The best gadget I got in lockdown was a set of motion activated lights. They have no user interface. I walk by them in the dark and they turn on. Midnight piss? No fumbling for a light switch, no shouting to a digital assistant, no logging in to an app. Simple. I love it. It […] | Continue reading
Exactly two years ago to the day, I reported a weird little emoji bug with Bitwarden. Let's say you want a password of: ✅ (As close as possible to Correct Horse Battery Staple) That works. Emoji are stored and retrieved correctly. You can use them with any system which supports t … | Continue reading
As I've discussed previously, I'm helping a collector who has acquired loads of mobile phones used in Doctor Who. Today's edition - The Poisoned Sky. As the Sontarans choke the Earth, the Doctor and UNIT battle to keep both Martha and Donna alive. A large plot point is Evil Clone … | Continue reading
Many years ago, I was involved in student politics. It was a great way to understand the fundamental disconnect between the ways different people see the world. I remember having a blazing row high-spirited discussion with someone about the way I thought about society. In a fit o … | Continue reading
I had a weird experience in a previous job. As it is long in the past, I thought now was a good time to blog about it. I worked in a hip office. Everyone was trendy and right-on. It was a heavily female dominated industry and the office politics were biased towards intersectional … | Continue reading
This is a retropost. It was written in 2022, but published later. Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it […] | Continue reading
Wouldn't it be good if digital currencies worked offline? I'm going to talk through a proposed user experience, and then discuss how it would work in practice. Let us imagine a future digital currency ₢. It might be fiat, it might be crypto, doesn't really matter. Alice loads up … | Continue reading
They say that The Best Camera Is The One That's With You - the same is true of Raspberries Pi. As much as I'd love a 4B, they seem permanently sold out. So I dug through my scrapheap of old tech and resurrected an ancient Pi2. It's old, outdated, slow, with limited RAM, and has [ … | Continue reading
I don't understand capitalists. Taylor Swift - the popular beat combo - wanted to sell tickets for her concert. She1 priced the tickets too low. People2 purchased the tickets and resold them at a higher price - up to $28,000. Tay-Tay's fans3 purchased the higher priced tickets. A … | Continue reading
This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect … | Continue reading
I'm a big fan of Untappd. It's a social drinking app which lets you check in to a beer and rate it. Look, we all need hobbies, mine is drinking cider. You can see a list of everything I've drunk over the 13 last years. Nearly 900 different pints! After checking in, the app automa … | Continue reading
The last part of my MSc Apprenticeship was my EPA Professional Discussion. It's designed to be a 90 minute chat to make sure you've actually learned something on the course. The official guidance is available. But I thought you might find it helpful to see the questions that I wa … | Continue reading
I was looking to buy the latest Zelda game for my wife as a present (Shhh! Don't tell her!) and it was SIXTY BLOODY QUID! For a video game! That seems extortionate. I remember, when I were a lad, video games cost... wait? Do I remember? Or is it just rose tinted glasses? I rememb … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I received a billing email from my phone provider O21. While glancing at it, I noticed all the images were broken. Viewing the source of the email showed that they were all coming from http:// mcsaatchi-email-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/o2/... What happens if we vis … | Continue reading
One of the things about AI is that it is brilliant at fooling us into seeing what we want to see. That's even more true when you're an investor who has poured millions into it. The journalist Martin Bryant has posted what Bing's A.I appears to know about him: My opinion of him is … | Continue reading
Every day is a school day. I'd recently seen a post about highlighting images without alt text. That got me thinking. Is it possible to style alt text? Yes. Yes it is. And it's pretty simple. Well, OK, it's CSS, so simple is a relative term! Let's take a broken image like | Continue reading
Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them! This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to d … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I idly wondered "Whatever happened to URI Schemes?". Older communications protocols didn't rely on http. You can use mailto:me@example.com to send email, sms:+447700900123 to send a text message, and skype:terence.eden to use Skype. There are dozens of these sort … | Continue reading
Jon Hicks has a lovely blog post about his site's design. In it, he briefly touches on something I find interesting: Blogging like it's 1972 I also finally realised that there's nothing stopping me from adding journal posts dated from before I started blogging. So I'm going to st … | Continue reading
There's a new pre-print paper called Pinpointing the problem: Providing page numbers for citations as a crucial part of open science by Leon Y. Xiao and Nick Ballou. It's a short, easily understandable paper, and well worth a read. I think I disagree with nearly all of its conclu … | Continue reading
I recently saw Robin Moisson's method of password protecting a statically served HTML page. It's quite neat! But it does rely on JavaScript. That got me wondering if there was a way to encrypt a static page only using CSS? And... I think I've done it! I'll warn you now, this is a … | Continue reading
Exactly a decade ago, I wrote about how Shakespeare invented the emoticon. Nestled deep in "Winter's Tale" is the first recorded use of the typographic smilie :) As I discussed, Sir Smile's smile appears in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th folios. One hundred years after the 4th folio … | Continue reading
The Guardian launched its online adventures back in 1999. At some point, they started using the name "Guardian Unlimited". Hey, the dot com boom made us all do crazy things! As part of that branding, they proudly used the domain GU.com Over time, the branding faded and GU.com bec … | Continue reading
I'm back with some more exclusive Doctor Who goodies! A collector has recently acquired a load of old Who prop phones - and I'm working with them to identify which episodes they're from. You might remember Series 8's "In the Forest of the Night. It's the kid-heavy episode with lo … | Continue reading
There are many improvisational games which are great for improving creativity, helping a team bond, or simply having a lot of fun. But there's one which is perfect for demonstrating how things like ChatGPT work. The "Once. Upon. A. Time." game requires two or more people with a b … | Continue reading
There are movies before Being John Malkovich, and there are movies after Being John Malkovich. It sets the standard for celebrities playing heightened versions of themselves. Once of those post-Malkocivh movies is the criminally underrated JCVD. In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme pla … | Continue reading
My OnePlus 5T is beginning to show its age. After replacing the battery a few years ago, I felt it was time to upgrade its software to Lineage 20. Everything went smoothly - but there are a few niggles you should be aware of. Some of these are Google's fault - they truly have con … | Continue reading
In 1818, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein - setting the stage for modern science fiction. A mere 9 years later, Jane Loudon published "The Mummy!" which, to my mind, becomes one of the earliest works of speculative science fiction. Set in a 22nd Century England which is ruled … | Continue reading
I hated art class at school. I could see so clearly in my head what I wanted my drawing to look like - but my hands just wouldn't obey me. Despite endless tutoring from sympathetic teachers, I left school with an unhealthy distaste for creating my own art. I simply didn't have th … | Continue reading
I always find it depressing when I reach the limits of my abilities. I have a new Thermal Imaging camera. It automatically saves photos in two formats. The first is a standard JPEG with false colours and metadata superimposed. The second is a .irg file which can only be opened by … | Continue reading
Computing is a comparatively young industry. We don't have hundreds of years of history, or secret societies jealously guarding our knowledge, or much love for hierarchy. This makes it difficult to progress in a world which values strict demarcations between people. There's an ob … | Continue reading
If you're a Doctor Who fan - I promise that this post is going to please you greatly! The Internet is a weird and delightful place. For years now, I've been running a blog series about the Mobile Phones of Doctor Who. I went through every episode and painstakingly identified ever … | Continue reading
I don't think I've ever spent £400 on a meal for two before...! Let's get that out of the way first. We decided to go out to celebrate our wedding anniversary, the completion of my MSc, Liz being appointed to a committee, and... you know what? Fuck you! It has been a bastard of a … | Continue reading
Last year, I reviewed the X-Sense wireless interlinked smoke alarms. They were a multipack of smoke alarms - set one off in the kitchen and the one in your bedroom will start chirping. As I noted at the time, they were only smoke alarms. Without an interlinked heat alarm, they ma … | Continue reading
(This is a rant because I'm exhausted after debugging something. If you've made RegEx your whole personality, I'm sorry.) The other day I had to fix a multi-line Regular Expression (RegEx). After a few hours of peering at it with a variety of tools, I finally understood the probl … | Continue reading
I've been reading lots of books about race, justice, and history. One of the things which confused me when I started this journey was the notion that race is a construct. But then I started reading about how Blumenbach literally invented the concept of distinct human races. And a … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I tried out that Seek Thermal Compact Infrared Camera which is a USB addon for phones. It was a good gadget, but had a number of compromises to get it into such a small form-factor. I've just been sent the TopDon TC004 handheld thermal camera to review. It's a ch … | Continue reading
If you're a Doctor Who fan, this post contains a lovely little surprise at the end. I promise you it'll be worth it. For a few years now, I've been running a blog series about the Mobile Phones of Doctor Who. I'm only human1, so I occasionally miss some of the devices. A reader c … | Continue reading
I read an interesting discussion the other day about why humans (mostly) don't eat carnivorous mammals. It boiled down to a few main points: Carnivores often don't taste good due to their relative lack of fat and stringy muscles. Aggressive animals are hard to domesticate. What d … | Continue reading
I ordered some pills off the Internet and swallowed them! What could possibly go wrong? Let's get one thing out of the way first. I am not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. This blog post is not medical advice. A few years ago I was suffering from some gastric issues. The [… … | Continue reading
After reading Laline Paull's The Bees, I was eager to read her next work. The Bees was about Bees, obviously. Pod is about a pod of dolphins - and their oceanic friends and society. Weirdly, this is the third book I've read from the perspective of cetaceans. Both The Idiot Gods a … | Continue reading
This film is a masterpiece. Sure, the plot is nothing special ("What is the dark secret behind this seemingly idyllic life?!?) but it is directed with such flare and texture that it becomes a joy to watch. I can't remember when I last saw something which kept me engrossed just th … | Continue reading
"How long have you been vegetarian?" Asked the waitress. "Oh, over twenty years now," I replied. She looked concerned. "Some people find the 3D printed steak a bit..." she paused, considered, and continued, "A bit intense. It takes people by surprise how it makes them feel. I enj … | Continue reading
Punch was a satirical magazine first published in Victorian London. It had a long and noble history of poking fun at... well, just about every fashionable idea of the day. Anyone who pricked the public's conscious probably found themselves lampooned within its pages. Charles Babb … | Continue reading
Hmmm... I was left a bit unconvinced by this series of essays. They feel like casually written blog posts - or hastily dashed-off Sunday Supplement articles. I was expecting a bit more rigour and investigation. The book treads over well-worn ground - most Silicon Valley companies … | Continue reading
Why do most programming languages use the / character when we have a perfectly good ÷ symbol? Similarly, why use != instead of ≠? Or => rather than →? The obvious answer is that the humble keyboard usually only has around 100 keys - and most humans have a hard time remembering wh … | Continue reading
Last week, Liz and I had the great pleasure of speaking at GeoMob London - a meet-up for digital geography nerds. We gave a talk about OpenBenches and how far it has come since launch. It blows our minds that we've have over TWENTY-SIX THOUSAND unique benches added to the site. A … | Continue reading
I hate leaderboards. I think competition tends to corrupt the incentives people have to contribute to a goal. Yet, at the same time, I was delighted to see that I was the top mapper in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand. For one specific week in December. They say golf is a good w … | Continue reading