Ben Foxall
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall
@benfoxall.bsky.social
120 followers 200 following 79 posts
I love the web, data, spatial, robotics and hacks. Prev, Robot Web at Wayve 🫶 🤖 🚗
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 1d
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)
Train Text
A data-friendly train times service for Great Britain.
trntxt.uk
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 1d
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.
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:
api.irishrail.ie
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 1d
I've been playing around with visualising Irish rail data

benjaminbenben.com/trains/
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Reposted by Ben Foxall
jakearchibald.com
Jake Archibald @jakearchibald.com · 19d
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...
The present and potential future of progressive image rendering
Exploring progressive image rendering across JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL.
jakearchibald.com
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 27d
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · 27d
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Oct 5
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Aug 20
✨ New blog post: Using QR Codes to communicate with offline devices

benjaminbenben.com/2025/08/19/o...
Offline QR Codes
Have you tried using a QR Code for that?
benjaminbenben.com
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 17
Blog post - video playback in 3d space

benjaminbenben.com/2025/07/16/v...
Video Space
Pose-aligned video tracking with WebGL
benjaminbenben.com
benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 14
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 11
Great to see him dropping some new tracks
Spotify notification: New album coming soon, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 8
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.
benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 7
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 7
Interpolated pose linked to <video> element playback.

TIL `.requestVideoFrameCallback`, pretty neat for syncing other elements to video timestamps.
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 5
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 4
Thanks! "Random clicking stuff until things look cool" probably sums up a lot of my process to be honest 📊
benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 4
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 4
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
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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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
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/
Visualised flight path, with options to export as different formats.
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
VLC shows the subtitles pretty well.

They're useful, though it doesn't capture the orientation of the drone/camera, only the position.
Video playing in VLC, showing subtitle information about the frame. eg: "106 00:00:01,751 --> 00:00:01,767 <font size="28">FrameCnt: 106, DiffTime: 16ms 2025-07-01 10:48:25.986 [iso: 100] [shutter: 1/400.0] [fnum: 1.7] [ev: 0] [color_md: default] [focal_len: 24.00] [latitude: 52.267958] [longitude: -7.516131] [rel_alt: 6.700 abs_alt: 244.381] [ct: 5509] </font>"
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
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)
Viewing a text file, with the contents that documents each frame: 1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:00,016 <font size="28">FrameCnt: 1, DiffTime: 16ms 2025-07-01 10:48:24.236 [iso: 100] [shutter: 1/400.0] [fnum: 1.7] [ev: 0] [color_md: default] [focal_len: 24.00] [latitude: 52.267959] [longitude: -7.516130] [rel_alt: 6.700 abs_alt: 244.381] [ct: 5501] </font> 2 00:00:00,016 --> 00:00:00,032 <font size="28">FrameCnt: 2, DiffTime: 16ms 2025-07-01 10:48:24.251 [iso: 100] [shutter: 1/400.0] [fnum: 1.7] [ev: 0] [color_md: default] [focal_len: 24.00] [latitude: 52.267959] [longitude: -7.516130] [rel_alt: 6.700 abs_alt: 244.381] [ct: 5502] </font> 3 00:00:00,032 --> 00:00:00,049 <font size="28">FrameCnt: 3, DiffTime: 17ms 2025-07-01 10:48:24.268 [iso: 100] [shutter: 1/400.0] [fnum: 1.7] [ev: 0] [color_md: default] [focal_len: 24.00] [latitude: 52.267959] [longitude: -7.516131] [rel_alt: 6.700 abs_alt: 244.381] [ct: 5502] </font>
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jul 3
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!)
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benfoxall.bsky.social
Ben Foxall @benfoxall.bsky.social · Jun 25
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.
Google search result for "User verification was required, but user could not be verified". Showing one result (a phishing site). Github search for "User verification was required, but user could not be verified", showing many results.