Jasper – voice control for Raspberry Pi

Now here’s an interesting project – Jasper is a voice control platform powered by the Raspberry Pi.  My immediate thoughts are extending my Music server to have voice commands – I like the idea of saying “Pi, play music” to my living room for an instant response.  (more…)

Flashback to 1986

I’m so pleased that I came across an archive of Popular Computer Weekly magazine on Archive.org.  I found one of my contributions from when “I was a lad” back in the 4th December 1986 issue – it’s a tip on how to rescue your Commodore 64 BASIC program if you’ve hit the reset switch or typed “NEW”. (more…)

Why is Facebook blue? The science of colour in marketing

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:

“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”

Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

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Why PHP?

PHP is a strange and (let’s get it over with) ugly, little language. It’s not exceptionally fast. It’s not beautiful syntactically. It’s not formulated around a clear opinion. And it’s still what I write a lot of software in. The obvious question is: why? (more…)

Telegram – the smart persons’ choice

First I read of Whatsapp’s behaviour of rifling through the contacts on your phone, extracting details and sending them all back to HQ.  Then the news breaks of Facebook’s $19 BILLION(!) purchase of Whatsapp so it’s time to find an alternative messaging system. (more…)

Secure Data Exchange Platform

My most recent project was for a major international organisation in Rijswijk (Netherlands).  My primary role was the development of a secure data exchange platform replacing traditional high volume mail based paper and CD exchange.  (more…)

wp:Manage

At Lemonberry, we needed a administration system for managing our clients and their (mainly WordPress) hosting account.  (more…)

Document Management with automatic OCR and translation

One of the problems with living in a foreign country and not speaking the local language very well is that it can be a pain to deal with bills, tax documentation, government correspondence and other post that comes through your door.  My solution is an automated document management system that will translate anything that is scanned on our network scanner. (more…)

WP-CLI

It’s typical… you spend ages writing scripts to manage WordPress installations… take a long time finding ways to detect if things need updating, looking for security holes etc.  Then, months later after refining your scripts to perfection, you come across a tool that is perfect for the job and does much more besides.  DOH! (more…)