Hacks – The Unusually Named Blog

Town And Street Name Nerdery

Posted onFebruary 5, 2017February 5, 202334 Comments

The Street With No Name Unless you happen to live in Shitterton, or Twatt, the chances are that you enjoy seeing funny place names.

I wondered if there was an easy way of doing an online search for town and street names, so I could find funny ones. The popular mapping sites are great if you want to search for a specific name, but I was looking for somewhere you could do more general substring searches, or ideally regex searches.

I didn’t really find what I was looking for, so I decided to make my own instead.

So I got hold of street and place name data from the Ordnance Survey, but first I thought I’d do a bit of titting about with it to see what interesting things fell out.
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Webpage Scraping Bookmarklet

Posted onAugust 1, 2016February 6, 2023Leave a comment

I quite often have to add new films into the database of my website british-film-locations.com. As well as adding the film I have to add data about the director and actors in the film as well. This is quite time consuming, so I created a system to simplify the task.

Firstly, I go to the page for the film on the Internet Movie Database, then I click on a specially-written bookmarklet. This runs some Javascript code which takes the IMDb URL, strips out the ID number of the film, and sends it to a PHP script on my website.

Hacking the Yamaha PSR-300

Posted onMay 22, 2014February 6, 2023Leave a comment

For one of my projects, I needed something to generate notes from MIDI data. I looked at eBay, and there were MIDI sound modules on there, but they were going for £40 upwards. I thought that there must be a way of doing it more cheaply.

Key Bottle Opener

Posted onMay 19, 2014February 6, 2023Leave a comment

I wondered if it was possible to make a bottle opener out of a key, and it still be usable as a key. It turns out it is. Kinda.

Books and Guns

Posted onJuly 11, 2013

Ever since I was a small child, I’ve been interested in book-safes – those hollowed out books you see in films and on telly, where spies hide secret things like government intelligence, or sweeties. I’ve made a couple in the past which were a bit of a bodge job; they worked fine, but they just looked a bit scrappy.