Lots of pixels have been spilled recently on whether you should build your own stuff, or buy stuff and then configure it. Wardley Mapping (which I still don’t understand) seems to say that yo… | Continue reading
This pre-release whitepaper is a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges associated with using Quantum BlockChain technology to improve the performance of 6th Generation data networks for thei… | Continue reading
As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team … | Continue reading
Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock” is one of the defining texts of the 20th century. In it, he correctly predicts the insanity of living in the 21st century with its constant bom… | Continue reading
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothin… | Continue reading
There’s an HTML element called
Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn’t even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you … | Continue reading
(This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.) My yearly contract with my ISP has just come to an end, so it was time to shop around for a better deal. T… | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about better ways to display footnotes in eBooks. So this is my horrible and hacky way to display inline footnotes in pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript. Here’s how it … | Continue reading
It’s possible to encode QR images as text. In this case, Emoji! | Continue reading
Apple’s HEIC format is… annoying. At the moment, Apple’s products are the only mainstream cameras which use it. Forums are littered with people trying to upload HEIC files to web … | Continue reading
The horror of the quantified audience The cinema is on the deserted outskirts of Pinewood Studios. It’s a wet and windy day — not unusual for England in late summer — and I’m here to ta… | Continue reading
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was “A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?”… | Continue reading
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 – with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was bas… | Continue reading
Recently, I bought an eBook which has a bug. I’d like to explain what the bug is, why it is a problem, and how I’m trying to get it corrected. Amazon sells eBooks in KF8 format. That is… | Continue reading
One of the things I loved about Facebook was its “On This Day” feature. There’s something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Tw… | Continue reading
/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user’s local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (Englis… | Continue reading
I’d like to propose that web designers around the world spend one day this year browsing the web with JavaScript disabled. I’m tentatively calling this “International No Javascrip… | Continue reading
I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network li… | Continue reading
Last week, I gave a talk at the Maps for the Web workshop. As part of the discussion, I talked about how some HTML elements are really easy for developers to use and understand, and others are hard… | Continue reading
It has been over a year since I cancelled my Cloudflare account. They keep emailing me and haven’t taken me off their marketing lists despite repeated requests. Their CTO told me he would inv… | Continue reading
I get a lot of random Twitter DMs from attractive women who are desperate to make friends with me. I usually report the obvious spammers. But a few weeks ago, one nearly slipped through the net. Th… | Continue reading
Most human societies have rituals. One popular ceremony is of the young person being made a member of the tribe. For some, it is at the start of life – a Baptism or Christening. For others, i… | Continue reading
A few years ago, Johannes Haushofer published a CV of failures. In it, he lists all the grants he wasn’t awarded, positions he didn’t get, papers rejected. I think that people need to b… | Continue reading
It has been four years since Unicode officially accepted our Power Symbols proposal into the standard. Now I’m delighted to announce that users on iOS 14 are finally able to use the full set of Pow… | Continue reading
I’ve built myself a framed set of imaginary software. This is not available to buy in the shops. Mostly because some of the artwork is not my copyright. All the parts are listed if you want t… | Continue reading
It’s quite popular to see high street shops names “Somesuch and Sons”. Indeed, my grandparents ran “Eden & Sons” for many year. Much rarer is seeing “…… | Continue reading
I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music! It is lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy. Thanks! I hate it! Ingredients Raspberry Pi USB floppy drive Audio Cable / Headphones USB Batter… | Continue reading
An old 3.5 inch floppy disk holds 1.44 MB of data. According to my calculations, that’s 1,424 KB blocks. For a total of 1,458,176 Bytes. Once formatted as FAT, you end up with 1,457,664 Bytes… | Continue reading
How well does SIP work on a modern Android phone, with no 3rd party apps? I’m trying to give up my mobile phone contract. As part of that, I’m switching my voice calls to VoIP providers… | Continue reading
The first thing I did when getting to the USA as a kid, was to find a payphone where I dutifully called 1-800-STARWARS. I’d grown up with American media. Phonewords – where your phone&#… | Continue reading
A friend and I were having a good old grouch-and-moan session over a couple of beers. We were being snide and petty about all the people who’d ticked us off that week. “And another thin… | Continue reading
Twitter has a nifty new feature which allows you to schedule the publication of a Tweet. But, crucially, it doesn’t let the reader know when the message was originally written. How can you, a… | Continue reading
My mate Dom was moaning to his ISP on Twitter. They sent him a private message so they could look into his account. Blimey! Thankfully, that was a pretty brazen and inept attempt at phishing. Anyon… | Continue reading
A decade ago, I was invited to the UK launch of Windows Phone 7. It was Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. Sure, Microsoft could make a brill… | Continue reading
Short domains are useful for security testing. If you only have a limited number of characters, you need to be able to reference code on a remote server in as few characters as possible. A few year… | Continue reading
Many text based conversations threads can be visualised as a tree. Mailing list archives often use nested
I’ve made no secret of rather enjoying this enforced period of remote work. Sure, it has had its challenges – but there have been so many fringe benefits. Less commuting! No crappy-cant… | Continue reading
It’s rather dispiriting when you launch something, only to have people berate you for not launching sooner. A few months ago, I was involved in a medical questionnaire launch. Before it was r… | Continue reading
Previously, on the Terence Eden Adventures: I accidentally won a load of vinyl on eBay, and I bought the cheapest record player I could find. The record player has USB output. So I shoved it into a… | Continue reading
I accidentally bought a load of vinyl records. So I decided to buy the cheapest, shittiest, turntable possible. This is the E1372. Made by Jia Yin King Technologies. This is sold under a variety of… | Continue reading
A question to the void. Are you entitled to get the source history of open source projects? Lots of Open Source licences give the consumer of software the right to a copy of the source code. For ex… | Continue reading
I’ve been reading lots more non-fiction books than normal. And I’m getting increasingly annoyed about footnotes1. Footnotes are a weird skeuomorph hangover from the days of printed text… | Continue reading
I found a curious little bug and I’m interested in who you think should take responsibility for it. My mobile network provider sent me this message: I clicked on the link, and got this error … | Continue reading
I’ve recently seen lots of people tweeting this supposed newspaper clipping. An olde-timey warning about wearing flu masks. But is it too good to be true? The first thing to do with any image… | Continue reading
I recently gave an online presentation at Tech Nottingham. It went off without a hitch, and I got some great feedback. I’d like to briefly discuss the tech that I used to make it all work. He… | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I picked up 20 NFC tags. But what to do with them? I know, let’s make something impractical! I had this gorgeous Barret Biggers – Link Blot poster which had lain in a d… | Continue reading
I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then dis… | Continue reading