tomroyal.com – Code, cats, etc

How to programmatically search the Facebook Ad Library

In this godawful year of all godawful years, it’s good to keep an eye on who’s trying to sell what to you, why, and for how much. Facebook’s Ad Library API lets you see the detail – here’s how to access it.

Avant Pop?

(This is from 2000, or maybe 2001 – an old project from my degree course, relating to emerging hypertextual literature. The original is gone, I fished this out of the Wayback Machine, and I’m keeping a copy here. Links are all missing, presumed broken.)

Simple Console Games for Small People

I’ve been playing games with Small since he was a little over three, and now that he’s four, and we’re all locked inside for the foreseeable future, I’m doing it for a few minutes almost every day. And so, as others might be doing the same, maybe for the first time, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.

How to archive, then delete, old Tweets

I joined Twitter in January 2009 for what might not have been the best of reasons – I was being miserable about it on BBC Radio, and thought I should at least make an effort to try the thing I was being professionally miserable about – and, somehow, have kept using it ever since. But, […]

Monitoring a CrowdCube investment page via email

CrowdCube is a service for crowd-funding – a little like Kickstarter, in that people pledge money to a project in exchange for something in return, but in this case that something is shares in the business.

Make America Kittens Again v1.3.1

This is a minor update – available here for Chrome, and here on Github – which updates the block list for the convenience of UK users, changes the icon to make it easier to find, and also tidies up the code a bit.

Yes, really, I’m reviewing a tent now. But when we wanted to buy one of these I couldn’t find a good review, so here goes: We wanted a tent for two adults and one 3-year-old. The Winslow 500 (official info here) is, technically, a 5 person tent – but it fits three of you very […]

Tax Free Childcare – How the 3 month allowance reset works

This is a post to file under “things I couldn’t find online so decided I should share”: if you’re enrolled in the UK’s Tax Free Childcare programme then you have (at time of writing) a maximum claim allowance of £2,000 each year, limited to £500 every three months. What’s not at all clear is how […]

Make America Kittens Again – v1.2

It’s been about four months since Make America Kittens Again went viral. In that time I’ve released a few minor updates to better target specific news websites, but this weekend sees the first major update in a while, and with it some significant changes. Custom Blocking I’ve received dozens of requests to add additional names […]

Make America Kittens Again

It’s been a weird week. Back in February, someone* asked if I could do a Trump version of my UKIP blocking plugin. About five small code changes later, I had one in the Chrome store: By request: MAKE AMERICA KITTENS AGAIN: https://t.co/Gg7mg3KGKL pic.twitter.com/wf5swmbtzT — Tom Royal (@tomroyal) February 27, 2016 Since then it’s been ticking […]