tomroyal.com – Code, cats, etc

Elgato Thunderbolt 2 Dock on MacOS 11.x Big Sur

For some time now I’ve had my desk wired up using an Elgato Thunderbolt 2 dock. It’s supposed to be incompatible with Mac OS 11 Big Sur, but here’s what I found.

Update: it’s 2021, and we’ve pitched our Winslow a good eight or ten times now. It’s suffered rain (thanks, Devon), wind (thanks, the storm that hit Devon) and the cold (thanks, the UK generally)

How to bulk upload Apple In App Purchases (IAPs) via Transporter

It’s easy to create single In App Purchases via iTunes Connect – but if you want to add tens or hundreds, here’s how to upload them in bulk using Transporter v2.1.x on Mac.

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.

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 […]