Ben Foxall

6 Sept

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

6 Sept

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

10 July

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

12 Mar

@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!

26 Jan

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

26 Jan

… 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...

11 Dec 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.

benjaminbenben.comLunatech

11 Dec 2025

benjaminbenben.com/lunatech/ 👀

5 Dec 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 📀

3 Dec 2025

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

3 Dec 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

1 Dec 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.

24 Nov 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

14 Nov 2025

Now we're talking 😻

14 Nov 2025

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

14 Nov 2025

… I guess this is technically what I asked for

13 Nov 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

3 Nov 2025

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

api.irishrail.ieapi.irishrail.ieOur 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:

3 Nov 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.

Ben Foxall reposted

Jake Archibald

@jakearchibald.com

16 Oct 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.comThe present and potential future of progressive image renderingExploring progressive image rendering across JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL.

benjaminbenben.comOffline QR CodesHave you tried using a QR Code for that?

20 Aug 2025

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

benjaminbenben.comVideo SpacePose-aligned video tracking with WebGL

17 July 2025

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

11 July 2025

Great to see him dropping some new tracks

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

7 July 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.

8 July 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.

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

5 July 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

7 July 2025

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

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

4 July 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...

4 July 2025

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

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

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

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

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

VLC shows the subtitles pretty well. They're useful, though it doesn't capture the orientation of the drone/camera, only the position.

I found a SRT viewer which parses the subtitle file, generates a path and outputs different formats. That's pretty cool (and way better than what I was going to try and throw together) djitelemetryoverlay.com/srt-viewer/

I'm going to play around with some drone footage I captured the other day. It's a 4 minute video around a place I camped a few nights ago, captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro (which I love!)

I've got 3 files DJI_20250701104824_0371_D.MP4 (3.5G) [...].LRF (489M) [...].SRT (3.8M) MP4 is the video, LRF (Low-Resolution File) is a smaller version of the video for previews/editing, SRT is a subtitles text file which adds some camera and location metadata for the frames. (manually enabled)

So, this was scaring me a lot.

Ben Foxall@benfoxall.bsky.social

I searched for an error "User verification was required, but user could not be verified". I only saw one result (odd), clicked on it. [this is the source of the attack, and it's super worrying but I'll look into that separately]

Right, I managed to find the content in devtools (it's the initial html). "Copy as cURL" and I can check on the command line (it's still there).

Ok, it's not my machine. Checked on a second laptop/network & a remote VM, and I can see the phishing site in the results. This is weird, Google serves me a single phishing site response for a term where there's plenty of results from a github search.

So, this was scaring me a lot.

Ben Foxall@benfoxall.bsky.social

Something is injecting phishing content into my google results? First thought was that it might be an extension I'd installed. The only ones with access to all pages is 1password & react dev tools. Dug into both, and they're the official ones and I poked around with the scripts they inject.