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The Ghost of the Stroud Observatory
stroud

The Ghost of the Stroud Observatory

There's a small patch of bushes and empty crisp packets near my home, haunted by the ghost of an observatory.
12 May 2025 8 min read
A history of the Trinity Rooms in 20 quotes
history

A history of the Trinity Rooms in 20 quotes

140 years of celebrations, revels, fights, religion and sex
06 Apr 2025 5 min read
Illustration with a female operator putting a card in a machine. It says "credit .00002" on the screen. A woman is fainting and being caught by two male assistants. One is rolling his eyes.
coding

The future of money (1976)

I love how this got internet banking almost spot on, but got internet shopping interestingly wrong (turns out we don't do it in a shopping mall)
06 Apr 2025 1 min read
Hacking Idiotic Journal Admin
coding

Hacking Idiotic Journal Admin

In which I present Fending-off Academic Form Fuss (FAFF): a very rough, first run at automating filling out academic journal admin PDFs.
29 Mar 2024 3 min read
FLOSS history: code as art
coding

FLOSS history: code as art

Way back in 2006, I co-authored a paper with Teresa Dillon on “The potential of open source approaches for education”. It's interesting for me to re-read it 20 years later.
01 Mar 2024 15 min read
Scraping tabular data with pdfplumber
coding

Scraping tabular data with pdfplumber

I got distracted by this toot: A bot that automatically does stock trades … … by identifying trades being done by US politicians … … who probably have inside (I.e. and thus basically illegal-to-act-upon) knowledge of market-moving government info … … and doing the same trades He’s up 20% since May 2022 The idea
14 Nov 2023 2 min read
Scraping and alerting with Github Actions
coding

Scraping and alerting with Github Actions

Dave pointed out this weird trick some years ago: using Github actions as a free engine for checking websites and sending you email alerts when they change. I use it fairly frequently to track things online. The code in that repo assumes the web page is available on the public
21 May 2023
Intense relief
maps

Intense relief

Using hillshade LIDAR models to spot interesting bumps in the landscape
01 Feb 2018 2 min read
Two maps of "The Heavens" overlaid on each other, the top one semi-transparent, rendered in 3D with hills in high relief, viewed at an oblique angle
maps

An interactive historical map of The Heavens

There’s a local beauty spot called “The Heavens”. Here's how I overlaid a 17th century map on a contour map.
01 Feb 2018 1 min read
An Ordnance Survey map of the Five Valleys of Stroud, rendered in 3D with hills in high relief, viewed at an oblique angle
history

An interactive, 3D Ordnance Survey map of Stroud

I made a zoomable, draggable, 3D relief map of Stroud's five valleys, using Ordnance Survey maps.
03 Apr 2016 1 min read
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