tomroyal.com

Category: geek

  • Lumos Helmet Review

    Lumos Helmet Review

    I’ve been cycling to work in London, a few times each week and 16km each way, since 2012. For about half the year, that means riding through the dark, and so I’ve become the proud owner of a large number of LED bike lights. As well as lights front and back, I’ve taken to wearing…

  • What the Robot Reporter learned from 10,000 news tweets

    In January 2015 I put together a simple twitterbot called Robot Reporter. The idea was to see if I could keep track of breaking news by monitoring Twitter for the journalists who use it as a way to find images of newsworthy events. It works a little like this. Something happens, and a user photographs it: Fire…

  • The NewZealand Arcade Machine Story

    The NewZealand Arcade Machine Story

    When I was a kid, I used to go for swimming lessons in the local leisure centre. In the lobby there were three machines: one that vended miscellaneous swimming items (cheap goggles, earplugs, etc), one that sold various less-than-healthy snacks, and one arcade game machine playing a game called The NewZealand Story. I never played…

  • How To: Write a RTing Twitter bot in PHP

    File this one under “stuff I’ve been meaning to look up for ages”: yesterday I finally sat down and wrote a Twitter-bot. You know the kind – a dedicated account that looks for updates containing a certain word or phrase, then retweets them – I often end up being tweeted by @redscarebot, for example. Anyhow,…

  • The Robot Reporter

    Hello. If you’re visiting this post, you’ve probably spotted @theroboreporter on Twitter. Or maybe it retweeted you, and you’ve asked why, or asked it to delete a tweet. In any case, here’s what you need to know: @theroboreporter isn’t a person, it’s software. Here’s what it does: 1) Journalists all around the world scour Twitter…

  • Kittens vs UKIP

    Per the excellent suggestion of Marina Isaac, UKitten is a Chrome Extension that replaces all images of Nigel Farage or related to UKIP with images of kittens from Tea and Kittens. It’s available now from the Chrome Web Store. UPDATE: Now also available for Safari – click here to download, then double-click that file to…

  • Stuff the App Store needs to do..

    The iOS App Store really is a brilliant thing. I first learned to program way before internet access was widely available, so the options for sharing my first creations (in STOS Basic, on the Atari ST), amounted to 3.5in floppy disks – today, if you can code something you can easily distribute it to a…

  • Some notes on Viaziz.com

    Meet Viaziz. Or rather, http://www.viaziz.com/adtracking/39. How did I get there? Here’s a nice advert that appeared on my Facebook page today. Save money on a Canon camera at www.saveonproducts.net. Click it and, rather than the website listed, you’ll land on the Viaziz page above. Looks interesting. You can’t buy the camera, of course, but you…