Projects

what Since early 2018 I’ve been learning R, a programming language for statistical analysis and data science. I initially learnt it as a way to dissect and understand my financial history, having painstakingly extracted all of my financial records from my bank. I later used it in experiments to track my spending locations, understanding my Twitter use, and dive into some data science at work. I then took on a number of data science courses on Coursera and have been slowly working my way through them. I wrote an R package for interacting with my newer challenge bank, Monzo, called Monzor. ...

what Over the years I’ve built a number of hardware projects. Most are relatively simple Arduino / Raspberry projects. Most recently, I built a smart lantern running Android things which I’m using to project my creative coding explorations. In the past I built (with a friend) a quadcopter drone (back before commercial/personal drones being available), a sun-seeker trike, and various small sensor experiments. This site is being served off a small Raspberry Pi at home, which also handles some dynamic DNS stuff, runs Steam Link, and hosts a few Twitter bot experiments. ...

what I enjoy hiking and have been doing it since I was a kid. I like to use my holidays to go walking whenever possible. I’ve hiked the Arctic trail in Greeland, the Arctic Circle trail in Norway, the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, the larger hikes in New Zealand, around parts of Ireland, and others. I don’t get to go hiking as often as I would like. ...

what From around 2007 to 2012 I played around with Processing, a creative coding framework in Java. I originally started experimenting with it after reading a paper on how fireflies use localised synchronisation to enhance their ability to attract other fireflies and wanted to see if I could recreate it. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time this had been done digitally (though it’s very simple coding and has since been done numerous times.) After I’d iterated on that a few times, playing with OpenGL concepts and hardware interaction, I played around with visualising how genetic algorithms solve problems as a way to help understand how they work (which ended up on Wired’s security blog and a few other places), augmented reality (back in 2009 when it was still in its earliest phases), and trying to prototype weird Twitter interfaces which more accurately reflected the network nature of it. ...

what In 2013 I bought an old canalboat and, over the course of the next 5 years, rebuilt it. And crashed it, and nearly sunk it, and had a few catastrophic engine failures. But mostly, rebuilt it. so what It was an adventure. During this time I also started and ran my own small, successful digital agency, due in no small part to my ability avoid London’s insane rent prices by living on the boat. My boat and I wandered around London, made friends, and stayed in liminal spaces I would never have known about had I not bought the ridiculous thing. I learnt a lot about engines, solar panels, friends, 12v systems, cistern tanks, and the value of a small woodburner during this time. ...