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Latest Posts:

  • 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…

  • The Tour de France Peloton hits London

    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.

  • Japan on a Budget: Sapporo to Ueno on the Hokutosei

    Having returned from Furano to Sapporo, I needed to get back to Tokyo in time to fly back home. There’s one simple and obvious way to do that: domestic flights from New Chitose airport to Haneda run just about every 30 minutes, take 90 minutes, and aren’t too expensive. Instead, I took a 16 hour long…

  • The Dai-Kannon of Ashibetsu

    In Japan, big statues are no big deal. There’s the Daibutsu at Nara, of course, but I’ve stumbled across other monumental, well, monuments in several other towns. But then, rolling through the countryside on a local train somewhere between Takikawa and Furano, I spotted a giant white figure on the horizon. The Dai-Kannon at Ashibetsu…