Sloponomics and the coming storm
We're in the era of Sloponomics, and we don't know what to do.
Bacon Boutique
Seb Bacon's personal journal. Local history (especially Stroud), culture and technology.
Latest posts
The Ghost of the Stroud Observatory
There's a small patch of bushes and empty crisp packets near my home, haunted by the ghost of an observatory.
A history of the Trinity Rooms in 20 quotes
140 years of celebrations, revels, fights, religion and sex
The future of money (1976)
I love how this got internet banking almost spot on, but got internet shopping interestingly wrong (turns out we don't do it in a shopping mall)
Hacking Idiotic Journal Admin
In which I present Fending-off Academic Form Fuss (FAFF): a very rough, first run at automating filling out academic journal admin PDFs.
FLOSS history: code as art
Way back in 2006, I co-authored a paper with Teresa Dillon on “The potential of open source approaches for education”. It's interesting for me to re-read it 20 years later.
Scraping tabular data with pdfplumber
I got distracted by this toot : A bot that automatically does stock trades … … by identifying trades being done by US politicians … … who probably have inside (I.e. and thus basically illegal-to-act-upon) knowledge of market-moving government info … … and doing the same
Scraping and alerting with Github Actions
Dave pointed out this weird trick some years ago: using Github actions as a free engine for checking websites and sending you email alerts when they change. I use it fairly frequently to track things online. The code in that repo assumes the web page is available on the public
Intense relief
Using hillshade LIDAR models to spot interesting bumps in the landscape
An interactive historical map of The Heavens
There’s a local beauty spot called “The Heavens”. Here's how I overlaid a 17th century map on a contour map.
An interactive, 3D Ordnance Survey map of Stroud
I made a zoomable, draggable, 3D relief map of Stroud's five valleys, using Ordnance Survey maps.