Making a static build of sox
This is super-technical. Caveat lector.Sox, “the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs”, has a jolly useful feature where it can read an audio file and dump out the contents as data; exactly...
View ArticleEnabling Webmentions
Well, everyone’s doing Webmentions these days. So, there’s a bandwagon here to jump on.All this is really my fault. It is a good idea that, when I write a post which links elsewhere, that the elsewhere...
View ArticleVouching for webmentions; hashing for vouches
As mentioned yesterday I’ve enabled webmentions on this site. Now, webmentions could have the same spam problem that Pingback has, and so one of the proposed solutions is Vouch, where when you send a...
View ArticleThe Matasano crypto challenges
The Matasano crypto challenges are a set of increasingly difficult coding challenges in cryptography; not puzzles, but designed to show you how crypto fits together and why all the parts are important....
View ArticleEnabling the devtools inspector when using Oxide in an Ubuntu SDK QML app
A tiny post for something I’ve just worked out. If you’re using Oxide, the Ubuntu web rendering engine (based on Chrome’s Blink) in an Ubuntu SDKQML app, it’d be useful to have access to the devtools...
View ArticleUbuntu Component Store, redux 2
A couple of months ago I came up with a proposal for how an Ubuntu Component Store could work to be a place where people could upload self-contained components for Ubuntu SDK apps, after a long...
View ArticleUbuntu phone screencasting, a minor tip
An Ubuntu phone has a command-line utility called mirscreencast which dumps screen frames to a file, meaning that in theory it’s possible to record a video of your phone’s screen. In practice, though,...
View ArticleLive screencasting from Ubuntu phone
After the previous post which describes how to send screen video from the Ubuntu phone to a file on your desktop via netcat, it occurred to me that it ought to be possible to just display your Ubuntu...
View ArticleKeyhunter Birmingham
You know those little “escape the room” Flash games? Where you have to click on things to search them, and get clues, and use the clues to find other clues and eventually the way out? They’re a bit...
View ArticleTemporarily older than Benedict Cumberbatch for six months again, dammit
Jesus Christ on a one-wheeled bicycle, I’m thirty-nine. Next year I’ll be forty. But that’s pretty cool. People congratulate you for that. Thirty-nine? My parents are thirty-nine.Well, no, obviously...
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Bad Voltage live show at SCALE 2015
We’ve been talking about doing this for some time, and now it’s nearly here. Yes. Bad Voltage, the finest podcast in this or any other galaxy, the source of all the tech knowledge you’ll ever need, and...
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Bad Voltage Live 2015
This week we did the first Bad Voltage live show, at the SCaLE conference in Los Angeles. It was the first time that Bryan, Jono, Jeremy, and I had actually all been in the same place. And it was a...
View ArticleChrome improves Add To Home Screen. Sorta
So, Chrome improve their add to home screen feature. Yay! Finally! This is great!Well. It’s sorta great. There are two ways of viewing the point of “add to home screen”. The first is as a sort of...
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Send a URL to your Ubuntu phone with Caxton
I fairly often need to send a URL from my desktop to my phone; there has been a product called Chrome2phone (and Fox2phone) for Android for this for years, and there’s Ansible for iPhones. But not for...
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A music thing for my parents
A while back my parents said: we’ve got a telly in the dining room now. Could we play music through it so we can put songs on while we’re doing things around the house?Sure, I said.Dad Music TVSo, we...
View ArticleWhy I Play The Lottery
There is a persistent meme that lotteries are a tax on people who can’t do maths and are stupid. I don’t think I’m stupid1 and I’m OK2 at maths, and I play the lottery. This is why.Basically, my desire...
View ArticleI wish I could pay for things on my mobile bill
I wish I could pay for things on my mobile bill. Stuff I’m buying from websites, applications from an app store, pizzas from Dominos. This, the concept called “carrier billing” or “operator billing”,...
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Things that are perfect
Dan Bull asked on twitter: Link me something you consider to be perfect. And I had a few things, which I felt should be recorded for posterity. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t like. But equally there’s...
View ArticleYour periodic reminder that
Here are things, according to Twitter people, of which you need to be periodically reminded.unless you have gender specific bathrooms in your home, you use gender neutral bathrooms on the regone can...
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Burning trees
Today I made a little thing, which I find rather more fascinating than I probably should. You see, Joeysaid, “I wonder if this still works?”That’s quite cool — sand dunes in front of a clock — and it...
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