Last week I blogged about a pretty severe flaw in some of Samsung's phones. If you use copy & paste too many times - the phone reboots or resets. So, I ranted and raved on my blog and in the press. Samsung wouldn't respond to me - either through customer support or through their PR team. Nice way to treat a paying customer, guys! There is an OTA update for the Galaxy Note II - taking it to 4.1.2. Sadly this isn't yet being pushed out via all UK carriers (including O2, who I work for). As…
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Getting access to my Twitter archive opened my mind to the nature on transience of the media we create. Take, for example, this tweet and image: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edenthttp://twitpic.com/2dhr3 - Loving #mint09 :-)❤️ 0💬 0🔁 012:24 - Mon 23 March 2009 Well... ok... fun at the moment it was taken, but does it have any use beyond that? On the off chance that I become a subject for scholars in the year 3723, perhaps. Should some media just be declared ephemeral? The word comes from th…
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Another in my occasional series of blog posts about our solar panels. We used both the Energy Saving Trust Solar Power calculator and the Europa Solar Calculator to estimate a generation capacity of between 2,500 and 2,700 kWh per year. We've just done a reading for 21 November to 21 February. Right in line with expectations, we generated 205kWh - netting us ~£96 from the Feed In Tariff. Over 15 months we've generated a total of 3376kWh. Again, totally in line with the top end of …
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Google's attitude towards its customers is a continuing stain upon its reputation. In an ideal world, no one would ever need to contact customer services. Every step of one's interaction with a company would take place online and be hassle free. All the information would be available on the web. Problems could simply be fixed by reading an FAQ. No mistakes would be made by either party. In those rare occasions where something did go wrong, the "community" would provide free peer-to-peer…
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After Twitter's repeated broken promises, I was unsure if I'd ever get access to my Twitter archive. But, finally, I'm able to extract my data from their systems. There are a number of deficiencies. Of course, it's impossible to please all the people all the time but, in typical Twitter fashion, they don't appear to have taken the effort to satisfied anyone. Let's take a quick run through of where the archive breaks down. Usernames Change When I first signed up to Twitter, I was known as…
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Somehow, simultaneously, all 10 children in my CodeClub shoot their hands up. "Terence! Terence! Why doesn't this work? "Help! My bird isn't flapping!" "What do I press to set this variable?" I am run off my feet. I dash from workstation to workstation, troubleshooting the problems. In every case, my response is the same. "Did you follow the instructions on the sheet?" I say. "YES!" Comes the howl of protestation. "Even this one where it tells you to click on cat before making the changes?"…
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The student approached the master. "Master!" The student wailed, "My code always crashes when I reach this point!" The master was deep in thought. "Show me," she muttered. The student ran the code once more. Lo! It did not crash. "Thus," whispered the master, "is the proximity to genius effect demonstrated." And the student became enlightened. For years, I've been talking about the "proximity to genius effect." It turns out, according to Google, I'm the only one who has heard of this term! …
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Samsung phones crash if you use copy & paste more than 20 times. http://t.co/2OnBwo86Shockingly bad engineering.— Terence Eden is on Mastodon (@edent) February 20, 2013 Sounds crazy, doesn't it? If you copy and paste text more than 20 times, your phone will restart! Some people have reported more severe crashes than that - but for me it is only (!) a soft restart. This affects the Galaxy Note II, as well as the SIII and Note tablet. Other Samsung products may also be broken in this m…
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I've really enjoyed learning from Kathy Sierra's talk "Creating the minimum badass user". It's an hour long, but well worth your time. She covers many aspects of product design, but the quote which really resonated with me was this - Zoomed in - This seems so applicable to many "services" these days. Millions spent on TV adverts, positive reviews, and glossy websites - yet nothing spent on customer care, and the entire shebang is held together with yarn. Imagine if politicians had to…
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Rob Pensalfini has written a delightful blog in which he accuses (or perhaps credits) Shakespeare with inventing the emoticon. He claims that this is within A Winter's Tail, Act I, Scene ii - in the first folio. So, I turned to the First Folio viewer which allows people to see scans of the first printing of The Winter's Tale - in this case, the New South Wales scan. Direct link to scan. The "emoticon" is also present in the second folio, the third, and the fourth. However, at some point,…
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Do you ever sign up for something, forget about it, then get pleasantly surprised when a parcel turns up at your door? No? Just me? Last year, I noticed that the SamKnows website were looking for volunteers to take part in their European broadband survey. The product is the rather uninspiring named "Whitebox". The SamKnows Whitebox is an industry-approved measuring device, designed to measure performance of your broadband connection. It has been developed to enable you to accurately measure…
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I recently got a MakeyMakey. It's a sort of ersatz USB keyboard that can be plugged into anything electrically conductive. I blogged about using it to control my Raspberry Pi using fruit and veg. I also blogged about controlling Android using a USB keyboard and mouse via a USB OTG cable. Hang on... the MakeyMakey is USB... Android can be controlled via USB... CAN I CONTROL MY ANDROID WITH FRUIT?!?!?!? Why yes! Yes I can. Watch and learn, young grasshopper. I couldn't find any games…
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