tomroyal.com

Latest Posts:

  • 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

    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…

  • 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…

  • Relationship of applicant to intended passport holder – what if it’s me?

    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…

  • 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

    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…

  • The best iOS game you’re not playing: 太鼓の達人

    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:…

  • 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…