Monday 4 November 2013

Ambient Computing

That old 24" screen with the broken backlight may never be your main monitor again, but that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it:



Remove the backlight and frame, and you're left with a light and thin sheet that blends in with your surroundings, using available ambient light. When you're not using it, it just becomes a tinted window.





Sadly it didn't work quite as well on this laptop, due to the surface area of electronics behind the screen. It'd work much better on more recent models, but I don't have any I'm willing to sacrifice to the cause just yet.

Monday 29 July 2013

Exifpeeler update: SSL

After months of letting it churn happily along, I finally spent 5 minutes making a fairly important change to exifpeeler: it now supports SSL. If you visit https://exifpeeler.com instead of just http://exifpeeler.com, your data should be secure in transit and not just at either end. 

I've left the http version enabled for now, but of course recommend you use the https version -While people probably aren't scrounging through all your web traffic looking for interesting tidbits, it never hurts to be careful. 
(if this is the kind of thing you worry about, may I also recommend the excellent HTTPS everywhere.)