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Gasconade: Making blog posts for Twitter users - 6 Sep 2017 Rust  Web 

Recently there’s been a lot of Twitter posts with the text ‘1/X’ or ‘Thread:’ in them, followed by umpteen other tweets because apparently the relevant poster both refuses to follow the parsimonious limits of the Twitter platform, and for some reason also refuses to write an actual blog post. Given these days the technical act…

Befunge for Clojurescript - 21 Aug 2017 Clojure  Esolangs  Javascript  Web 

Having written the Beatnik interpreter a few months ago, I was recently reminded that my Befunge interpreter still didn’t have a Clojurescript version and, given it’s been almost exactly five years since that post, it’s about time. For the impatient, it’s hosted on Github pages. By default it loads ‘Hello World’, and there’s a couple…

Extending Splitwise’s currency conversion - 25 Apr 2017 Python  Tools  Web 

I’m rather fond of Splitwise, which is an app/website for recording money owed between multiple people. Myself and my partner use it a lot for various expenses, and it’s really useful when you’ve got many different payments, and you need to keep track over time. We’ve got one repeated payment however that’s been in US…

BoardGameGeek graph - 28 Feb 2017 Javascript  Python  Web 

I’m a bit of a gamer, although I’m using that term to cover many things including pen-and-paper RPGs, board games, various forms of LARP, and occasionally a bit of video gaming. Of course, with all those options there’s the problem of what should you play. One of the solutions that people have come up with is…

Companionate: sharing logins with QR codes - 23 Jan 2017 Web 

I’ve run into a problem a few times recently, which is that having done all the right things with passwords i.e. using a password manager and having them be unique strings of basically random garbage, I now need to enter them in somewhere I haven’t got my password manager running on. I’m typically sitting in…

Dawn: Mobile bus stops display - 14 Jul 2016 Rust  Web 

When I’m out and about, I find myself repeatedly wanting to know when a bus will stop near where I am. This generally involves a phone as the TfL Countdown displays are a bit thin on the ground. Despite the advent of such things as Citymapper, I’ve still been a fan of the Countdown mobile website,…

Kitten videos: an engineering approach - 29 Oct 2015 Python  Rust  Web 

A little while ago one of my colleagues put up a kitten video feed on one of the spare monitors in the office. This was liked, but as we rapidly found out there was a few problems. Biggest of which is that kittens have a fairly well known failure state: they fall asleep. Sleeping kittens are…

Tumblr blog generator - 28 Feb 2015 Clojure  Rant  Web 

TL;DR version – OAuth sucks, Tumblr’s API has some notable faults. So, a while back I came across the “dice shaming” meme. For those of you who haven’t seen this before, or who aren’t RPG players and so don’t know what’s going on, it’s a bunch of posts of people going “I rolled my dice…

Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar - 11 May 2014 Python  Web 

In my ongoing attempts to use various tools to try and reduce my levels of distraction and akrasia, I've been using Beeminder. It's a pretty simple service. To use it, you need a goal for a repeating task (e.g. doing the washing-up) with the following characteristics...

Things made this weekend: Abbreviated Twitter Link feed - 6 May 2013 Python  Web 

I'm currently working on a little RSS feeder app in my spare time (which may eventually get released to the outside world, but not yet), and along the way I've made a few other useful tools

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