This is quite the epitome of yak-shaving! Suppose you have an article written in HTML. The basic layout might be something like:
Being from the United Kingdom is hard sometimes. When scrolling through a list of countries, we might be found down the bottom as “UK” or near the top as “Great Britain”. Oc… | Continue reading
Truly, men have the worse of everything…⸮ But, there’s something we blokes can be grateful for. No matter what grief the world throws at us, it’ll always be the women’s fault that… | Continue reading
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! This is known as “Va… | Continue reading
I’ve never “got” the appeal of a Mac. But I have to use one for work. Here’s a partial list of everything I cannot do on a Mac, but I can do on Ubuntu. These are all objecti… | Continue reading
We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results. You can view more at This Bench Does Not Exist. Here’s a video which shows how the proc… | Continue reading
Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of spam notifications from Google Drive. Here’s a sample: The notifications come direct to my Android phone via the Drive app – they don’t … | Continue reading
There are some books which make you feel smarter just by having them on your shelf. This is one of them! I would consider it essential for anyone working with code – whether a wide-eyed newbi… | Continue reading
The fine folk at HP sent me one of their new Laser printers to review. The HP M140w is a small printer/scanner with built in WiFi. It’s pretty good – but has an atrocious app – an… | Continue reading
I found this on a security-related Slack (shared with permission). It launched an entertaining discussion about the risks of taking a potentially fake FIDO token. We all know the risks of taking a … | Continue reading
The FIDO specification defines a form of Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) when users log in to a system. Rather than relying on one-time codes sent via SMS, or displayed on a phone screen, these are phys… | Continue reading
I found this rather humourous Tweet in which a computer issued a cheque for £2,324,252,080,110: I wondered whether 2324252080110 was a common sort of mistake – like a 32 bit overflow – … | Continue reading
Several years ago, I applied for my dream job. Not quite ice-cream tester on the International Space Station, but pretty close. I was astounded to get a first interview, and crushed to flame out at… | Continue reading
When I was young, I had a piggy bank. A piggy bank is incredibly secure. It’s fairly big – so it is hard to lose. It is brightly coloured – so you can find it easily. No one else … | Continue reading
This is a regular HTML page. But if you click or tap on the text, you will be able to edit it! HTML is magic! This isn’t a fancy styled , it’s a element which uses the contenteditable g… | Continue reading
Google has decided to fuck over its early adopters. Way back in 2006, Google announced Google Apps for Your Domain. Basically it was Gmail – but you could use your own domain. No more example… | Continue reading
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art … | Continue reading
How efficient are modern codecs? Can we ever work out whether the power use of compression algorithms is a net gain for global power consumption? Come on a thought experiment with me. I have invent… | Continue reading
Much like a Tesla, all analogies break down eventually. As many many many people have said – free software is free, in much the same way as a free puppy is free. I prefer to think of it as be… | Continue reading
This is a small proof-of-concept. It relies on PGP – but you could use Keybase, GPG, or any other hard-to-use encryption program. Background Suppose you want to support an artist and give the… | Continue reading
I recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves f… | Continue reading
I recently read Future Law – a book of essays about using popular culture to explain technological and legal concepts. One essay looks looks at GDPR issues experienced by Disney® Princesses. … | Continue reading
I went to an interesting seminar a few weeks ago. As part of it, the facilitator projected this image up on the screen. They asked us to call out what we could see. I could kinda, sorta, maybe see … | Continue reading
Lab grown meat is nearly here. To be fair, it has been “nearly” here for a long long long long long time. But with the imminent arrival of lab-grown meat, it is time to investigate Synt… | Continue reading
Chrome for Android had a flaw which let one tab draw over another – even if the tabs were on completely different domains. A determined attacker might have been able to abuse this to convince… | Continue reading
There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long – are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem … | Continue reading
You’ve heard of the AI Winter, right? The period where funding for AI dried up due to products failing to meet their hype. I think we’re now in Springtime For Crypto1 – named afte… | Continue reading
The book Antifragile is pretty bad. Like most popular management books, it’s a single useful idea padded out with anecdotes. Some organisations are overly reliant on the status quo. If a sing… | Continue reading
As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exa… | Continue reading
As part of my MSc, I have to take three “Professional Practice” courses. The course provider, QA.com, let me choose anything from their online catalogue. The first I’m doing is Ce… | Continue reading
Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer’s name incorrectly. The bank didn̵… | Continue reading
The CSS property -webkit-text-stroke is a curious beastie. MDN gives a big scary warning saying “Non-standard: This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on p… | Continue reading
When I first helped get the IEC Power Symbol into Unicode – I made a promise to myself that I’d get it as a tattoo. One day. Turns out, I’m a massive wuss. How will I cope with ac… | Continue reading
Computers would be so much better if they never had to deal with users, amirite?!!? I remember, years ago, working on a mobile web service which had a URl bar – so users could tap in bbc.co.u… | Continue reading
The BBC Shipping Forecast is one of those strange bits of national tradition which, somehow, bridges the gap between infrastructure and folklore. You can listen listen to the latest forecast on the… | Continue reading
David Bowie invented the NFT in 19971. The “Bowie Bond” allowed you to directly invest in an artist’s catalogue and receive royalty payments based on their sales. Here’s how… | Continue reading
Remember SlideShare? It’s where we used to upload PowerPoints back in the day. It was easier than emailing them around. I think. No one really remembers. I think they got bought by LinkedIn? … | Continue reading
It has been 4 years since I got my OnePlus 5T. For a mobile geek like me, that’s unbearably long! In recent months, the phone has become temperamental and the battery barely made it through t… | Continue reading
The web service TurnItIn is a “plagiarism detector”. Lots of universities use it to assess whether their students are copy-n-pasting content which they haven’t written. I’m … | Continue reading
Previously on Terence Eden’s Blog: I turned an old eReader into an Information Screen. This time, I’m taking a different Nook, and turning it into a magic gallery. Here’s what it … | Continue reading
I am very interested in your opinion on this. Imagine that you work at a company which sells widgets. Each widget has a unique serial number. The number is a fixed length, and can contain leading z… | Continue reading
This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. “Alexa… Notifications?” “You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dr… | Continue reading
Inspired by John Hoare at the Dirty Feed blog – I’ve asked the British Library to assign my blog an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). An ISSN is an 8-digit code used to ident… | Continue reading
Twitter can be amazing sometimes… I was reading about “L’Inconnue de la Seine”. The face of a young woman found drowned in the river Seine in the 1800s. Her death mask was e… | Continue reading
Is it the end-of-days for the humble headphone jack? As Apple prepare to remove it from their next iPhone – with Android manufacturers no-doubt following suit – I thought now would be a… | Continue reading
Whenever I open Twitter in a new tab on my phone, the page layout looks weird for a few seconds. It starts out looking like the desktop view and then, after a few seconds, it snaps back to the mobi… | Continue reading
I was recently asked to look at some advice for new graduates entering the workforce. It was the usual mix of helpful, obvious, and trite. You know the sort – tailor your application to the j… | Continue reading
Previously on Terence Eden’s blog… About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twi… | Continue reading