Reykjavík successfully held it’s third cryptoparty last night, as part of the Tor developer conference happening here all week. Tor developers joined people from the local pirate party, universities and hackerspace to discuss and teach crypto technologies with anyone interested.

If you’ve never done any microcontroller programming, start with an arduino.cc. It’s the best way of getting started with embedded hardware programming.

If for whatever reason you’re determined to use PICs (cost, availability of free samples, you already had a bunch of them, etc.), you should get a pickit3 and use the netbeans-derived MPLAB X to develop, program and debug your devices.

But if like me you’re in the weird position of having a bunch of PICs, a Chinese knockoff pickit2 and a strong dislike of Java, here’s how to set up a *minimal* C development environment on a Mac.

Each computer hardware form factor has gone through several names before one started to obviously dominate. Palmtop, PDA, handheld computer, smartphone, notebook, laptop, clamshell, netbook, portable computer, tablet, slate, touchpad computer, “phablet”.

What should the new class of devices being created under the “internet of things” banner be referred to as?

Initially a transcript of the web action toolbelt video, this guide covers how to install and use the Web Action Hero Toolbelt.

In which I document the experience of exporting data from several services, commenting on the UI, UX, terminology and utility/tangibility/formatting of the data produced.

(video+transcript) Squarespace doesn’t yet add rel=me to links to connected accounts, and even if/when they do you may still want to add support for other authentication methods like SMS or Persona. Follow these steps to be able to log in using a squarespace site.

A working list of things I want to be able to do with data on the web

Indie Web Camp and by extension Indieauth and the wiki act as diagnostic tools which, by not compromising on their principles, expose UX flaws further up in the chain, and make fixing them a practical necessity rather than an idealistic desire.

How to create a small IRC bot using the Go programming language.

This post by Oliver Hotham was censored by the organisation it exposes. In an attempt to rebalance the universe, here it is on a platform which is slightly trickier to censor.

You can tell a lot about what a school values by the difference between it’s public reception and it’s student reception.

Notes on Statistical Significance and Effect Sizes

By default, trying to push the Smallest Federated Wiki repo to Heroku runs using Sinatra. It didn’t work, so here’s how to deploy it using Node.js

Notes on how to convert OSM’s complicated address tagging schema into microformats h-adr semantics

A distillation of my thoughts about collective identities, aggression and the importance of diversity, prompted by reading “On Aggression” by Konrad Lorenz.

Many people ask me why I only ever drink water. This is my logic:

In response to Twitter’s Display GuidelinesRequirements, here are some things I request/suggest you do if using my content on the web.

In which I exaggerate Twitter’s requirements, postulate about hashtags being gestures and unleash the worlds first fully compliant hashtag.

Brainstorming, research, prototyping etc. around quoting UIs.