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
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
A few years ago, I wrote about Google’s secret screenshot API – a slightly cumbersome way to take website screenshots for free. There’s another service which you may find simpler … | Continue reading
One evening, my wife turned to me in bed and said, “Winter is coming…” Well, what she actually said was “Get your frozen feet away from me, you cold-blooded monster!” … | Continue reading
Here’s a curiosity which I found while stumbling through the Sony PlayStation store. The website loads internally hosted scripts using SRI (SubResource Integrity). Why? Does your work require… | Continue reading
For the last year-and-a-bit, Liz and I have been running OpenBenches.org. An open data website dedicated to memorial benches. Here are some rough and ready numbers about how it has gone so far. 9,8… | Continue reading
Some external JavaScript libraries are dynamic. That’s a problem for the SRI model of security. How can this be fixed? Definitions Suppose I want my website to have the latest version of the … | Continue reading
If you’ve spent any time with graphic designers, you’ll know that they love spending your money on imperceptible tweaks to your image files. “It must be pixel-perfect!” they… | Continue reading
Scratching my own itch here… GitHub users have a username (mine is @edent) and have a user ID number (mine is #837136). If you want to redirect a user ID to a username, you can use the little… | Continue reading
CloudFlare claim they want to secure the web – but they seem more interested in tracking their customers than giving them decent security. Upon registering with the Internet giant, users are … | Continue reading
I have friends. More than one! I also have a home full of smart-gadgets which are controlled by apps. The two don’t mix. This is yet another complaint about solipsistic app design. Let’… | Continue reading
One of Android’s mottos is “Be Together; Not The Same”. What does that mean to you? To me, it means that you don’t need to conform to a single way of doing things. Sadly, Go… | Continue reading
Here’s how to control the Toshiba 49U6863 – and other similar models – using Telnet. Quickstart At the command prompt, type telnet 192.168.0.123 4660 then type 1012 and your TV wi… | Continue reading
There’s a lovely Twitter feed called Yore Computer – run by Rob Manuel, it randomly tweets out scans of 1980s computer magazines. A wonderful mix of nostalgia, dated references, primiti… | Continue reading
I popped round to an NHS dentist a few months ago – and they stuck my head on one of these contraptions. The Kodak 8000C takes a panoramic X-ray, giving a superior view of your teeth. Nifty. … | Continue reading
One of the problems with the BlockChain goldrush is that it attracts a lot of people who don’t necessarily have the required technical skill to safely run a service. This in turn reduces trus… | Continue reading
I rate every pint I taste using the Untappd app. Think of it like TripAdvisor for lager, stout, cider, bitter, and all manner of other beery goodness. Seriously, I’ve reviewed over 600 differ… | Continue reading
Unicode contains a range of symbols which don’t get much use. For example, there are separate symbols for TradeMark – ™, Service Mark – ℠, and Prescriptions – ℞. Nestling am… | Continue reading