Ryan Stenhouse

Barkeeper

Introducing Vector: Peace of Mind for your venue

Vector serves as a purpose-built communication tool exclusively designed for bars and clubs to securely exchange vital information. It handles lost and found items and cloakroom management, while also helps to combat antisocial behavior and improve loss prevention.

Using AI to calculate a fair review score for a venue

In this post, we explain how we use some AI and old-fashioned content scraping to generate a fair review score for a venue. We call this "FairScore" and it makes up part of our product, Barkeeper

Projects

Designing a static / dynamic website builder hybrid

This is part of a series about the technology behind one of my projects, Barkeeper. In this post, I'll give a rough background about what Barkeeper is and how I approached its website build system.

Politics Featured

My thoughts about the UK Supreme Court ruling on Indyref2

The historic judgement by the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday, November 23rd 2022 was as disappointing as it was unsurprising. The Court has ruled that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to hold an Independence referendum. This post is about what I think about that.

LGBT

Transphobes over Scotland

Right at the start of the "Yes Scotland" movement, there was a blog that provided great content on the various things happening on the campaign trail. It was called Wings Over Scotland. Now, the blog is a hub of awful transphobic frothing.

Let's get it right this time

The First Minister of Scotland and her Government have fired the starting pistol for the next independence referendum. Scotland will be going to the polls in October 2023 to decide if it should become an independent country. You can find out more details about the Scottish Government's plans in the

LGBT

Gay life in Japan

Japan has a reputation around for world for doing things a little differently than everywhere else. The Gay Scene there is no different.

Politics

Let’s get our eyes back on the goal

Right now, when Brexit is set to throw us back into an economic downturn that will hurt for 30 years we should be more determined than ever to make sure that an Independent Scotland happens.

Tech

The tale of the invisible man - a conference story

Ruby Kaigi is a Japanese technology conference for Japanese people that does great work to make sure that their talks are available in both English and Japanese.

Personal

Goodbye, Mathie

Goodbye Graeme. Thank you for your long and valued friendship. You’ll be missed, but never forgotten.

Activism Featured

Homophobia is more rife than assault rifles in the USA

When elected politicians actively stir up hatred against the LGBT community, it legitimises that hatred and makes bigots more comfortable in that hate.

Tech

Re-introducing prawn-graph - it's back! Simple graphing for PDF and Ruby

There might be a slight sense of déjà vu about this topic, since a few years ago on my old blog I wrote a similar thing. That time it was an attempt to motivate me to actually make an update to prawn-graph. This time, it actually is updated. Over 6

Politics

On 'internet piracy' and 'copyright infringement'

Peoples' usage patterns change, as more and more people are connected to the internet and the speed and quality of those connections increases the more people will be looking for instant gratification from the entertainment industry.

Tech

Your code of conduct is not enough if your guests are illegal

But what if the country the conference is in has it’s own strict laws about what is acceptable or not? What if the law of the land makes it clear that certain groups are not welcome and indeed such people are breaking the law by existing and deserve the most strict punishment?

Personal

Goodbye, Sir Terry

This magical place that was a close satire of ours was enjoyable to me as a kid, and then re-reading the books as an adult, became almost profound in the subtly of his wit and criticism of the world we all inhabit.

Japan

Changing your UK Driving license into a Japanese one

This post is about how I was able to use my own full UK Driving License to obtain a Japanese Driving License. The procedure is for Tokyo, but should be similar throughout Japan.

Tech

Ruby / Rails the 'Enterprise' and how software works in the 'real world'

In this post, I draw upon my own work and personal experience to discuss both these topics and try to see where Ruby and Rails sit in the ‘real world’ as it pertains to me, and within the ‘enterprise’.

Tech

Sometimes, its own worst enemy is itself

It’s fair to say that I am well aware of many of the great benefits you receive with Free Software and the products off it, and thanks to my knowledge of Non-Free platforms I also have a good understanding of them.

Howto Featured

Shinsei Bank CSV to QIF Conversion

I bank with Shinsei here in Japan. They allow me to download my statements in a tab-delimited text file which they call CSV.

Howto

Installing Ghost using Nginx / Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu

This guide assumes you're using Ubuntu LTS version 14.04 (Trusty Thar). At the time of writing (October, 29th 2014), the latest version of Ubuntu is 14.10, however there are no Nginx / Passenger packages available. Update: April 20th 2022 Obviously this guide is ridiculously out of date and should

Tech

Reflections on the past year of running a Tech Startup

I’ve learned the hard way a lesson that’s so blindingly obvious now: the reason Confman hasn’t shipped yet is because of me. It’s because I let myself get in my by making these pretty fatal mistakes, and I now understand (after screwing up so bad) exactly how to go about fixing things.

Opinion

My review of REWORK: surprisingly good

I won’t say I feel I was entirely wrong with my initial opinion about the book, its a very good marketing ploy that promotes 37signals all the way through; however where I was wrong was in thinking that this book is not useful.

Tech

Vim - All the IDE you'll ever need, and then some

Vim has a reputation of almost mythic proportions about its flexibility, powerful feature set and steep learning learning curve and tetchy way of editing and interacting with files.