Blog — Page 8
These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
An email today announced a beta test of some new features that Heroku are “excited” to introduce. New service levels are available that include a “hobby” tier that does… exactly what the old “free” tier used to do. For $7 per month per app! The free tier has now been...
(Note: This code is designed for Octopress 2. My website now uses Octopress 3— the Jekyll plugin works just the same, but Octopress 3 sites can use the jekyll-archives gem to generate proper archive-by-year pages so should not need the bookmark ‘hack’ shown in the first code block.) One thing...
Time flies when you’re having fun. And somehow, without really realising it, I turned thirty years old. I’d say I’ve come far from where I began — but though I’ve been a way, I came back, and now I’m not so very far away after all. I live in the...
London is a strange place. Not the places the tourists see — the shopping streets, the palaces, the museums. Those I understand. What’s strange to me is the rest of it; the places where people live and work. The estates of a thousand homes, red-brick and identical and unaffordable, each...
My SuccessWhale application has long supported both Twitter and Facebook social networks, despite both networks’ relatively developer-hostile stances. The worst offender by far was Twitter, with it’s 100,000 user limit that has deliberately crippled many third-party clients in order to drive users to the official website and app, which make...
Playbulbs are colour LED lights sold by a company called Mipow. They come with an iOS and Android app that can set their colour and various patterns via Bluetooth. There’s no security on them whatsoever, so any nearby device can connect and change their colour. That seems pretty bad —...
It was suggested on IRC last night that the sad, cautionary tale of Sultan Hamnvik may have its roots in my simple lack of knowledge — particularly of the “cheats” that allow for easier navigation around IKEA’s torturous, non-Euclidean shop floors. I’d like to take this opportunity to refute that...
Another year, another childrens’ toy with a Raspberry Pi needlessly attached to it. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been taking an old broken RC toy and turning it into something a bit more fun — by strapping a computer to it, naturally. The result is the “All-Terrain Pi”, a...
Lights flicker and fade, drawing the year to a close. Outside, the weather is warming and slowly burning the frost away; a tiny ripple before the wave of heat to come, before it is summer again. 2014 has been a year of travel, with three trips abroad setting a new...
Like many, I came of age with a head full of dreams about what my adult life would be like. I thought maybe I’d live in a big old cottage, raise my children in a little village by the sea, have a wood fire burning through the winter and I’d...