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Estimating past follower numbers on Twitter

Lets face it: no matter how much we protest that Twitter is not a numbers game, we can’t help comparing follower counts with other similar accounts. And we all get a little fizz of excitement when we pass a milestone in followers, or notice a spike in the number of people following us.

But if [...]

The Poke publishes the best police tweets of 2013 – and the majority of them are from 2012!

Earlier today the poke published the 11 best police tweets of 2013. I love the poke, they publish some brilliant things…but this one was a bit…erm…out of date? How do I know? Well I wrote two of the tweets they highlighted…in 2012!

Here is the poke’s run down, with the original tweets (or you [...]

2013 – a review of my year…

My boss wrote me a powerful message in her Christmas card to me this year: “be proud of what you’ve achieved this year”. December was a hard month for me, but that quote set me thinking. In the light of all the “reviews of the year” that are inevitable at this time of year, I [...]

Creating a Photomosaic of Twitter followers

One of the Twitter accounts I manage professionally recently passed the 30,000 followers mark. This was a big milestone for us, and we wanted to mark it with something special. Here’s how I did it! [...]

Creating random (fake) placenames

When I saw this tweet asking for help creating fake placenames:

I need your help. I need fake town, city and county names please. Caveat: they must be realistic sounding and not offensive. Thanks!

— Christine Townsend (@ceetownsend) August 7, 2013

My inner Stinson couldn’t resist…

Pick a word from the Prefix Column, and [...]

Is there a flaw with Twitter two step verification?

Earlier this week Twitter announced its much awaited two-step verification process (see Mashable for more).

I am worried I might have spotted a fatal flaw in the process that makes hacking a twitter account EASIER if you enable two step verification.

Twitter have been obviously inspired by Google’s two step verification process, making use of [...]

Drawing pictures with text (the joys and annoyances of Unicode and Ascii text).

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I have a bit of a soft spot for symbols and pictures in text based updates. More often than not this is done using Unicode – no doubt you’ve seen people (let’s face it, they are usually beliebers!) who include hearts, squiggles, smiley faces and weird [...]

Broadcasting hidden messages to cameraphones using IR light

I recently came across an interesting feature of cameraphones, which I think is ripe for taking advantage of.

This is a picture of a TV remote taken with the camera on my smartphone. You will notice the purple flare from the infrared (IR) LED on the front of the remote, as I press the power [...]