iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The protocol: → left stick = position → right stick = colour → buttons = sync

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Random hack - streaming video into a browser via the Gamepad API. 0.05 fps, incredibly low quality.

A web page showing a very low-quality image of a person celebrating. Graphs and stats show a signal from a connected gamepad (the source of the image)

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Ah yeah, that's a good approach, and I guess over 4km you were able to follow it quite closely. Reminds me of lines.chromeexperiments.com from years ago, and think I saw a road version recently! And a lot easier if you're in the sky... www.bbc.com/news/article...

lines.chromeexperiments.com

Land Lines

Land Lines is an experiment that lets you explore real Google Earth satellite imagery through gesture.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Thank you so much! Ah, that's cool. Was it hard to find a matching cycle route? I guess it would be helpful if their logo was a single straight line or something 😅

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I'm kind of obsessed with video & 3d space. Been building a drone flight viewer that shows captured video aligned with flight paths. flights.benjaminbenben.com

A grid of 3d flight paths of a drone, with volumes aligned with the path to show when video was captured.

A drone video playback window with an overlayed 3d model showing where the drone was when it captured

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Not sure of the context of the line up, but could you ask about luggage options and heated grips? Would be useful thanks. I'm doing good thanks. Pretty settled in Dublin - currently cooking some pork carnitas for tacos later. How you doin? Any dinner plans?

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I like your advice about non-tech hobbies. I've got several outdoor hobbies, but realised if I'm indoors I'll often be tinkering or working. Think I'm going to buy myself a Ukulele!

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

I had the nineT as a borrow bike when mine was getting repaired. Wished the repair had taken longer!

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

@alexlizhill.com every few years I get in a conversation about Pull Requests and end up directing people to your Lead Dev 2018 talk. It just happened again, so thanks!

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

… though to be fair, it did *sincerely apologize* and promised never to do it again. I've reset my credentials, but probably won't update my repo secrets anytime soon 😅 github.com/benfoxall/lu...

Comment from copilot:

Fixed in commit c5a1fa8.

I sincerely apologize for this critical security mistake. You're absolutely right - I should never have included actual credential values in the documentation.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

So @github.com copilot decided to extract some secrets into a plain markdown file which it committed to my repo 😰

A screenshot of AGENTS.md, containing hard coded values for `TRACTIVE_TEST_EMAIL` & `TRACTIVE_TEST_PASSWORD`

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

We think our cat is being bullied 😿 (keep seeing her getting chased home by a stray cat). … I found an undocumented api for her location tracker (Tractive) and made some plots. Looks like she's been exploring way less over the last few weeks.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Yes! Handy feature otherwise I might accidentally get your blog post burned into my CRT Display

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

@remysharp.com I just came back to a page I was reading yesterday to see it replaced with your face bouncing around. Love it 📀

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Have you explained about how your approach is much more efficient? I feel like a few graphs/slides would get the message across well.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

I dreamt up a very elegant and secure way of restricting which doors you could open, but then I figured: 1. I'd be doing that for me, rather than the person I made it for 2. Real ones aren't that secure either

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

I made an advent calendar with a picture of our cat each day 🐈. benjaminbenben.com/catlendar/

A web page (benjaminbenben.com/catlendar), showing an Advent Calendar - kind of like the paper ones you used to get where you open a door each day and see a new picture.

One of the doors is open and you can just make out a cat.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

I gave a talk last week about communication & data extraction with QR Codes. One thing clicked for me recently: When you scan a QR Code, you're _copying_ data from the physical world to your device. Was interesting to talk about performance & security with that in mind.

A screenshot of a slide deck. The highlighted slide is titled "QR Codes are Data", with the content of “Scanning them copies that data to your device"

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Thanks Paul 🙏! Sorry to hear the search has been rough, is there an end in sight?

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Thanks! And thanks for sharing my post that I was searching. I got a few good leads who mentioned you specifically.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Had some final stage interviews with a multi-billion dollar company this afternoon, managed to tell: → The CTO & Cofounder – It's my mum's birthday today → Head of Engineering – I went clubbing at the weekend and considered replying to an email at 1am, but didn't

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

… does anyone know where I can buy a cat wig?

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

… I guess this is technically what I asked for

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

It's getting to the time of year that people I met in the summer have started noticing that I always wear shorts

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

And it all packages up well. Now I've got a self-contained docker image (around 440mb) that I can deploy wherever I want.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

There's something cool about making a local map server, this one is only really useful if you're in Dublin.

Directions between two points south of Dublin. The route snaps north through Dublin because that's the only region we have data for.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

1. Download open streetmap data for the area you want to route through 2. Process/extract/partition your data into a bunch of osrm.* files 3. Run the server github.com/Project-OSRM...

github.com

GitHub - Project-OSRM/osrm-backend: Open Source Routing Machine - C++ backend

Open Source Routing Machine - C++ backend. Contribute to Project-OSRM/osrm-backend development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

I'm impressed with how straightforward it is to setup your own routing service with OSRM. (this instance finds walking directions around Dublin).

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

oh wow, that map view is cool. There's so much train data that I know nothing about. Dunno if you've seen trntxt.uk by Dan Pope? It's very very data optimised (most page loads are <2k single rt)

trntxt.uk

Train Text

A data-friendly train times service for Great Britain.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Everything comes from a single endpoint `getCurrentTrainsXML` api.irishrail.ie/realtime/ I did some git-scraping for a few days, pulled everything into DuckDB and generated a csv file to pull into the frontend.

api.irishrail.ie

Our central signalling system is subject to ongoing work to support this real-time facility. However real-time information has weaker coverage in certain areas, these include:

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

I've been playing around with visualising Irish rail data benjaminbenben.com/trains/

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Reposted by Ben Foxall

Jake Archibald @jakearchibald.com · 16/10/2025

I dug into progressive image rendering and found a bunch of common assumptions aren't quite true. ➡️ JPEG & WebP progressive-renders worse in Safari ➡️ AVIF _does_ support progressive ➡️ But JPEG XL in Safari doesn't ➡️ JPEG XL decodes much slower than AVIF ⬇️ and more jakearchibald.com/2025/present...

jakearchibald.com

The present and potential future of progressive image rendering

Exploring progressive image rendering across JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Additional point: I don't want to store user emails at all if possible. Nice way to do this is storing a hash of the email to check against when they request a magic link.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

My ideal auth flow is using a Magic Link to validate a Passkey, and then use that for future logins. That way, the user gets fewer emails and can log in more quickly. This post is really good – rmondello.com/2025/01/02/m...

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

I like how copilot uses the PR description to explain the plan. Is this a tool for letting people add their own feeds to your reader? (I added mine 😎)

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

✨ New blog post: Using QR Codes to communicate with offline devices benjaminbenben.com/2025/08/19/o...

benjaminbenben.com

Offline QR Codes

Have you tried using a QR Code for that?

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Blog post - video playback in 3d space benjaminbenben.com/2025/07/16/v...

benjaminbenben.com

Video Space

Pose-aligned video tracking with WebGL

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Were you at the Future of Coding meet last April by any chance? I was talking about using qr codes to transfer data and showed a signalling demo with it.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Great to see him dropping some new tracks

Spotify notification: New album coming soon, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Aligning video to viewport. I'm quite happy with this! Driving this from the native <video> element is handy, here I can increase the playback speed through the native controls.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Rendering the video aligned to the interpolated pose (plus some fixes to how I was converting colmap frames). Not sure what's going on with the bouncing in this corner, but overall it feels pretty nice.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Interpolated pose linked to <video> element playback. TIL `.requestVideoFrameCallback`, pretty neat for syncing other elements to video timestamps.

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

I made a thing - reading the colmap model and then plotting images where they were captured. It's using the full size images so it's like 200mb at the moment, though I'm wondering about using the video (smaller and will have 30x more frames). Hacked together with html/threejs + vibes from gemini

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Thanks! "Random clicking stuff until things look cool" probably sums up a lot of my process to be honest 📊

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

SuperSplat Editor is awesome. Let's you rotate/crop/export a splat intuitively. Published: superspl.at/view?id=919d...

A screenshot of https://superspl.at/editor showing a view of my motorbike/tent cropped to a sphere

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

I managed to generate my own splat. It's not as neat/good as Polycam, but it's something to play with. github.com/pierotofy/Op...

Viewing a gaussian splat with https://playcanvas.com/viewer

Motorbike & tent visible, but several artifacts present

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

I chucked the images into Polycam, and this is exactly what I was looking for. Such a great tool. poly.cam

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Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

I managed to get some positions with colmap 1. extracted the video frames at 2hz with ffmpeg 2. clicked stuff in the gui colmap.github.io

a 3d point cloud (you can just make out my motorbike), with lots of red pyramids that represent the orientation of the drone as it was flying around

A better view of my motorbike & tent (looks like black and blue clouds)

A zoomed out point-cloud, showing the road

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