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 …
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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 …
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@BurgerKing got hacked – but kept their verified tick…
Earlier today the @BurgerKing twitter account got hacked – possibly by online hacking pranksters “anonymous” – and started to tweet rather “off message” stuff (starting by saying the chain had been sold to McDonalds). Shouldn’t those changes have meant they lost their verified tick? Does that hint at something stranger going on?
Snow (dum dum) Huh! (dum dum). Whaaat is it good for? – Absolutely nuffin*
*If Edwinn Starr had sung this lyric about SNOW instead of WAR he would have been wrong (he also wouldn’t have made such a valid political point…but I digress). Much as we moan about it snow can be an invaluable way to track down local social media users!
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 …
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Talking to strangers…
A recurring theme today seems to be “talking to strangers”. It first came up during a discussion I had this morning with some colleagues, discussing the “North South divide” – and a comment along the lines of “if you talk to a stranger in London, people think you are weird. If you do it in …
Introducing my Twitter User Biography Downloader Excel Spreadsheet Thingymajig
Details (and link) about an Excel spreadsheet I developed to download Twitter user biographies, and up to 1200 tweets for any (unprotected) user.
Braindump of Blue Light Camp
On Sunday I went to Blue Light Camp – the unconference for people working within the emergency services (Disclosure – I work for the Police at the moment). I want to do a proper write-up of the whole event but, while I am thinking that through, there are some quicky things that I want to …