RSS Parrot

I built a digital calendar

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/zero-screen/

Published: August 12, 2026 01:00

Years ago, I was gifted a Lenovo/Google Assistant smart clock. It was good! It's not necessary by any means, but I liked that it was a smart speaker with physical buttons, and I liked that I could set alarms by talking to it instead of memorising the…

I turned my Lego Game Boy into a photo frame

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/lego-gameboy-photoframe/

Published: May 16, 2026 01:00

For Christmas, I received one of those Lego Game Boys. It's a really nice object! It's almost the right scale to be a real Game Boy, with a few fudges to fit the brick size. The most impressive thing is that (decals aside) I don't think there is a single…

Dithered QR Codes

https://www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-codes/wtf/

Published: August 16, 2025 01:00

A DoS vulnerability I found in Apigee’s platform

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/regex-bomb/

Published: July 22, 2025 01:00

To be clear, this happened about a decade ago and has been patched for very nearly as long. Nothing here will help you hack anything. But maybe it will help you avoid writing so easily hackable code. Apigee, now owned by Google, was one of those…

How Stereograms Work

https://www.andrewt.net/stereograms/wtf/

Published: May 25, 2025 01:00

Infant Arcade: Pico-8 Games Made For a Child

https://www.andrewt.net/pico/infant-arcade/

Published: October 16, 2024 01:00

My nephew is big into retro video games, and Pico-8 is great for making a tiny retro-style videogames, so here are some that I made for him. You can play them in the browser, or download them if you have Pico-8. If you want any exported as builds for…

That time I hacked my school's network

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/hacking-my-school/

Published: September 11, 2024 01:00

To be clear, while I was a massive nerd in high school, I wasn’t like a hacker at all. What I did was, I opened Network Neighbourhood and clicked around a bit. So, my school gave every student and teacher an account on the network, and it came with a…

CSS Crimes in the Public Sector

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/css-crimes-in-the-public-sector/

Published: September 10, 2024 01:00

Some years ago now I worked on the BBC Developer Portal — alas, the plans to open it up to the public so you could all use (some of) the BBC’s APIs never really came to fruition (yet?), but the landing page is still visible to the public. Have a look! If…

eslint-no-javascript

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/eslint-no-javascript/

Published: July 4, 2024 01:00

I recently found an eslint rule called no-plusplus. It's based on the logic that since this code— i ++ j —increments j instead of i, which is confusing, what we're going to do is ban the ++ operator. This logic is completely sound and reasonable, as are…

Searching Obsidian through Gnome

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/obsidian-gnome/

Published: June 28, 2024 01:00

I recently started using Obsidian as my main notes app, and Linux with Gnome as my main OS. One of my favourite things about Gnome is the unified "search" mode it enters when you hit the "super" key (what Linux calls the Windows key) — from here you can…

Con Medicine

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/con-medicine/

Published: December 15, 2018 00:00

A while back I wrote a thread on a social media website which I no longer use, about this Unicode character, a famously terrible joke, and Christmas. ffi "ffi" is the Latin Small Ffi Ligature. It's a nice way of presenting two Fs and an I (say, in "efficient")…

Vim must die and Emacs must not take its place

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/vim/

Published: July 1, 2018 01:00

My preferred text editor is Sublime. Atom is pretty good too, and I hear good things about VS Code. They're all proper, modern applications with tabs, menus, and so forth. They're powerful but accessible, making the common things easy and the rare things…

Hacking my Roomba

https://www.andrewt.net/roomba/

Published: January 1, 2018 00:00

Like most programmers, I live alone, which means I end up in charge of rather more housework than I am altogether prepared to do. To fix it, I bought a Roomba. Specifically, I bought the cheapest Roomba there is, on the basis that it's a robot that cleans…

Mastodon Bots

https://www.andrewt.net/mastobots/

Published: December 1, 2016 00:00

Fish Exist. Fish Exist is a parody of QI’s excellent podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, designed to generate interesting facts instead of researching them. It first pulls Wikipedia’s list of No Such Thing As A Fish episodes, pulls out all the headline facts,…

A Christmas Gathering

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/a-christmas-gathering/

Published: November 29, 2016 00:00

The hoods came down, as they had the last two thousand times. “Hail,” the gathered creatures said in unison. Ruprecht took the lead, as he had the last two thousand times. A grizzled man, with a cane, a long beard, and a face that had seen much. It had…

The Megapixel

https://www.andrewt.net/megapixel/

Published: October 1, 2016 01:00

As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2016, Katie Steckles decided to build a monitor for the domino computer. Or rather, to demonstrate how a computer monitor builds up an image from red, green and blue pixels by making a giant one from pens. This…

“Unicorn” “Layer” “Discovered” in “North Korea”

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/kirin/

Published: December 2, 2012 00:00

Today, the Guardian helpfully informed me that a unicorn lair had been discovered in North Korea. Apparently the journalist in question didn't entirely believe this news, since "discovered" was in quotation marks. If it were me, I might have chosen…

The Domino Computer

https://www.andrewt.net/maths/domputer/

Published: October 1, 2012 01:00

As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2012, Matt Parker decided to demonstrate how computers worked by building one out of dominoes. This page will show you how the domino computer was designed — here is the official video from the weekend, but be…

1bn Hiroshimas = 1 (Isle of Wight) × 20 (speeding bullets)

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/hiroshima/

Published: July 22, 2012 01:00

I think one of the problems with science journalism is that before a science story can be reported in the news media, someone has to convert everything from metric to journalist units. But some recent work may allow us to do science directly in journalist…

Why I Support Scottish Independence

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/why-i-support-scottish-independence/

Published: January 19, 2012 00:00

With the issue of Scottish independence looming again, the question of the flag has come up. I really like the Union Jack. I think it's an ace flag. But The Sun have mocked-up a version of how it might look without Scotland. I'm not impressed. First of all…

Security Is A Spectrum

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/whatsapp-signal/

Published: January 17, 2012 00:00

Recently, a security hole was found in WhatsApp Messenger’s implementation of the Signal protocol. Signal is the messaging app created by Whisper Systems and it uses a fairly complex system of mostly throwaway encryption keys. If you reinstall the app for…

Can AV elect a second- or third-placed candidate?

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/can-av-elect-a-second-or-third-placed-candidate/

Published: April 23, 2011 01:00

Under First Past The Post (FPTP), everyone picks their favourite option, and the one with most votes wins. Simple, right? Under the Alternative Vote (AV), the one with fewest votes is eliminated, and this process repeats until one candidate has a majority…

So what if they say it's “chemical free”?

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/chemicals/

Published: November 19, 2010 00:00

I saw a Twitter exchange today about a Starbucks employee and a homeopath selling their respective brands of instant coffee (just add water) and water (just add medicine) by saying "there were absolutely no chemicals in it". The former predictably led to…

Fun with the Mercator Projection

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/fun-with-the-mercator-projection/

Published: September 2, 2010 01:00

On my brother's wall is a map of Earth with the South Pole at the top. It uses an equal-area projection to show the true relative sizes of, say, Africa and Greenland. It aims to make a point about the more common North-up, Mercator projection. Mercator…

Art Critic In “Being A Bit Pretentious” Shocker

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/art-critic-in-being-a-bit-pretentious-shocker/

Published: September 3, 2009 01:00

According to the Guardian, Bristol council have taken to allowing the public to vote on which graffiti gets removed and which is good enough to be left as 'street art'. I think that's pretty excellent. I love art when you least expect it. I think that's…

Pseudo-Random Musings

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/dice/

Published: May 1, 2009 01:00

I’ve just read about a thing called the Dice-O-Matic. The gist is that the operator of GamesByEmail.com requires a lot of random numbers between one and six inclusive to feed his collection of online dice-games. And inevitably, people have complained that…

Stupid Formulæ

https://www.andrewt.net/formulae/

Published: June 21, 2008 01:00

I get annoyed by the stupid formulæ used by PR companies to generate nonsense ‘news’ reports about their clients’ products. I’ve done a talk about them at a couple of Skeptics in the Pub events, as well as Barcamps and the like. Email me if you’d like me…

My New Coins

https://www.andrewt.net/blog/my-new-coins/

Published: August 19, 2005 01:00

Nobody believes me when I tell them this. I don't know why; maybe they don't read the news. But they don't. The Royal Mint has asked the public for ideas for their new range of coins. The reverse side (tails) of all British coins will be changed and there…