Data & Experiments

Yes, I’m still playing Wordle in 2026. According to Wordle, I’ve played 1,559 games, I win 99% of the time, my current streak is 107 days and my longest is 278. Four numbers, and they’re mostly correct. What I don’t get is anything behind them. No per-game history. No way to compare a Tuesday to a Sunday. No sense of whether I’ve actually got better at this over four years. Each day I’ve played, I’ve also shared the result to WhatsApp. Just a habit, not a data strategy, but it turns out that habit quietly built a far more detailed record than Wordle itself ever keeps. One I can finally ask my own questions of. So I looked into rebuilding my own copy of the data.

Two consecutive titles on the HN front page yesterday had a 6 in them. This means nothing. But it’s the sort of nothing that lodges in your brain until you do something about it, so what is the most popular number in Hacker News titles?

Between March 2011 and October 2021 I backed 19 Kickstarter projects, spending £386 and $565 across the lot. Here they all are, in order, with what became of each. March 2011 Minecraft: The Story of Mojang $30filmstandalone My first ever Kickstarter was 2 Player Productions’ documentary about Mojang’s first year. It delivered in late 2012, and I took the DVD tier, so my name is in the credits. I no longer own anything that can play the disc, but it’s a neat thing to have. On launch day 2PP uploaded the film to The Pirate Bay themselves, asking people to buy it if they could rather than pretend piracy wasn’t going to happen, and it went free on YouTube the following year. January 2013 GCW-Zero $155consolestandalone An open-source Linux retro handheld built around the Ingenic JZ4770, pitched as the spiritual successor to the Dingoo, by Justin Barwick (a Dingoonity regular). It delivered in 2013, but the shipping was a mess. We hosted the official GCW Zero subforum on Dingoonity, and it turned into a wall of “where’s my order?” posts despite us having nothing to do with fulfilment. I still have mine. It was underwhelming: by the time it arrived I had countless other devices that did the same job, often better. The community software carried it, but the hardware itself was nothing special. March 2013 Sweetbox II £32accessoryraspberry-pi A case for the Raspberry Pi. It arrived, but it fit an old model of Pi, so it stopped being useful fairly quickly. I’ve had better cases since, and these days I’d just 3D print an equivalent if I needed one. July 2013 Fairywren £50diyraspberry-pi A mini-ITX baseboard for the Raspberry Pi. It arrived. I never used it. I had aspirations and never got round to it (ADHD caveman brain). September 2013 RFIDler £24diystandalone A software-defined RFID reader, writer and emulator. It arrived, and I never worked out a good use for it. Writable RFID tags got cheap enough to buy and write straight from my phone, so I never needed it. I’ve got a backburner idea to make custom Tonies for the kids’ Toniebox, but they’ll probably grow up before I get to it. November 2013 Kano $120diyraspberry-pi A build-it-yourself computer kit wrapped around a Raspberry Pi, aimed at teaching kids to assemble and code. It delivered in 2014, a couple of months late, which for hardware is nothing. It seemed like a nice bit of kit, so I gave it to a nephew that Christmas. As far as I know the bright orange keyboard is still going strong. Kano itself became a real London company, raising around $45 million, doing the Harry Potter coding wand and a Windows machine with Microsoft, before drifting away from Pi kits entirely into Stem consumer audio (the Kanye West Stem Player) and splitting into two companies in 2023. March 2014 Planets³ $20videogamestandalone A voxel-based open-world RPG. It half delivered. Renamed Stellar Overload, it reached Steam early access, but Cubical Drift went bankrupt around 2018 and pulled it from sale unfinished. Backers were left with a Steam key for a dead game. I can’t even remember playing it. April 2014 LAST LIFE $15videogamestandalone A sci-fi noir adventure about investigating your own murder on Mars, with Double Fine attached as publisher. It never came out. Double Fine dropped it, the creator kept expanding the scope, the money ran out, and it ended up sitting unfinished on his hard drives. A complete write-off. June 2014 MyPifi LED board £6diyraspberry-pi An LED board kit for the Raspberry Pi. I remember soldering it together. I couldn’t tell you where it is now. June 2014 TerraTech £10videogamestandalone Physics-based vehicle construction and combat from Payload Studios. This one delivered properly. It left early access as a full release in 2018 and is still a supported game. I have no memory of playing it. November 2014 Espruino Pico £17diyespruino JavaScript on a USB stick, and the first of four things I backed from Gordon Williams at Espruino. He’s a local creator and the campaigns were always fun to back and tinker with, so once I’d backed one I kept coming back. It delivered, as all of his did. August 2015 The imossi N1 wallet £29accessorystandalone An RFID-protected wallet. I used it for about six years. These days I’ve got a MagSafe card holder on the back of my phone and mostly pay by contactless, so it’s retired. November 2015 Tingbot £50diyraspberry-pi A Raspberry Pi gadget with a screen, meant to make the Pi fun to build on. It delivered and I got into it for a bit, but in the end I needed the Pi for another project. It’s still in parts in my parts bin. I’d love to get it running again, but I don’t think the software stack is supported any more. December 2015 Pine A64 $41diystandalone A cheap 64-bit single-board computer pitched as a Raspberry Pi rival. It arrived barebones, the OS images weren’t great, and I already had Pis that did the job, so it was in a drawer before long. The company stuck around where most “Pi killers” didn’t, and Pine64 went on to make the Pinebook, PinePhone, PineTime and a line of RISC-V boards. The thing of theirs I actually use is the Pinecil, a USB-C soldering iron I bought later and still reach for often. July 2016 Puck.js £47 for twodiyespruino Gordon’s Bluetooth beacon, again running Espruino’s JavaScript. I spent proper time with these, contributing to a media-control script, nextSongPuck, and actually used it. August 2016 The Superbook $164accessorystandalone A laptop shell that turned an Android phone into a laptop, from Andromium, later Sentio. It raised nearly $3 million, one of the biggest hardware campaigns on Kickstarter at the time, then unravelled. They shipped about 75% of units before running out of money around 2019, with a distributor allegedly making off with $300,000 of inventory. Mine did arrive, after a very long wait, and it completely missed the mark. A 2016-era Android phone driving a laptop shell was beaten by any number of cheap old laptops, several of which I now own. I’ve still got the sheet of keyboard legend stickers and the Sentio-branded sleeve. The Superbook itself, I couldn’t tell you where it is. November 2019 Bangle.js £46wearableespruino Gordon’s hackable smartwatch. JavaScript on a watch (yes please, in principle). I wore it and gave it a proper go, but it was chunky and the software side was a bit of a bodge, so I went back to a better-supported watch of the time, a Pebble or similar. January 2021 Paper Apps Dungeon $20 for twotabletopstandalone A dungeon game in a 3x5 notepad. Delivered, and it still ends up in my bag from time to time. It’s a nice way to play something without a screen, and I’m holding onto it for when the kids are old enough to enjoy it. October 2021 Bangle.js 2 £75wearableespruino The second-generation open smartwatch from Espruino, and the last thing I’ve backed. Much the same story as the first, though nicer made. I bought it mostly to support Gordon. It sits in a drawer with my other watches now (I wear a Pixel Watch 2 these days). I’ve not backed anything since the second Bangle.js. Time and money are part of it: I’ve less of both spare for a bet that might take three years to arrive, if it arrives at all. The rest is the platform. In 2011 Kickstarter felt like funding things that wouldn’t otherwise exist. A lot of it now reads as drop-shipped tat with a slick video, or projects carrying enough red flags that another Superbook feels more likely than not. Almost everything above did arrive. Not much of it stuck.

The Group Stage of the 2026 World Cup finished today, so it’s time to mark the homework. Back in the launch post five AI models, a deterministic lookup table, and one football fan predicted the same 72 fixtures before a ball was kicked. I’ve been scoring the results on AIWC26 each day as they came in. I’ve got no real opinion on the teams; I’m interested in what the scoring reveals about the models.

The World Cup rolls around every four years, and with it the office sweepstake, the ritual where everyone gets handed a team at random and pretends to care how it does. I have no interest in football (I had to read a beginner’s guide to how it all works just to follow what’s going on), and I definitely don’t know enough to make an informed prediction of my own. So I thought I’d hand the job to five AI models instead, get them to commit their predictions in public, and keep score. The result is AIWC26, a page that shows every group-stage prediction from five models side by side, scores them against the real results as they come in, and ranks the models in a league table. It looks like Ceefax, because of course it does.

I’ve been using Google’s Call Screening feature for a while now. I turned it on mostly to filter out calls from numbers I don’t recognise (I’ve signed up with TPS and reported numbers to the ICO, and neither has made much difference), but in practice it’s doing something I didn’t quite expect: it’s almost exclusively screening other AIs.

Through 2022 I kept track of most the movies I watched. In this post I’ll talk about how I took that data and, combined with the OMDb API, used the data with Jekyll.