Technology

2024

Recommendation rabbit holes

Battling the YouTube sidebar

We’ve all been there... you jump onto YouTube for a 'quick' tutorial on fixing a leaky tap and before you know it you’re an hour deep into videos about the …

Microclimate change

A CO2 detective story in my flat

I love my new flat, but I'm getting headaches. There's not a lot of ventilation and I have a sense that just my breathing might be enough to alter my …

Creative Muse

Keeping "The Artist's Way" alive with GPT4

Creative Muse is a custom GPT I made to help people continue “The Artist’s Way” by providing prompts for “morning pages” and “artist date” ideas.

2023

Let's make rainbows 🌈

Creating digital rainbows with GPT4

I saw the most spectacular rainbow not long ago and wondered whether I could simulate it 🤔. I decided that, with the help of GPT, it would be totally doable and …

Constrained particles

My first physics collaboration with GPT4

GPT and I built a interactive particle simulation with constraints - each particle must stay equidistant from two other particles. It took just a few hours to …

Backup Gitlab issues

My first GPT 💡 moment

My brain suddenly surfaced those immortal 3 letters... GPT 🤩 and that's when I knew the way I worked was going to change. I was blown away by the quality and …

Taste of Tech

Is a tech career right for you?

I've seen how hard it can be for people to figure out if a career in tech is right for them and so I'm experimenting with an idea to help unblock peoples' …

2022

Back in stock

Building a stock checker and notifier 🔔

I need to buy new fridge with some annoyingly specific requirements. The problem is, the fridge keeps going out of stock and the website's built in notification …

Slidee

A presentation tool powered by Reveal.js

At its core, Slidee turns a folder of markdown files into Reveal.js presentations.

2021

Swipee

The no-list reading list app

Reading lists suck! Save everything for later and then get paralysed by choice 😣 Swipee makes the choice for you. Instead of a reading list, Swipee uses a deck …

Squidler

Reflections on my first attempt at making a tech business

Squidler is an app that a couple of friends and I dreamt up in October 2013. We wanted to turn messaging into a game. We didn't know how to code, so we taught …

Peer to peer video calling

It's built into your browser already 😮

My mind was blown today when I found out about WebRTC and how it can enable video calls directly from my browser to yours without any data going through another …

WhatsApp migration

How to extract links from your chats

I've got lots of group chats with plenty of interesting links that have been shared over the years and I don't want to lose them. WhatsApp doesn't give you an …

2020

Flashee

The free and simple flash card app

There's no such thing as an original idea, and this is especially true of flashcard apps. There are MANY apps out there and yet all of them suck (in my humble …

Plotting Palladium

Using Observable notebooks to aid research

In this post I've embedded an Obvservable notebook that I'm trying out as an easy way to visualise the loading of deutereium into palladium in my experiments. …

2017

Rvu

A decentralised peer-reviewed publication platform

It's no secret that academic publishing is dysfunctional. Much has been written about the problems and potential solutions. A friend and I have begun gathering …

2014

Play with particles

An experiment in cross platform physics apps

Inspired by advances in both web and mobile technologies, I created the Play with Particles webapp. The user is able to control the motion of particles through …

BOT

Bump-on-Tail simulation tool

BOT is a Matlab tool for studying the electrostatic instability in the bump-on-tail problem in plasma physics. I originally created this tool in 2011 as part of …