Editing a photo and noticed this little fella’ chilling out in my Photoshop curves panel.
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Dino
Union Flag design without Scotland – a logical look
Scotland have a historic vote next year – whether to leave the United Kingdom or not. Will it actually happen? Who knows, probably not. But if it did, and cutting to the chase, the Union flag should look like the...
Guide to replacing a BMW E46 4 cylinder pre-cat sensor
Did a bunch of searching online for this when mine broke and couldn’t really find anything that related to the 4 cylinder E46 BMWs. Got a good steer from the good folk over at Bimmerforums so thought I’d...
Hotdog buffoonery
My son’s school requires a packed lunch every day. It must get a bit boring, so I occasionally throw in a few curve balls. Here are some hotdog-based examples.
Xbox 360 RROD reflowing – doesn’t always work
I love broken stuff. It gives you an excuse to try and fix something. If you succeed, you’re awesome. If you fail, it was broken anyway, right? Base in point… my Xbox 360 has been having the infamous Red...
Kitchen Science – cabbage pH indicator
This one’s a favourite in our house. Any time we have red cabbage, we keep the ‘juice’ and use it to test wether things are acid or alkaline, often with some surprises. Certainly makes for a good...
Twitter API – accessing all your historic tweets
The Twitter API used to be pretty open but now there are a few sensible restrictions in place to stop anyone abusing it. The main on is that the call to get a tweet will only fetch the last 200 tweets. I wanted to...
HTML5 tree generator
Always wanted to write a tree generator and decided to have a go with HTML5 and canvas. Have a look here. Should work on mobile and desktop. Took about 2 hours from start to finish, and as I’ve realised...
Cookie Clicker – iPhone ‘cheat’
I like my cheats a bit old-skool so came up with this way of getting up to 50 clicks per second using a small solenoid to move your finger for you! Lazy? Yes. Cunning? Yes. Practical? No, not really. But hey, it’s...
Great customer service still exists
After my last grumpy post courtesy of Google’s appalling customer service, it seems that two businesses have taken it upon themselves, unbeknown to them, to be the yin to Google’s yang. With online shopping...
Adsense, Charity and Google being evil
I try to keep my random posts useful and avoid having a rant. But Google’s recent behaviour deserves a little post all of its own. In June 2008, I posted a video on YouTube of myself, in my garage, revving a...
Moshlings Theme Park review
Today’s post is by guest writer Sophie, aged 11. I loved this game! My favourite thing about the game was the big final rides at the end of every level and the minigames. I think that I liked it because in the...
LifeHack: How to fix your TV remote buttons…
We bought a Sony LCD tv a while back and over the years, some of the buttons on the remote started to become unresponsive and vague. Mainly the volume buttons. You had to press them harder and longer to get any response...
Olympic Stadium seat/row guide, sort of…
I posted an article about visiting the 2012 Olympic Stadium and detailed the top 10 ‘things’ I found during my visit. Some good, some not so good. One comment asked about seat allocation and after a few...
Disney Pixar Brave – a dad’s review
Ok, we’re all busy, time is short so let’s do this the practical way… conclusion first. Brave is absolutely brilliant. Go and see it if you have half the chance, with or without your kids. It’s...
FatFonts – Fonts just got geeky
It’s not that often I get really excited about a font. I get excited, just not really excited. But FatFonts is really quite exciting. FatFonts is a graphical technique conceived and developed by Miguel...
No Olympic tickets? At all? Ever? Seriously?
As an update to my visit to the Olympic Stadium opening, I was excited at the prospect at being given ‘priority’ booking for the next load of tickets coming on sale throughout the week. However, I guess the...
London Olympic Stadium opening – my first impressions
I’m one of those people that didn’t get any Olympic tickets at each round but was determined to allow my kids the ‘memory’ of actually being there at some point. So I managed to bag 4 tickets to...
GameHack 2012 at Pinewood
To some, this weekend was 24 hours of constant rain and storm force winds. To about 400 dedicated game hackers and makers it was 24 hours of constant RedBull and code. Yep, the inaugural UK GameHack event kicked off in...
Colour mapping Kinect data in 3D
Quick update on my Processing and Kinect journey. This time it’s mapping the colour information from the on-board RGB camera to the infrared depth data. The OpenKinect libraries come with a few demo files that...
Huston, we have Kinect data…
Earlier today I saw “Unnamed Soundsculpture” by Daniel Franke, a really evocative and quite strange video that combined Kinect data, live dance and Processing. So that got me thinking I should have a go...
Experimenting with Processing
So, what to do with a few hours spare? Learn Processing of course! Processing is an open source programming language that makes it relatively easy to make pretty things. The language itself is almost identical to...
Static flow of water – explained
A few friends have asked me for an explanation of what’s going on in the video above as it seems pretty weird. It’s actually pretty simple… The camera records at 24 frames every second. The speaker is...
A brief guide to frictionless sharing
So the anecdote goes, if you drop a frog into a pan of hot water, it will jump out. Sit a frog in a pan of cold water and slowly increase the heat, it will be unaware of the subtle temperature rise and eventually meet a...
The 12 fun facts of Christmas – Noise Inc style
Before I forget, thought I’d share the Xmas Infographic I put together for Noise Inc. Informative AND festive, you can’t go wrong there!