Conway’s Game of Life, interpreted in sound.

February 6, 2013

2

Some videos you find on Youtube fill you with questions. Questions like ‘why did I just spend 2 minutes of my life watching that?’ or ‘what is this?’ Sometimes though, you find videos that fill you with the right kind of questions. Questions that lead you through lots of different ideas and possibilities and inspire […]

Posted in: creativity, fun, idea, play, python

Gloomy education? (Creative writing and card games)

October 11, 2012

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This isn’t a rant about the state of modern education. Rather, I want to talk about a somewhat melancholy card game called ‘Gloom’ (info) (amazon). Gloom is a game of “inauspicious incidents and grave consequences” – a game where you control the fates of a band of misfits and malcontents, playing cards to make their […]

Posted in: idea

Exploring Locksmithing and Lockpicking as an intellectual pursuit

September 30, 2012

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I am fascinated by complex things and always have been, whether they are mechanical, chemical, mathematical or other, similarly elegant pieces of “clockwork”. I was the clichéd kid repeatedly told off for dismantling things or repairing them. It wasn’t because I lacked the ability to do so, it was just because I was caught in the act. […]

Posted in: fun

Open Source Cola – “Cube Cola”

September 26, 2012

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From their site: Standing on the Hands of Giants We are wildcrafting our own cola from an open source recipe reverse-engineered from the original Coke. A process merging domestic and scientific methodologies. Cube-Cola is distributed by social courier within the city perimeters of Bristol UK, and is available by mail as a cola concentrate worldwide. […]

Posted in: fun, howto

Birthdays and Boardgames

September 26, 2012

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Monopoly is the game that killed my interest in boardgames. Why? Its depressingly long-winded, yawnsome play is based more on luck than skill. The crushing inevitable win by the player who got ahead early in the game. The forced family play at christmas with children who’d rather play on their new computer games and adults who […]

Posted in: opinion

Why ignorance can be helpful and Learned Helplessness

September 26, 2012

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I’ve had a bit of a problem for the past few months. I couldn’t seem to finish and write about any of my personal projects. I felt blocked. I’d sit at my desk, staring at a mostly blank draft post, stumbling over the words to describe what I was working on, whether it was a […]

Posted in: opinion

RETRACT ALL THE THINGS!

September 26, 2012

2

PLoS has just put out an editiorial titled “The role of retractions in correcting the scientific literature” where they make a number of suggestions around retracting papers once the consensus of evidence and opinion suggests that the paper’s conclusions are false. The key section is this (emphasis my own): … as editors and as a […]

Posted in: Uncategorized

CBM 1000 thermal printer hack

August 14, 2012

4

(Rescuing this page from the spam-ridden pbworks Microprinter wiki) Notes and settings I used to get this printer to work and accept input. The main problem with this printer is the low baud rate (9600) for the connection. This is fine for text, but when you are pushing bytes down the line to print images, […]

Posted in: Uncategorized

RaspberryPi birdfeeder webcam

May 31, 2012

8

This isn’t so much a Howto (as other people have already written that up very nicely) but a post on what I am using one of my Pi’s for. The first gotcha is that for some unknown reason, the default, recommended, reference debian image is built without support for USB webcams… Nuts, but there you […]

Posted in: development, event, fun, idea, play

GLSL Sandbox on the Raspberry Pi

May 13, 2012

4

I hope many of you have seen the excellent and fun WebGL GLSL sandbox at http://glsl.heroku.com/. This live editing of shaders is an excellent learning tool, as it allows you to watch the consequences of any changes you make. I am constructing some simple OpenGL ES scripts as a learning resource for anyone new to it, […]

Posted in: creativity, linux, python