Once again my wrath is targeted at The Guardian, Barclays and Apple. Three massive companies - each one of whom could have stopped this advertising disaster. Mistake #1 Take a look at this rather charming advert on the Guardian's mobile site. The more astute among you will recognise the problem. I'm being advertised an iPhone game when I'm browsing the site using an Android phone. This is the fault of the Guardian - or, more likely, whoever runs their advertising department. Well, let's…
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It has been a while since I last posted in the Mobile Badvertising section. Mobile adverts are slowly improving. By every once in a while, I spot an advert of such mind numbing ineptitude that I am compelled to post. Orange Take a look at the latest offering from Orange - a large UK mobile network operator. Orange Advert on Guardian Spot it? It's the microscopic banner hidden away on the mobile site of the Guardian newspaper. The advertiser has little choice in the poor placement. And it's …
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I am no longer confused! Here is a quick tutorial in how to post images to Twitpic and Twitter when using OAuth. I'm indebted to Steve Corona of Twitpic, for his help with this. You can see the full code on Dabr's Google Code page. First of all, you'll need to have enabled OAuth for your Twitter client. I use Abraham's excellent OAuth libraries for PHP. This tutorial assumes you already have OAuth working. I'll attempt to explain what I'm doing as I go along - but the code should be…
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Twitpic has implemented an OAuth API. No more having to hand out passwords to all and sundy. Only I'm too much of a dunderhead to get it working. Perhaps it's a combination of heatstroke or this rotten head-cold, but I just can't see what I'm doing wrong. Any help much appreciated. The easy bit. It's easy to post the data to Twitpic $media_data = array( 'media' => '@'.$_FILES['media']['tmp_name'], 'message' => html_entity_decode($_POST['message']), 'key'=>'123465789132465' );…
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There have been howls of protest from Labour voters at the prospect of a Lib/Con coalition. The main complaint is that anyone daft enough to vote for Clegg has caused a Tory government. But is it true? Using data from The Guardian, we can see if the Lib Dems cost Labour a majority. In how many seats did a Labour candidate lose to a Conservative? 137. But this doesn't tell the whole story. In Clacton, even if all the 5,577 Lib Dem votes had gone to Labour, the 16,376 is still well short of…
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Having moaned that my TARDIS was too full, I set on a quest to find another. The cardboard one I had appears to be the last of its kind - but I did manage to snag this beauty on eBay. It's a Panopticon '93 Officially licensed TARDIS - similar to this one on RetroTrader. Click to embiggen images. It's a little scuffed, but nothing a lick of paint can't fix. Of slight - very slight - annoyance is that it's a fraction too shallow to hold standard DVD cases and have the doors tightly…
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I'm in the process of moving all my contacts from BlackBerry to Android. I've been moving contacts from phone to phone for close to 10 years - but I've never found a problem like this. Getting my contacts from BlackBerry to Google was simple. I exported a VCF of all my contacts from Outlook and imported them to Google. Simplicity. Everything worked. Syncing back to Android was easy - input Google account and password and hey-presto. But that's where it all broke down. The address seems…
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I was mightily disturbed to receive an email from Google apparently telling me I had purchased a Nexus One phone. Had I been hacked? Had my credit-card details been used to buy a phone? Were Google sending me one for free? Hello! Your new Nexus One phone has many cool and useful features. Learn more by clicking on the links to watch brief YouTube videos directly on your phone: Take pictures with your 5mpx camera and view them in your 3D Media Gallery. Learn more Get transcribed…
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I'm a natural Labour voter. As I explained several months ago, I went in to this election thinking I may vote Labour. It's now become clear that my vote will be going to the Liberal Democrats. More than that, I will be joining them. I want to explain why - without resorting to attacking the other parties. Voting Reform As I've said, I was raised in a Labour household. I went to university expecting to vote Labour. Yet in ever constituency I've ever lived, the Labour Party haven't fiel…
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If you haven't already heard, I've joined the award winning team at Touchnote ltd. I was overwhelmed by the support of my friends on Twitter and by the excellent bloggers at Mobile Industry Review and The Really Mobile Project. http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2010/04/vodafones-terence-eden-joins-touchnote.html http://thereallymobileproject.com/2010/04/terence-eden-joins-touchnote/ Starting a new job is never easy - but you guys have given me wind in my sails. My first week has just …
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In 1974, a post-boxing day Britain tuned in to BBC 1 to watch "Robot" - the first Doctor Who story to star Tom Baker. For the next 6 years, 2 months, and 22 days, Tom Baker was The Doctor. But, as these things are wont to do, it came to an end. Forgive the spoilers, but The Doctor lay broken and bleeding after The Master threw him off the Pharos Project. Death was certain. And then... On the 1st of September, 2003, a young and eager Terence Eden walked into Vodafone to start on the G…
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I'm a huge fan of Paul Battley's iplayer-dl. In brief, it downloads videos from iPlayer by pretending to be an iPhone. The .MP4 files it grabs are suitable for playback on most mobile devices (480 x 272 and stereo audio). It also downloads radio programmes as .MP3 files. I was having a bit of trouble installing it on my XNAS - running Xebian Linux, so I've written this as an aide-mémoire. I hope you find it useful. Install Ruby and Ruby Gems apt-get install ruby rubygems Download and …
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