Ada Lovelace Day is ... ... an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do Last year I blogged about Delia Derbyshire and Helen Keegan. This year, it's... Rachel Armstrong I first met Rachel at BarCampAfrica UK. I thought she was barking m…
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Last night I went to the NESTA's "What's App?" discussion. You can watch the event at NESTA's website. .social-embed {all: unset;display: block;}.social-embed * {all: unset;display: revert;}.social-embed::after {all: unset;}.social-embed::before {all: unset;}blockquote:not(*) {all: unset;}.social-embed a {cursor: pointer;}blockquote.social-embed {box-sizing: border-box;border: .5px solid;width: 550px;max-width: 100%;font-family: sans-serif;margin: 0;margin-bottom: .5em;padding: …
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We all know and love the humble banner advert. That little rectangle of joy which seeks to distract our attention. It's a ubiquitous format on the web. It's a format that, for better or worse, has migrated to mobile. Here's the mobile Guardian showing off its latest advert for STA travel. A Normal Banner Ad? Or Much, Much More? This being a super-whizzy smartphone, the advert has a surprise up its sleeve. Clicking on it doesn't take you away from the current page - it displays an overlay …
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ARRRRRGGGGHHHH! Dead BlackBerry Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Due to a crazy taxi driver (are there any other kind) and a violent swerve, my BlackBerry Bold 9000 is no more. Bereft of life, it rusts in pieces, and other such Pythonesque metaphors. Arse. I truly feel like I'm missing an extension to my body. There's a symbiotic relationship which develops between a geek and his phone. It entertains me, informs me, keeps me on time and allows me to rapidly communicate with a variety…
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Well, it's been ages coming, but it's finally here. Elonex have released V0.47 of the 511EB software. V0.47 was released on 12th March 2010. The previous firmware (V0.41) was released on 18th January 2010. The next release should include note taking functionality. You may be interested in part 1 and part 2 of my review. This firmware update resolves some issues when processing very large eBooks, word wrapping issues and some minor bugs with symbols. You can now mount the eBook on Linux - I…
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(Edit 20100315 - Thanks to Mobyaffiliates for choosing this post as Carnival of the Mobilists post of the week!) I'm a long time fan of SpinVox - the Voicemail to SMS service. In my review of them last year I found seven ways they could improve their service. Due to SpinVox's rather beleaguered year, there have been no noticeable improvements or enhancements in the service they provide. (Edit 20100318 - SpinVox is now cancelling all individual users' accounts) SpinVox Cancelled Enter …
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This morning, when I logged on to Twitter, I saw a user who I didn't recognise tweeting away in my timeline. I wracked my brains thinking about how they could have gotten in there before I realised it was a long-dormant friend who had changed their name and avatar. But, in thinking about how a spammer could infiltrate one's timeline, I think I came up with a fairly bullet-proof method to spam Twitter users. I present this as an exercise in devious thinking - and also to show how our…
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As I mentioned in my last post about VoteUK, I found the TheyWorkForYou API to be a little lacking when it came to image sizing. I posted a request asking if there was a pattern to the image sizes and, if not, was it possible to have the sizes returned in the API. The "standard" open source reply - "fix it yerself" - was predictably swift. So I did. The source code is remarkably accessible - although a few more comments wouldn't go amiss. This was my first experience with GIT and Github. I…
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This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I've done. It's a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets. The Twitter Engineering Blog That's all well and good, but as I discovered yesterday, without standardisation the ability to search falls apart. I'm not talking about w…
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It's always a thrill to hear an author read their work aloud. It's even more of an honour to be at the author's début. Last night, 100 people crammed into the function room of Canal 125 for the launch event of Girl With A One Track Mind Exposed by Abby Lee aka Zoe Margolis. Sitting around her in a semicircle, it was like Jackanory for adults. Despite never having read her work in public before, Zoe's voice rang out loud and clear. She relished the innuendo and succeeded in making her …
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What is "Implicit Knowledge"? Essentially it's stuff that everyone knows, but no one has written down. Usually it's something that people have worked out through their own experiences. This sort of knowledge is common in life - but is fatal in computing and design. Take the following tweet I received. Mark Hawkins @Mawkins Replying to @edent …
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Well, we're post Mobile World Congress, so let's see what's caught the eye of the web's best mobile bloggers. Here's Carnival of the Mobilists #212! The 25 Biggest Companies in Mobile. The inimitable Tommi Ahonen pores over the statistics and shows the size of companies according to the money they make in mobile - and only mobile. I may query the use of USD rather than € in the calculations, but the data are still highly interesting. This is my post of the week! Mob4Hire launches. There ar…
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