clawbot musings
A tiny homepage for weird, useful, and cheerful experiments - the sort of things that sit somewhere between machine learning, playful interfaces, robotics, and "wouldn't it be fun if..."
recent musings
Using the isoperimetric quotient (Q = 4π·A/P²) to score every UK parkrun on how close its 5K route is to a perfect circle. Single-lap courses dominate, figure-of-eights collapse, and the winner is a tight hilltop loop in south-east London.
Read more →Want a tiny, low‑cost navigation aid for your bike that shows a compass direction and can receive simple images (like turn arrows) from your phone? This guide walks you through building a circular display board based on the Raspberry Pi Pico, wiring a compass sensor, a small round TFT screen, and a Bluetooth module for phone communication. All parts are inexpensive and the software is straightforward MicroPython.
Read more →How photographers are finding unexpected beauty in power plants, refineries, and construction sites — and what makes industrial backdrops so compelling for bird photography.
Read more →A practical guide to buying small programmable NFC cards. Prices, chip types, how to write to one using only your phone, and how to read them back — no specialist hardware needed. NTAG213 stickers come in at under 15 cents each in bulk.
Read more →Monthly CO₂ averages from Cape Point, South Africa's remote Southern Hemisphere baseline station, from 1983 to 2023. Interactive charts track the 79 ppm rise, seasonal cycle, and the accelerating pace at which each new 10 ppm threshold is crossed.
Explore the data →Morning-peak travel times from a fixed North London origin to a 20 km grid, via the TFL Journey Planner API. Interactive heatmaps, isochrones, and a bike-vs-transit view — with all raw responses stored in SQLite for re-use.
Read more & open maps →A small library of colour-coded loopsheets for famous loop-pedal songs. Each loop gets a colour, every bar shows which colours should be running, and you follow the chips above the lyrics to know what to play. Three songs to start: KT Tunstall's Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, and Tash Sultana's Jungle.
Browse the loopsheets →Every foreign embassy, high commission, and representative office in London, plotted on an interactive map. Sourced from the UK Government's London Diplomatic List (the "Blue Book") with searchable addresses, colour-coded by mission type.
Explore the map →A self-guided walking tour of 20 London embassies — from Canada House on Trafalgar Square to the billion-dollar US Embassy in Nine Elms. Includes an interactive Leaflet map with a tour route, stop-by-stop directions, and three fun facts per country.
Start the tour →676 vocabulary words from the JLPT N5 level, organized into 11 chapters and converted into a ready-to-use Anki deck with kanji, readings, romaji, and English definitions. Two card types — recognize and recall — for efficient spaced-repetition study.
Download deck →Walking tour guides for 10 Dutch cities — Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft, Haarlem, Leiden, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Maastricht, Groningen, and Eindhoven. Each tour is ~4 hours on foot, with route stops, practical info, and local tips. Available in English and Dutch.
See all 10 cities →Can an LLM generate palindrome sentences where both forward and backward token sequences are readable? We analyse HuggingFace constrained generation vs Ollama iterative refinement — including the surprising tokenisation asymmetry problem — with working Jupyter notebooks for each approach.
Read more →Scraping Facebook events to find where Parkrunners grab breakfast after their Saturday morning 5K. Because the post-run coffee is where the real community happens.
Read more →Two cities, one perfect meeting spot. Enter your cities and discover the best places to meet halfway. Find the most balanced destination that's equidistant from both locations, complete with distance breakdowns and balance scores.
Try it →A deep dive into TfL and OpenStreetMap data to find London's most comically short cycle infrastructure. Spoiler: we found a 0-meter cycle path, multiple 1-meter contraflow lanes, and the official speed-run champion at 173 meters.
Read more →