The Lab

Designing for Receipt Printers

With the recent release of Berg’s Little Printer and the availability of a small Internet-connected printer from Adafruit for less than $100, it’s getting easier and easier for anyone to have bits of information from the web made into a physical object.

We’ve created a publication for the Little Printer which gives you an excerpt from The Times crossword called One Down. Both the idea and the parts of the codebase are based on a project that we worked on earlier this year that put a small piece of the crossword on the side of bins in the City of London.

Our publication gives you the choice of the day’s cryptic or concise crossword, and you can pick which days you want to receive it on. Like all Little Printer publications, you also choose what time of day you want to receive it.

Why Mozilla Persona Is the Right Answer to the Question of Identity

On the 27th September 2012 Mozilla launched the first beta of Persona. Persona is an authentication system that on the surface is quite similar to OpenID and oAuth, but differs in important technical and functional ways.

We were fortunate enough to partner with Mozilla and create a beta version of The Times Crossword as part of the launch of the Mozilla App Store. In doing so we were one of the first third-parties to integrate Mozilla Persona (BrowserID back then). Mozilla even did a video about it.