PHP is often the butt of jokes online, but I've always thought that quite unfair. Turns out, that I am certainly not the only one, as outlined in this article 'The Internet of PHP
I have now been using Chat-GPT, and Github's Copilot for coding for 3 months, and I just have to say, some days I am just breezing through tasks that woul...
The dust has settled a bit after the wide release of Chat-GPT and my excitement has tempered somewhat. It is capable of some very cool stuff, but its main limitation is accuracy. There are a lot of mistakes, and it asserts itself so conf...
Here is one cool project I have been working on recently. This is the perception census, a huge study of perceptual diversity undertaken by world-leading academics Anil Seth from ...
I am so excited! Today after reading articles about Chat GPT I decided to see if I could start using it to help me do my job. Here is my first bit of work:
How can I prevent a user from signing up with a particular email address, w...
I love python, I had what seemed like a fairly complicated task, I googled and found two packages that basically do it all. One simple conda command to install.
Wait a sec.... let me just spend an inordinate amount of time fixing my pyt...
For my birthday I got a Hario V60 Glass Brewing Kit, which I asked for because I thought 'Hey it will be nice to be able to make myself and my partner, a nice mornin...
I had a project where users were reporting intermittent flags from malware software. This wasn't something I had encountered before, but apparently if a scammer uses a hosting service's ip address, they get put on various blacklists, and then an ...
When you are the only programmer on a project, you sometimes get an unsung win, something which you are proud of, but that no one really understands so didn't notice fully 🥲. Often it's little things, like being able to add a new feature reall...
A year and a half ago I spent £21.99 on soap flakes from Chateau du Savon, to use in place of laundry detergent for clothes washing. I am now thoroughly convinced that laundry detergent is basically a co...
I've always known that you should take animal studies with a grain of salt - demonstrated clearly by the awesome and often hilarious Just says in mice twitter account.
However today I heard s...
I have just completed a new iOS app and it was my first time using SwiftUI. I have to say the developer experience felt almost... phenomenal... although recently the bar has been prett...
In a timely coincidence this tweet came up on my timeline just when it basically happened three times to me in one week from different proj...
Recently I had to spend a few hours updating a React project, and fixing breaking changes from all the new dependencies and upgrades on npm packages, and in timely fashion I came across this article discussing
Came across this great open source app for iOS that automatically removes the annoying, space-hogging 'live' effects from photos taken on iPhone. It is called LivePhotoCleaner. Cynicism alert: This live...
The latin phrase Solvitur Ambulando is translated as "it is solved by walking". It has a funny double meaning: classically it has meant "the problem is best solved by actively trying ...
As part of a process of taking the advice in Stolen Focus I have cut out nearly all notifications, turning off all sounds, and indications of message waiting on email, slack, ...
There is a common source of friction (and anxiety) in psychology projects with large datasets: The pipeline of getting data from the data collection stage wherever or whatever that may be, into the final form to perform statistical analysis. Fre...
I've been using nearlyfreespeech.net for a while for a side project, and also for adhoc sites that are needed from time-to-time during work. I have grown to really like it's minimal, clutter free set...
This is a little Linux tip that I've started using quite frequently on one of my projects: how to transfer a script and execute it with ssh. I use it when I need to execute a script on a remote server, to do something as a one-off like build a pa...
At work I’ve been updating many forms to be responsive and work on mobile. This is not as exciting as it sounds - but like any boring but necessary task, there is fun to be had searching for an optimal solution. Psychology is just full o...
In my job, I tend to work as a sole developer, and quite often in a project there comes a stage where I need feedback on a specific feature, before the rest of the project is in a presentable state. When working on something tricky I will disable...
We are having a baby soon! That and the likelihood that I will continue to need a room to work from home, we decided that it was worth looking at getting a garden office, if it can be done within a budget. Both pre-made off-the-shelf buildings, ...
Inspired by this and this (both sourced from Adactio’s website who I sometimes play irish ...
I think he's trying to tell me I am drinking a little too much. Well, it's Christmas and it's just been 2020, what does he expect!
Recently I decided to go back to basics and rewrite my site and blog in as minimal format as possible. No libraries or frameworks, no database, all hand coded, fast loading and clean etc. However, one of the things I really missed from developing ...
Qualtrics is used widely throughout academia to administer surveys and gather data. It is easy to set up surveys, which automatically look good and the data is stored reliably and is easily exportable. And ...
With the outbreak of Covid-19, researchers at Sussex decided to move swiftly to measure the psychological impact of lockdown over the course of the pandemic. We had to move quickly using the tools we had: But we had a problem, the surveys were on ...
This is for people who want to understand how to make choices in personal finance and know how to program. Normally, it's easy enough to use rules of thumb, and to just follow advice / well trodden paths in finance - but if you're inclined you c...
Armadillo is a superb linear algebra library for C++, that makes doing things which are easy in MATLAB, almost as easy in C++ . I recently had to port a fairly complex curve fitting algorithm from MATLAB ...
I wanted to inspect individual pixels in a CVPixelBuffer, which is the format provided by default on iOS's camera callbacks - but I couldn't find a recipe online, so after figuring it out, here it is. You can adjust this code to iterate through t...
Using Python in SPSS is great if you want to do any complex calculations, without having to leave the SPSS environment. Python is much more flexible than SPSS syntax, and it's actually very easy to use. It is especially useful when you are colla...
For a recent project I made a draggable pie chart. I thought this might be useful, so I have made it open source for others to use. There are many off the shelf libraries for doing charts, but only the extremely heavyweight ones are c...
For a recent project I had to generate a stimulus set consisting of random non-overlapping circles in MATLAB. Â My solution was to keep a list of the outside of a gradually increasing outer ring of circles, and add new ones, expanding the ring. Â ...
I had to learn Core Audio for a project recently, which despite being notoriously difficult, has been great fun. Starting out, I would have killed for a basic example audio player that didn’t have any unnecessary bells and whistles to ju...