I really wanted to write a rant about how incompatible smart lights are ruining the world. But… errr… Everything just works. Previously on my smarthome adventures, I kitted my house out… | Continue reading
I’m increasingly concerned with the power that CDNs wield – and CloudFlare in particular. So I decided to delete my CloudFlare account. While they claim to have removed my account, they… | Continue reading
If you’ve seen that episode of The West Wing, you’ll remember this scene: I’m not a paying member of the OCSE, but I fully support their aims. Because messing around with maps is … | Continue reading
Somewhere, stuffed in a cupboard or undeveloped on an old roll of film, is a photo of me laughing and joking with a murderer. It was one summer, while I was visiting home between university terms, … | Continue reading
For the sake of my mental health, I’ve blocked a few people and organisations on Twitter. They can’t see what I do, and I can’t see them. I’m sure you’ve done the same… | Continue reading
I go to lots of hack days and hackathons. Some are big corporate affairs, some are boutique community events. They all have one thing in common – Geeks suck at giving demos. You have 3 minute… | Continue reading
I’d recently given a talk at a conference and was gently basking in the glow of people telling me how fabulous I was, when some entitled prick came up to me and said… Great talk, mate! … | Continue reading
I am not an economist – so perhaps someone more intellectually equipped than me has already written a better version of this blog post. “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read is an influe… | Continue reading
One of my favourite works of art is The Great Bear by Simon Patterson. At first glance, it appears to be a normal London Tube map. But look closer… Cool! But there is something about it which… | Continue reading
This is a minor obsession of mine. The crew of JMC Red Dwarf are familiar with 20th Century pop-culture – but they never mention Doctor Who. Why? In various episodes they talk about The Flint… | Continue reading
For years, my email address was registered with our electricity supplier. I got the monthly bills sent to me. My wife’s email was used for the water supplier. This made sense when we were a y… | Continue reading
I hate creating Alexa skills. What should be a 3-click process inevitably ends up requiring trips to multiple websites, to set up weird parameters, and reading outdated tutorials for obsolete libra… | Continue reading
I review a lot of tech kit. It is amazing just how bad the consumer experience is when you have a brand-new box in your hands. It can be as simple as difficult to open packaging, to the existential… | Continue reading
Like all security minded people, I use a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This week, I noticed I had started receiving spam to an email address associated with my Join.me accoun… | Continue reading
I’ve spent a week cosplaying as a disabled user. And I hate it. A couple of months ago, I attended a private talk given by a disabled colleague of mine. “Everyone should believe disable… | Continue reading
I’ve been a vegetarian for half my life and I have been blogging about crappy vegetarian labelling for a decade. Usually it’s a rant about how a seemingly innocuous dish has hidden bone… | Continue reading
I go by “edent” on most websites. It’s short, relates to my real name, and is usually unique. I quite often sign up to things just to snag the name. But there have been a couple o… | Continue reading
I do lots of public speaking as part of my job. I’d like to share one of my tips for giving engaging and impactful talks. Two caveats: This is a sort-of work post. In that, I’ll be disc… | Continue reading
Back in 2014, I set up a rather silly Twitter account – @OxfordSolarLive. The premise was simple. A camera took a photo of the sky above my house. It took a reading from my solar panels to se… | Continue reading
This blog post contains emoji which your system may not be able to display. You may see broken text, weird symbols, or other buggy rendering. The Transgender Flag is a draft candidate for Emoji 13.… | Continue reading
I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger… Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were … | Continue reading
Hello! It looks like you’re writing a blog post – would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy – the ado… | Continue reading
An interesting question appeared on Twitter – where are the queer robots in Sci-Fi? Let’s first define what we mean by Queer. This usually means outside of binary gender and/or someone … | Continue reading
(For more about the “Falsehoods” meme – read the big list of falsehoods programmers believe.) Do You Want To Phone A Friend? A popular website asked me to confirm my phone number.… | Continue reading
At the recent BarCampLondon Ⅺ I decided to run a little experiment. The idea is similar to Swishing – a popular way to recycle old clothes. In a Swishing party, you turn up with a jacket, swa… | Continue reading
I’ve just seen that I can now add sponsorship to my GitHub projects. Here’s a quick guide to how it works: Repo settings There’s now a new option in your repository settings. Tick… | Continue reading
Another day, another Gmail bug which won’t get fixed. The original Android phone – HTC Dream – had 192MB of RAM. The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in… | Continue reading
It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but … | Continue reading
I watched this video from my colleagues in NHS UK – it’s the first time I’ve seen a Sign Language overlay on a Twitter video. Is it possible to have multiple Sign Languages availa… | Continue reading
The ridiculous proliferation of TLDs (Top Level Domains) continues unabated. I wondered how much you’d have to spend to secure your name on every TLD. tl;dr;tld Over $300,000! (Roughly €280.0… | Continue reading
I don’t like AMP. I think that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive. So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee… | Continue reading
I found a bunch of my old school-books that I wanted to digitally capture. I do have a flatbed scanner, but most of my 1980s workbooks were far too large for it. So I decided to build a cheap scann… | Continue reading
(Long and data-filled post ahead!) I’ve switched to energy provider Bulb (£50 off if you join using that link). They offer a “peak time” electricity charge which looks like this: … | Continue reading
I’m going to let you in to three TOP SECRET rules for getting hired. These are the hidden techniques used by TOP interviewers… Never Tell The Candidates The Rules Of Success I read an infuria… | Continue reading
The GNU Unifont project is amazing. It contains every Unicode glyph in one single file! I am going to argue that you should bundle it with your apps, your operating systems, and – at a pinch … | Continue reading
I’ll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masque… | Continue reading
When I was at school, we had to wear a uniform. Black trousers, white shirt, brown blazer, brown tie. Coincidentally, it was more-or-less the same uniform as the local supermarket. On the last day … | Continue reading
What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference betw… | Continue reading
I’ve just got a set of wearable NFC tags, and I’ve discovered something interesting about the way data is stored on them. tl;dr Overwriting a tag can leave old data intact, and still re… | Continue reading
It’s 2019 and high-tech devices are still plagued by text encoding bugs. I recently bought the new 4K Amazon Fire Stick. It’s a little Android dongle which plays videos. It’s neat… | Continue reading
My fingers are now Internet-enabled. Well… sort of! My dexterous digits can now wirelessly broadcast URls and all sorts of other information. Here’s a video showing how! I have a small … | Continue reading
Previously on “The Terence Eden Adventures!” I have a new job. I am a bit scared by my new job. This week – WTF? OMG? BBQ??? I’ve been working for DHSC (Department of Health… | Continue reading
When you share a URl on services like Twitter and WhatsApp, they often display a preview image. This is usually accomplished by the author of the page selecting an image from the page, and adding i… | Continue reading
I decided to treat myself to an upgraded home cinema experience. But mandatory copy-protection has meant I’ve spend the weekend trying and failing to get things working, rather than watching … | Continue reading
Code-sharing site GitHub automatically sends email notifications to users. If you’ve commented on an issue, you’ll get an email each time there’s an update. That’s pretty ha… | Continue reading
I was in need of a new laptop, so I bought a cheap ChromeBook – mostly because Amazon could deliver it the same day. Sadly, the trackpad was broken. Before I sent it back, I thought I’d… | Continue reading
Imagine the scenario. You’re trying out some cool new Twitter app. It asks you to sign in via OAuth as per usual. You look through the permissions – phew – it doesn’t want t… | Continue reading
Glasgow City Council has released a treasure-trove of open data. Nearly one-hundred datasets ranging from Live Traffic Information – to historic climate data. A fantastic boon for researches … | Continue reading