Week 300 - Interesting links

Qaop/JS - ZX Spectrum Emulator

Having cut my software teeth on the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum, I enjoyed playing some retro games on the Qaop ZX-Spectrum emulator which has been ported to JavaScript. — JM

Atom plans to be UK’s first all-digital bank

Although this isn’t recent news, I only came across it relatively recently. Apparently the new bank will be headed by Anthony Thomson, founder and former chairman of Metro Bank, and Mark Mullen, who was CEO of First Direct.

It sounds as if it has some of the same goals as the bank/credit union idea that we worked on earlier this year. — JM

Asciidoctor

A fast text processor & publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc to HTML5, DocBook & more. I’ve tended to use Markdown rather than AsciiDoc as my lightweight markup language of choice, but coming across this Ruby gem has made me wonder whether AsciiDoc might be the better choice in some situations. — JM

Choose one: Feature Toggles vs Authorisation

This points out that both Feature Toggles and Authorisation could make use of the same underlying implementation. I hadn’t considered that before. — JM

Sonic Pi

I thoroughly enjoyed Sam Aaron and Xavier Riley’s inspirational LRUG presentation: Live Coding in the Classroom. I can see that the rapid feedback provided by Sonic Pi’s live coding development environment would be really powerful in engaging children in learning how to program.

The idea of music as test/code to be shared and collaborated on via GitHub is also really interesting. — JM

Matter and Form makes Affordable 3D Scanner

Perhaps we can combine this with our CubeX 3D printer (on loan from Makie) to make a Star Trek-style replicator. — JM

Bomb Sight

Explore the London Blitz during 7th October 1940 to 6th June 1941

This is an incredible map of bombs dropped on London during the Blitz. I can’t quite get over how many there were and the area they covered. Seeing that bombs were dropped close to our office, and to my flat, somehow makes it all the more real. — CR

Free Rider HD

I don’t generally play games but got a little bit addicted to this web based over the weekend. I love the simplicity, the huge number of tracks and the way the little rider bounces around like a rag doll when you crash :-) — CR

Exist - Activity tracking and insights

I haven’t tried it but really like the look of this app. I collect quite a bit of data about myself but haven’t yet taken the step toward interpreting it; something that it looks like this app does really well. — CR