switch between Game Boy game…
To be clear, this happened about a decade ago and has been patched for very nearly as long. Nothing here will help you hack anything. But maybe it will help you avoid writing so easily hackable code. Apigee, now owned by Google , was one of those business-to-business software products that exist just because businesses will buy any old shit. If you can convince a manager that your overlay can…
My nephew is big into retro video games, and Pico-8 is great for making a tiny retro-style videogames, so here are some that I made for him. You can play them in the browser, or download them if you have Pico-8. If you want any exported as builds for anything Pico-8 exports to then let me know (or get a copy of Pico-8 and do it yourself). Step On All The Lasers Until You Get The Boss A game made…
To be clear, while I was a massive nerd in high school, I wasn’t like a hacker at all. What I did was, I opened Network Neighbourhood and clicked around a bit. So, my school gave every student and teacher an account on the network, and it came with a personal “ M:\ ” drive we could store our work in. And I found them. Just like, hanging out in Network Neighbourhood where anyone could see it. Not…
Some years ago now I worked on the BBC Developer Portal — alas, the plans to open it up to the public so you could all use (some of) the BBC’s APIs never really came to fruition (yet?), but the landing page is still visible to the public . Have a look! If you’ve had a look, have another look, and this time click the laptop screen in the stock photo. This came about because we’d found this stock…
I recently found an eslint rule called no-plusplus . It's based on the logic that since this code— i ++ j —increments j instead of i , which is confusing, what we're going to do is ban the ++ operator. This logic is completely sound and reasonable, as are all the other eminently sensible rules that eslint enforces by default. If I have one criticism of them, it is that they do not go far enough.…
I recently started using Obsidian as my main notes app, and Linux with Gnome as my main OS. One of my favourite things about Gnome is the unified "search" mode it enters when you hit the "super" key (what Linux calls the Windows key) — from here you can type the names of apps, unicode characters, contacts, or files, you can do calculations, search the web, install new software... just about…
A while back I wrote a thread on a social media website which I no longer use, about this Unicode character, a famously terrible joke, and Christmas. ffi "ffi" is the Latin Small Ffi Ligature . It's a nice way of presenting two Fs and an I (say, in "efficient") without the various dots and ascenders mushing together. Most fonts have it, and you see it every day without noticing it. There are versions…
My preferred text editor is Sublime . Atom is pretty good too, and I hear good things about VS Code . They're all proper, modern applications with tabs, menus, and so forth. They're powerful but accessible, making the common things easy and the rare things possible, like all good software should. Sometimes, though, I have to SSH into a remote machine and quickly edit the crontab file. Or I have to…
Like most programmers, I live alone, which means I end up in charge of rather more housework than I am altogether prepared to do. To fix it, I bought a Roomba. Specifically, I bought the cheapest Roomba there is, on the basis that it's a robot that cleans my floor and I didn't entirely understand what the premium version of that product would be. It turns out that the cheap one can't be scheduled…
Fish Exist. Fish Exist is a parody of QI’s excellent podcast No Such Thing as a Fish , designed to generate interesting facts instead of researching them. It first pulls Wikipedia’s list of No Such Thing As A Fish episodes , pulls out all the headline facts, and feeds them into my Markov chain implementation . Every few hours, it picks a fact from the real list, and uses the first two words as a…
The hoods came down, as they had the last two thousand times. “Hail,” the gathered creatures said in unison. Ruprecht took the lead, as he had the last two thousand times. A grizzled man, with a cane, a long beard, and a face that had seen much. It had seen everything. “My friends, we are reaching the end-times. We have barely fifty years left before our glorious work is complete. Come, brothers,…
As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2016, Katie Steckles decided to build a monitor for the domino computer . Or rather, to demonstrate how a computer monitor builds up an image from red, green and blue pixels by making a giant one from pens. This was the Megapixel project . The final image comprised around eight thousand pixels, each much like these ones that Angie coloured: Dropped into…
Today, the Guardian helpfully informed me that a unicorn lair had been discovered in North Korea . Apparently the journalist in question didn't entirely believe this news, since "discovered" was in quotation marks. If it were me, I might have chosen "unicorn" as the word to call into question, but apparently we're assuming unicorns are plausible but discovery is suspect. Okay, whatever. Readers of…
As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2012, Matt Parker decided to demonstrate how computers worked by building one out of dominoes. This page will show you how the domino computer was designed — here is the official video from the weekend, but be aware it contains answers to some of the interactive domino puzzles below. The computer comprised about ten thousand dominoes, and could add up any…
I think one of the problems with science journalism is that before a science story can be reported in the news media, someone has to convert everything from metric to journalist units. But some recent work may allow us to do science directly in journalist units, thereby making scientific papers immediately understandable to laypeople. According to a throwaway letter in the Guardian 1 billion…
With the issue of Scottish independence looming again, the question of the flag has come up. I really like the Union Jack. I think it's an ace flag. But The Sun have mocked-up a version of how it might look without Scotland . I'm not impressed. First of all the airbrushing is clumsy, and secondly the Irish cross should be centred in each quadrant without the white, Scottish one competing for the…
Recently, a security hole was found in WhatsApp Messenger’s implementation of the Signal protocol . Signal is the messaging app created by Whisper Systems and it uses a fairly complex system of mostly throwaway encryption keys . If you reinstall the app for any reason, you lose all those keys. Because Signal is built for security above all else, it will warn all your contacts about this — and lock…
Under First Past The Post (FPTP), everyone picks their favourite option, and the one with most votes wins. Simple, right? Under the Alternative Vote (AV), the one with fewest votes is eliminated, and this process repeats until one candidate has a majority — or until only one candidate is left; it makes no difference. No2AV will tell you that this can hand victory to the second- or third-placed…
I saw a Twitter exchange today about a Starbucks employee and a homeopath selling their respective brands of instant coffee (just add water) and water (just add medicine) by saying "there were absolutely no chemicals in it". The former predictably led to the skeptic "pointing to everything around him and saying it was all made of chemicals". I think this approach is unhelpful. (I don't think he's…
On my brother's wall is a map of Earth with the South Pole at the top. It uses an equal-area projection to show the true relative sizes of, say, Africa and Greenland. It aims to make a point about the more common North-up, Mercator projection. Mercator projection maps enlarge areas near the poles so that shapes are preserved. I like the sentiment but I think switching to an equal area projection…
According to the Guardian, Bristol council have taken to allowing the public to vote on which graffiti gets removed and which is good enough to be left as 'street art' . I think that's pretty excellent. I love art when you least expect it. I think that's exactly where art should be. Seeing it in a gallery makes it a bit clinical for my tastes, like seeing a gorilla in a zoo just sitting there…
I’ve just read about a thing called the Dice-O-Matic. The gist is that the operator of GamesByEmail.com requires a lot of random numbers between one and six inclusive to feed his collection of online dice-games. And inevitably, people have complained that the numbers he’s used are insufficiently random. And maybe they were, once. Originally, GamesByEmail used the pseudo-random number generator…
I get annoyed by the stupid formulæ used by PR companies to generate nonsense ‘news’ reports about their clients’ products. I’ve done a talk about them at a couple of Skeptics in the Pub events, as well as Barcamps and the like. Email me if you’d like me to do the talk for you. (I’m pretty good.) There is a very cut-down and heavily adapted version of that talk here . The Telegraph The Perfect…
Nobody believes me when I tell them this. I don't know why; maybe they don't read the news. But they don't. The Royal Mint has asked the public for ideas for their new range of coins. The reverse side (tails) of all British coins will be changed and there is an open competition to decide the new designs. So I thought I'd have a go. According to The Times, chef Marco Pierre White's suggestion is…