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Automating a meme: Compound Movies - 14 Feb 2011 Humour 

Automating a meme: Compound Movies

Repository crawlers for Mercurial (or why you need to learn about revsets) - 30 Jan 2011 Technology 

Recently I needed to write a tool to crawl a Mercurial repository and look for certain things in unfinished branches that could cause us problems in the future. Given I knew that Mercurial was written in Python, my first approach to this was to start digging around in its code and see if there was…

Robolectric: unit testing Android apps - 31 Dec 2010 Android  Technology 

I’ve been playing around with doing some testing of my Android apps, and it turns out to be a little bit more difficult than I’d hoped, but with the aid of some tools it can be brought back under control. Given Android apps are basically just Java, the usual choice would be JUnit. Android needs…

Map overlays (or how to break Google Maps) - 28 Nov 2010 Technology 

I’ve been trying to use the TfL bike hire system recently, in a vague aim to get a bit more exercise. One problem with this was that although I had a vague idea where the stops where, I wasn’t exactly sure where the boundaries were offhand. My major use case being the idea of travelling…

Last.fm API bindings in Erlang - 15 Oct 2010 Erlang  Technology 

About 6 months ago, I started to teach myself Erlang. I’ve always found it difficult to learn a new language without a decent test project to try out things with, and so I decided to add last.fm scrobbling support to our jukebox. I got pretty far, but then I got buried in other projects, and…

Android Postcode app - 26 Sep 2010 Android  Programming  Technology 

I’ve been playing around with Android development recently, and one of the apps is now worth sharing with everyone else. It’s not particularly complex, but last I looked, there wasn’t an app to do this: tell me what my postcode is. Given you’re holding a phone that knows where it is, and that can talk…

Random game ideas: Cattle prods and Sumo wrestlers - 20 Sep 2010 Gaming 

Random game ideas: Cattle prods and Sumo wrestlers

Diegetic death in Halo: Reach - 19 Sep 2010 Diegesis  Gaming 

Spoiler warning: Unless you've already completed Halo: Reach, there will be spoilers within. I'm going to spend some time wittering on about other stuff first, but there will be spoilers later on. If you're intending on playing it, I'd advise doing so before reading this. I'M NOT KIDDING HERE. I WILL BE SPOILING THE ENTIRE PLOT INCLUDING THE ENDING.

“Nearby art”: using the V&A API and geolocation - 16 Jul 2010 Programming  Rant 

A little while back, I was informed that the V&A had an API. To be honest, my first response to this was “why on earth?”. There’s been a few similar APIs coming out recently from organisations, with some sort of “build it and they’ll come” expectations i.e. expecting that all they have to do is…

Little Brother: spying on yourself for fun and profit - 26 May 2010 Technology 

One of the internal tools that some of us use is a little script called getcap. Using the venerable xwd and ImageMagick, along with a bit of shell scripting it gets run by cron 8 times an hour and dumps a screen capture into a hidden folder in your home directory. As you can imagine,…

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