Blog — Page 9
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.
It’s a little over a month until we are getting our first pet - a crested gecko. In the mean time, we are getting our vivarium set up ready for our pet. We have just about everything we need, but managing the environment is a manual process — turning the...
Our school is consulting parents on its proposed transformation into an “Academy”. Since ranting about online this earlier today, I’ve been asked what my reasons are for opposing the change from a Local Authority funded school to an Academy. Here are my reasons, which I am also using as part...
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...