09 Sep 2026 • 1 min read
Sometimes I take a picture of a slide someone is showing for my notes. The other day, during an online call, I took some screenshots of slides containing only text, so I wondered if it might be possible to paste the screenshot into an ocr?
Read more…05 Apr 2026 • 1 min read
Work has started on DoooM a simple yet hopefully informative android usage tracker that reflects the recent history of scrolling activity.
Read more…21 Dec 2025 • 6 min read
Symmetry is nice, and six-fold symmetry is even nicer, so let it snow…
Read more…4 Dec 2025 • 2 min read
spanish tortilla on crispbread with wallies (pickled gherkins) and burger sauce, inspired by an episode of easy spanish.
if the wallies are sweet you could skip the sauce, as this recipe would still meet max's six rules of sandwich: hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft.
Read more…14 Nov 2025 • 12 min read
Abridged excerpt from a Q&A with Cory Doctorow,
in which he investigates potential uses for
language/vision models if hyperscaling is over,
hyperlocal optimised models are widespread,
and GPUs are cheap:
Enshittification
With Whitney Betran and Ed Zitron at the Seattle Public Library
Our story begins around 35 minutes in…
Read more…08 Nov 2025 • 2 min read
The long-tail of ideas coming from the geoplace conference in May continues! This time I finally got round to open-sourcing and packaging up a python module that links datasets by household:
https://joeldn.srht.site/assign-uprnIt's a trio of functions which interact with the ASSIGN HTTP API: validating single or multiple freetext addresses into their definitive one-line form plus unique reference. Read more…
14 Sep 2025 • 1 min read
At some point around 2023 TfL changed it's countdown API causing the household a certain amount of inconvenience. We'd been heavy users of a long forgotten app that went like the clappers (unlike the buses, thankfully) and offered a no-frills highly usable experience when getting around town on four wheels.
It was called when-ze-bus and no app before or since has given such clear assistance when trying to tame the streets of London.
Having briefly considered rebooting the android toolchain (it's very very very long), I simply decided to go again in web standards, so here we are ; I hope you find it useful.
https://joeldn.codeberg.page/when-ze-bus.html
22 Jul 2025 • 1 min read
There are no frogs in this porridge, but chia seeds give it a froggy consistency.
Quantities of ingredients are per person - when i say "two hands" this is based on a cook once telling me that a stomach is about the size of two hands. Cook for around three minutes, stirring occasionally with a fork to stop the chia seeds sticking to each other.
Read more…20 Jul 2025 • 1 min read
reaquainting myself with strudel ahead of AlgoRhythms and it's been fun. it started out on nudel.cc from where i borrowed a synth on friday evening, and then added some drums, percussion, and bass in strudel for a more compositional approach.
the style is influenced by some of the split tempo (170/85) music coming from Berlin, especially the Samurai podcasts by Donato Dozzy and Reeko.
take it easy with the room reverb function, it uses a lot of energy.
14 Jul 2025 • 3 min read
Curious about local politics around the world? Press a location on the map to query wikidata! NOTE: This doesn't always return results, and when it does they can be slow to arrive, plus their temporal/spatial accuracy can be out of date/place due to old data or spatial oddities, since the match is inferred by proximity to a local admin headquarters, which could be in a another area entirely, yet still closer than the actual one… Still, do give it a spin, wikidata is amazing after all. TIP: Zoom to a locality first.
Read more…