Why electrical network frequency analysis might be unsafe to trust in court

    Tl;dr: Electrical network frequency analysis involves analysing the frequency of recorded mains hum to verify the time a recording was made, and that it has not been edited. This piece expresses concern that it could be fooled using readily available computer equipment, and makes a suggestion as to how that might be prevented.

    Electrical network frequency analysis has been in the news

Read More

Slashdot is beyond resuscitation.

    I'm a news junkie. Specifically I'm a tech news junkie. Part of my morning routine involves scanning Google Reader to see what's new from a long list of tech news sites.
    One of the consistencies in my news feed for well over a decade has been the venerable tech news blog, Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that matters, as the tagline put it. My Slashdot ID isn't one of the really low

Read More

Bye bye analogue telly

   It is with some sadness that I note today sees the turning off of the final UK terrestrial analogue TV transmitter in Northern Ireland. Not because I miss Ceefax or because I hanker again for the days of only three, four, or five channels, but because analogue TV was what gave me my start in electronics when I was a teenager.
    When my contemporaries were doing more conventional 1980s teen

Read More

What I really want from a mobile phone

    Every week it seems, there comes a new smartphone launch. Despite the fact that they are increasingly becoming identical black slabs, we're told that this one is different, special somehow because of one of its new features. It has an extra few mm of display width, it's 0.5mm thinner or it has an extra core in its processor.

    All very nice, but y'know what? I don't give a toss.

    For

Read More

Baby killer

    My car was involved in a collision with a teenaged cyclist this morning. As far as I am aware she's shaken but OK, with little worse than a nasty graze to show for the incident. Nothing I'm particularly proud of but fortunately in the view of the police officer who interviewed me it was a fairly unavoidable accident caused by another motorist making a sudden risky manoeuvre hiding me and the

Read More

Living in a post-PC world

    I've spent the weekend having a clear out. Lots of old tax papers, magazines and assorted detritus, all gone. And a load of treasures from a couple of decades of hoarding PC bits.

    Some things are easy to part with. An ISA multi-IO card, for instance, is an easy throw. I'm never going to need one of them again in my life. Or an 8-bit cheap-and-nasty Soundblaster clone from about 1990.

Read More

Oxford Raspberry Jam meetup 3

    So last night a bunch of us made our way down to Electrocomponents HQ again  for Oxford Raspberry Jam meetup number 3. As before, a fairly informal show-n-tell format with plenty of scope for discussion, and a lively exchange of ideas.


The serial terminal in action

    It was noticeable that people are starting to get to grips with the Pi's hardware. Our previous meeting has featured

Read More

What was that about "Don't be evil"?

    I'm sure most readers of this blog will be familiar with the famous Google motto "Don't be evil". Having had the chance to look at Google culture from a viewpoint slightly closer than the average Joe it comes across as something taken pretty seriously within Google. When they say that, they really mean it.
    "Being evil" is generally taken as a reference to some of the shady practices found

Read More

MSIE overtaken

    Back in April I wrote a piece about the rise of Google Chrome and the pending loss to MSIE of the number one browser slot. Based on StatCounter GlobalStats data I predicted that this would happen in June.

    I was wrong. It happened in May. Finally we're in an era in which supporting outdated, insecure, and non-standards-compliant browsers is no longer considered a priority.

    It would

Read More

Oxon-RaspberryPi meetup 2

   Here's a quick report on my return from the second meeting of the Oxon-RaspberryPi group.



    So, about twenty people gathered in the meeting room at Electrocomponents on Oxford Business Park. Electrocomponents are the parent company of RS, one of the companies selling the Raspberry Pi, so a massive thank you to them for allowing us to use their space, and for providing us with some very

Read More

Life with Pi

    My Raspberry Pi single board computer arrived just over a week ago after a long wait for my ordered unit to be manufactured and shipped. I wrote back in early March about my thoughts on the product launch and I outlined my plans for the device a couple of weeks ago, now I've had it in my possession for a week here are my thoughts about the board itself.
    On first unboxing the unit my

Read More

What I'm going to do with my Raspberry Pi

    That magic email from Farnell came on Saturday, my Raspberry Pi is in the post!
    So, what am I going to do with it?
    Like loads of other geeks I expect I'll plug it into my telly, connect it to my router and use it as a web terminal and media centre with geek bragging rights. There it'll sit for however many years it takes until I get a new telly or a Raspberry Pi 2, unseen and

Read More

How We Deal with the Homeless Problem in Oxfordshire

    If you were given a heap of money and told you had to spend it deal with some homeless people living in Oxford, how might you proceed? Go on, you can spend it how you'd like.
    Perhaps you'd invest it in some kind of housing, maybe a subsidised rent scheme or something. I'm not a housing expert, but you'd kinda expect the solution to have something to so with housing, wouldn't you.
    In

Read More

A simple question for SEO practitioners everywhere

    My friends ask me for advice when they are looking at search engine marketing services for their websites. They've usually got some pushy SEO salesman giving them the hard-sell. "We can put you on the top of Google searches!".
    I tell them to ask this simple question of SEO sales people who make that particular promise.

    "What's your name?".

    If the answer ain't "Larry Page" or "

Read More

Preparing for MSIE Overtaking Day

    It's been a trope of the web developer's existence for the last decade: Microsoft Internet Explorer won the browser wars in the 1990s, all other browsers are irrelevant. The customer has this firmly lodged in their heads from the days when MSIE had over 90% of the market and demands support for IE in all its forms over support for any other browser. We may just about have won the war over

Read More

Accessibility: it's an engineering problem

    A  little over a week ago, the British paralympian athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson gave an interview in which she decried the state of accessibility for people with disabilities in the UK and described the experience of having to crawl off a train because the rail employees who had been booked to provide her with a ramp had failed to materialise.
    It has been interesting to watch the

Read More

How the Pi could have been (some of) ours

  (edit: My Pi arrived on 2012-05-14. If you would like to read about my plans for it you can do so here, and my review of it can be found here.)

    So, the Pi will not be ours. At least until April, according to my email from Farnell.
    The Pi? The Raspberry Pi, that is, powerful yet inexpensive single board computer and object of desire. Released to a storm of interest that created a

Read More

An AJAX and jQuery driven web feature, the OxfordWords Text Analyser

    If you are a follower of the OxfordWords Blog, you may have seen the launch of the OxfordWords Text Analyser, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens. Here follows a technical description of the feature, what it does and how it works.
    The challenge was to show the logophile visitors to OxfordWords some of the computational linguistic techniques used in the preparation

Read More