As I mentioned in my last post, we've just had solar panels installed! Because of Greg Barker MP's idiotic decision to scrap the Feed In Tariff with only six weeks' notice - we've had to get this done in rather a rush. Thanks to Angi and Philip at Sunny Future Solar, we were able to get our system installed before the deadline. Yesterday, we received confirmation that panels were installed and working and had generated their first 15W of electricity! Total cost of installation: £12,000. …
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As many of you know, I worked for Vodafone for nearly 7 years. I left shortly before the "entirely legal and justified tax avoidance" scandal came to light. I didn't know anything about the tax issues while I was working there - other than the fact I had some colleagues working in Luxembourg - otherwise (I like to think) I may have raised the matter internally. Not that the accountants would have listened to me... Since leaving Vodafone, I haven't felt able to criticise it too harshly. …
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As I've mentioned before, I hate SMS Spam. Last night, I received this unsolicited message. Now, I can try to unsubscribe using STOP ALL - and I have forwarded the text to VSPAM. But that's not enough for me. I want to stop them sending any more spam SMS to anyone. Let's do a little stalking investigating and find out what we can. Who Supplies Their SMS Gateway? The people who provide the SMS gateway services ought to do a better job of policing who uses them. PhonePayPlus allows us to…
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Bitcoin me! 1LJmePYmet9VjpeAqqLbd0RVGoYcLqAZhk If that "sentence" makes any sense to you - you're not a muggle. Muggles (for want of a better epithet) don't want to invest a lot of time into things which don't fit with their mental model of how the world works. Without getting into a philosophical discussion on what money is and how value is generated - let's look at how Bitcoin works in practice. Failing to Design is Designing to Fail Bitcoin is doomed to fail. Pick a reason why. …
Continue reading →It's Time To Switch Banks are fucking us over. They gamble with our money, lose it, ask us for a bail out, lose more money, then ask us for yet another bail out! They are resisting even the very modest changes the government is imposing on them. No more. We have a very easy way to stop the banks pissing about with our money. Take our money from them. I'm not talking about taking out your savings for a few days. I'm talking about a permanent withdrawal of our consent. We take our money…
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This is a project I developed for OTA11 - but didn't feel confident showing it off. Not least because I was one of the competition judges! Preamble Many people download BitTorrent files. There are no BitTorrent search engines which are mobile friendly. Users have to try to navigate non-mobile-optimised websites. This is slow, inefficient, and may cost the user money in bandwidth charges. People who run Bit Torrent sites are often sued. The Problem BitTorrent search…
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Every so often I find a device which - inexplicably - doesn't include Linux support. I've been very impressed with how well Ubuntu runs on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200. Everything worked out of the box - with the exception of the fingerprint reader (AuthenTec AES2810). Now, I know that fingerprint readers can easily be defeated by jelly-babies, but it annoys me when something doesn't work. The manufacturer of the fingerprint reader has a great developer community, so I contacted them. Here's…
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The journalist Shiv Malik took a rather intriguing photo at the recent student protests. It appears to show a group of police officers gathered around a blue box. No one seems to know what the box is for. I'm sure it's got a rather prosaic function - but that doesn't stop the speculation! As soon I saw it, I could think of only one thing; chroma-key! (Or Colour Separation Overlay if you're the BBC). It's more commonly known as "blue screen". It's the special effect which allows you to…
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As the Student Protests were starting outside my office door, I decided to pop down and see what was going on. I nominally joined in and took this selection of some of the more humorous signs I found. The photos seemed to go down well on Twitter - this one had 15,000 views and Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentFather Ted school of protest #9nov twitpic.com/7cej0x❤️ 12💬 3🔁 013:05 - Wed 09 November 2011 reached at least 26,000 users. If you're interested in using / licensing them, please use th…
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In my last post, I was talking about generating new cards for the fantastic game "Ex Libris". I emailed the manufacturers to see if they had any objections - and to see if they were releasing any updates. With their kind permission, I'm posting their reply in full. Dear Mr Eden, We are delighted that you love our game 'Ex Libris' and understand your frustration about the limited number of cards in the pack, but I'm afraid that we would strongly object to you creating ' unofficial' new cards …
Continue reading →Ex libris is a wonderful game. No - better than that - it's a beautiful game. Here are the rules: Everyone has to write the opening line of a novel, based on the novel's summary. One player has the real opening line to copy down. One other player (the guesser) has to guess which of the opening lines is the real one. If you fool the guesser, you win the point. If the guesser is correct, she gets the point. Simple and perfect. You don't need to be well read - you just need…
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Lori Philips has been interviewed by the Indianapolis Woman Magazine. A great article discussing the role of the Wikipedian in residence and how QRpedia codes have taken off there. …
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