Merry fucking Xmas, love Big Brother.

Christmas tree decoration seen in Canary Wharf shopping centre reads: CCTV in operation here. This has to be a prank, right? There’s no way, even in the Orwellian Albtraum of Canary Wharf, that someone would have decided this an appropriate Christmas decoration for the shopping centre’s christmas trees. Alas, I fear it’s real and intentional: [...]

Sucking tweets into a local database

A friend asked me yesterday if I could snap together a script to build a local database of tweets using the twitter search API. This is what I came up with. The script takes one argument – the term to search on – and creates a sqlite3 database in the current directory containing all the [...]

Play IF in Campfire

Ruby is an excellent language for writing small scripts to glue stuff together. Here’s a script I knocked together that lets you play a zcode text adventure (interactive fiction) with your friends in Campfire. You’ll need a room, account, etc. in Campfire; you’ll need to compile this version of dumb-frotz; and you’ll need a zcode [...]

Recent infocom obsession

I’ve recently been finding and buying up old Infocom interactive fiction games or text adventures. Amazingly, there are still brand-new, unopened copies of these games out there, despite at least 20 years having whizzed past since they were released. Two delights in opening these boxes: the first being the feelies – little trinkets and props [...]

The marvellous Olympic compound-eye camera.

Particularly interested to read that Football Data Co want to stop live twitter updates at football matches: They’ve forced developer Ollie Parsley to to remove club logos from his site and shut down part of his FootyTweets service, which used Twitter to provide live match updates for a variety of clubs. You can’t just start [...]

List of UK MPs on twitter

I just spent several hours building a list of MPs on twitter by harvesting, cross-tabulating and advanced munging of various lists on twitter. Yes, I know it’s already been done by tweetminster and there are lists on listorious, probably elsewhere too. But there are none that I know of that are freely available, which are [...]

Spod, Spod, Spod, Marbles and Open University.

I wish I’d stayed at Playful on Friday for James Bridle’s talk, A new theory of awesomeness and miracles. Unfortunately a splitting headache sent me home. That might have been for the best. If I had stayed, I would have probably melted into an unseemly puddle of nostalgia and pity for my younger geek self. [...]

Squeaky hinges

Tweetie is my favourite twitter client. It’s reliable, unobtrusive, Mac OS native, and it isn’t one of those power-clients that make twitter feel like a job. It’s well worth the money. I feel a little bad singling it out for criticism so I hope you’ll take my comments as a broadside aimed at all non-malleable [...]

Why are you here?

So, according to google analytics, those visiting my site have mostly searched using these words: I’m your man for washing machines and version control systems, apparently.

‘Technical measures’ and the government-sanctioned interweb.

If the three-strikes internet law gets passed, I fear we’ll end up with a whitelisted, government-approved, corporation-controlled internet. This cannot be allowed to happen. Just to restate my position on illicit filesharing. I think it’s wrong for those who can afford to pay, or to wait, to download content for free. I just don’t do [...]