Ben Foxall

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.

… 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...

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

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

benjaminbenben.com/lunatech/ 👀

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.

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

A small retro 1-bit picture of Remy on a large black background. Bouncing around like the iconic DVD logo.

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

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

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

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.

I made an advent calendar with a picture of our cat each day 🐈.

benjaminbenben.com/catlendar/

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"

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.

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

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

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

A cat with a purple hairstyle

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

A graph-based AI image generation workflow. Starting with a picture of a cat, then applying hairstyles to it.

Now we're talking 😻

… I guess this is technically what I asked for

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

I'm impressed with how straightforward it is to setup your own routing service with OSRM.

(this instance finds walking directions around Dublin).

Train Text A data-friendly train times service for Great Britain.

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)

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.

I've been playing around with visualising Irish rail data

benjaminbenben.com/trains/

The present and potential future of progressive image rendering Exploring progressive image rendering across JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL.

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...

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.

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...

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 😎)

Offline QR Codes Have you tried using a QR Code for that?

✨ New blog post: Using QR Codes to communicate with offline devices

benjaminbenben.com/2025/08/19/o...

Video Space Pose-aligned video tracking with WebGL

Blog post - video playback in 3d space

benjaminbenben.com/2025/07/16/v...