It is time for me to have a clear out. I've got hundreds of books which I've replaced with eBook, CDs which I never listen to, and DVDs I'm ashamed to own. Selling them individually on eBay or Amazon sounds like a lot of hard work... That's where Zapper and MusicMagpie come in. Both offer the same basic service: Scan the item's barcode with the app. The app makes you a cash offer for your book/CD/DVD. You send a big box of your stuff to them. They send you money. Let's get one thing out…
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For a bit of light reading, I've been going through some of the documents published by Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry. There are thousands of Telegrams, eGrams, Teleletters, and other miscellaneous communications. For those unfamiliar with the jargon, the inquiry have helpfully published a guide to reading the evidence. In it is this delightful titbit about the timestamps used on telegrams. That's not a normal looking timestamp. I've deliberately obscured the explanation because a good…
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If you've spent any time in a modern design environment, you'll be familiar with the idea of User Stories. As a first-time user, I want to log in with Facebook, so that I don't have to set up a new account. Fairly easy, right? Stick enough of those up on a wall and you've got yourself a party! If you've ever played an RPG or Roguelike game, you'll be familiar with how your character can evolve throughout a game. You put on a cursed ring! Your attacks now do 10% less damage! (A…
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This morning I received an email which made my heart sink. In order to co-ordinate things better, we'd like to invite you to our exclusive Slack Channel! A variety of rude words danced around my brain. I think this makes the, what, 9th? 10th? Slack that I'm part of. Don't get me wrong, I like Slack as a service - but it only really works if you have One Slack Team To Rule Them All. I've just got a new tablet - so I need to sign in to Slack TEN TIMES! How is that an acceptable user…
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There has been a terrible natural disaster in Italy. A huge quake has broken a city. Rescue teams race to the scene to try to save lives and stabilise the situation. During the rescue efforts, the Italian Red Cross sends this tweet: Croce Rossa Italiana@crocerossa#Terremoto, per favorire comunicazioni e operazioni di soccorso vi invitiamo a togliere la password della rete wi-fi pic.x.com/u9baz8f7wg❤️ 1,459💬 34♻️ 009:59 - Wed 24 August 2016 It says "To facilitate communications and rescue op…
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We're entering a golden era for small-batch artisinal hardware. Anyone with an idea and a modicum of talent can build hardware and get it shipped around the world at a reasonable price. Enter "The ReSpeaker" - an open source alternative to Amazon's Echo. It promises ultimate hackability, speech recognition, and IoT control, wrapped in a cheap single-board design. ReSpeaker is an open modular voice interface to hack things around you. Let you interact with your home appliances, your…
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This is a sponsored post by LOPOO UK who've asked me to review their Oittm Bluetooth Headphones. There's a lot of technology packed in for £19.99. Bluetooth 4.1 - compatible with Android and iPhone. cVc noise cancellation - for improved call quality. A physically tiny 70 mAh battery - good for around 3-6 hours of use. I found it fully charged in around 2 hours. Flat cable which feels rubber coated and is sweat-proof. All this weighs just 16.5 grams. So, what's inside …
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Mostly notes to myself :-) Here is a quick way to add watermarks to photos and videos. All Linux command line based - so perfect if you've got a lot of images you want to manipulate. Here is a delightful photo I've taken of a bee covered in pollen. I want to add a little copyright notice to it in order to discourage people using it without permission. This command uses imagemagick's "annotate" option. convert bee.jpg -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 16 -font TinyUnicode-Medium -fill…
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Loading large 3D Models in the browser is extremely resource intensive. 2D images are trivial to resize and resample with negligible loss of perceived quality. 3D resizing is complex. As part of my "Pirate Museum" I wanted to display 3D scans of statues using WebVR. The only problem is, these files are huge. Take The Dancing Faun - at full resolution, that's around 230MB. Even on fast broadband that's a pain to download - and even on a fast computer it is slow to render. Once you add…
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