Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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The Mystery Button-Box
Dan finds another bit of mystery hardware, and scares some head-scratcher photos.
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How Much of My Graticule is Covered With Water?
How much of an advantage do inland geohashers have over island ones? Dan attempts to quantify the answer in the hackiest way he can think of.
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Intercepting HTTPS Traffic from Android Emulator
A brief guide to decrypting HTTPS traffic sent to/from Android apps.
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Challenge Robin
Dan drives a blindfolded man into the wilderness, steals his phone and wallet, and abandons him. But it's all okay!
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Leak in Comic Chameleon (app API hacking)
Not for the first time, Dan becomes an "accidental hacker" when he finds a bug in a comic-reader app that lets him read not-yet-published episodes of a webcomic he follows.
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Oxford's Long-Lost Zoo and Wild Wolves
For the first time in a long while, Dan's been setting up new geocaches. Also: did you know that Oxford used to have a zoo? In Kidlington‽
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Intermediary Protocols and Google Duplex
As Google show off their digital assistant's upcoming new feature of being able to make phone calls on your behalf, Dan asks what this means for the way we communicate in the future.
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The Mystery Cable
Dan found a mystery cable in his attic and has no idea what it is or what it does. Can you help, before it drives him mad?
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The Better Bundo Book
Dan reads A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo to a four year-old as a vehicle to talking about difference, diversity, and discrimination.
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On This Day In 2005
On this day in 2005 Paul made the Internet a fraction of a percent more-weird by cooking and eating a "Birmingham Egg". Dan's just resurrected the web page about it. You know: for posterity.
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Neural nets respond to pranks like children do
There's a lot of fun to be had in "pranking" image-recognising neural nets with unusual photos. But the ways in which they fail might be a clue about how young humans learn language, too.
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Lunar Lander
Back in 1997 Dan made a "Lunar Lander" game in Turbo Pascal. Twenty years on, he's re-implemented it in Javascript.
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Bureaucracy vs. Common Sense
When Dan's pension provider made "Gender" a mandatory field, he never expected to be asked to PROVE the gender he clicked on. Especially since he clicked on "Not provided"...
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Replacing "love" with "butt" in song lyrics
As an early celebration of Valentine's Day, Dan channels his inner 12-year-old by replacing the word "love" with "butt" in song lyrics.
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Bypassing WordPress / Jetpack's "Prove your humanity:" CAPTCHA
Popular WordPress plugin Jetpack provides a CAPTCHA whose sole purpose seems to be to frustrate humans. It does nothing to stop bots, as Dan demonstrates with a browser plugin that circumvents it.