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…

The new online service for renewing a UK passport is pretty simple – until you get to the form above. If you’re filling in the form for yourself, there’s no guidance on what to do with the “Relationship of applicant to intended passport holder” section – should you leave it blank, or write in “self”, or…
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…

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…
If you’ve ever been in a Japanese video game arcade, there’s one machine you can’t miss: Taiko no Tatsujin (太鼓の達人), AKA the one with the two huge drums (photo above by Amy Jane Gustafson). It’s a hugely fun game, not least because it’s so simple: there are only really four things you need to learn:…
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…
The Tour de France Peloton, in a GIF (might take a while to load). Snapped it in one burst on my iPhone as they passed Poplar.
The other day a message scrolled past in my Twitter feed: Which made me think: if the sea off Fukushima really were boiling, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Except if there were some sort of amazing cover-up, in which case why would NHK (which is, essentially, the Japanese BBC) be showing…
ADP freedom is an online payroll management system, designed years ago and somehow still in use. It does not allow you to log in using any recent version of Firefox* or Chrome, and now also rejects IE10. So, if you’re using Windows 8, you could be completely locked out of your own salary and tax…