I was inspired by Matthew Petroff's Kindle Weather Display to do something similar with my old Nook Simple Touch Reader. I had planned to use a salvaged eInk screen - but the Nook STR (or NSTR from now on) is only £29 due to a massive price drop. The Glow version is a mere £69 - so I bought that and have set my old NSTR to work as a "Family Display Screen". The idea is that this will stay by the front door, show today's weather, mine and my wife's calendar, as well as other useful bits of i…
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There are loads of really delightful Simplified and Traditional Chinese True Type Fonts available on the web. There's only one issue - the file sizes are really large. In many cases, too large to effectively use as a web-font. For example, this calligraphy style font is 3.4MB. The beautiful Paper Cut Font weighs in at 14MB! That file-size is far to heavy to embed on a web page. Subsetting Generally speaking, font files like .ttf contain a representation of every single character. 0-9,…
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King of Google Eric Schmidt has written in The Guardian about how unfair it is that people don't think Google pay a fair share of taxes. He makes three pretty good points. Companies only pay tax on their profits. Politicians shouldn't make laws with loopholes. International laws need harmonisation. I agree with his second two points - although no-one is forcing Google to exploit the loopholes that it finds - but I am not sure I agree with the first. Fairness, so it seems, is…
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So, Yahoo! is to buy tumblr for $1.1 BEEEEEELLION. I don't understand money. Well, specifically, I don't understand how companies are funded, classify shares, or any of that finance stuff. But, there's something which has been bothering me about the recent sale of some social media properties. According to some estimates, tumblr has 170 million users. $1.1 billion / 170 million users is.... double checks workings $6.47 per user. Err... what? Even if those number are off by 50% - Yahoo have …
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Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011. It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality. Here are my thoughts from the day. Farmification Of Factories Fascinating talk from Lisa Ma about living and working with workers in a Chinese joystick factory. Raises interesting questions about…
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For the last few months, I've been curating a Tumblr of a very specific annoyance. I'll let Aral Balkan take credit for inspiring me. Any modal message—full-screen or alert—that interrupts user flow to ask them to download your app suffers from #doorslam #ux antipattern. @aral First, a quick definition: In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or co…
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I recently picked up a new Nook. Their manufacturer is dumping stock and the prices are ridiculously cheap for an eInk touchscreen running Android. One thing that annoys me about the Nook is the fact that you have to register for a Barnes & Nobel account before you can use it. I dislike their geo-restrictive terms and conditions, and the fact that they place advertising on my home screen. I also don't particularly want my reading habits fed back to anyone. No one needs to know that I like…
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The 3D printed gun is now a reality. I don't have access to a 3D printer - but I've downloaded the plans out of morbid curiosity. While downloading the blueprints may not be illegal, any UK citizen who made and owned such a handgun could face arrest, according to the UK's Metropolitan Police. BBC News It may not the best weapon in the world - it has reliability and accuracy issues - and it may not be the cheapest - around £5,000 for a 3D printer to fabricate the thing. But it's certainly the …
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I've been a big fan of Ovo Energy since switching to them last year. They email me a PDF statement, pay me 3% interest on any overpayments, and have their call centre waiting times displayed prominently on their homepage. So, when they announced their new app, I was expecting something a little bit special. And that's exactly what I've got. An automatic torch to help you when you're rooting around in dark cupboards trying to read your meter. Brilliant. So, not only does the app fulfil its …
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Wandering down my suburban street this morning, I noticed a manhole cover, with the initials G.P.O. carved into it. The General Post Office was the UK communications monopoly. Created by King Charles I in 1660, it remained a fixture of British life until it was abolished a mere 309 years later. The GPO ceased to exist in 1969. And yet, 44 years later, its brand remains seared on the flesh of the streets. Most of the GPO manhole covers have survived for over half a century - although many…
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I hate the iPhone. Always have, probably always will. However, as a geek in the mobile industry, I have to try the full gamut of devices. So, this weekend, for testing purposes, I've been lumbered with an iPhone 4S. My aesthete friends are always complaining about how cobbled together Android is. Because there is no overall owner, the UI is full of unintuitive quirks. That's a fair criticism - some parts of Android are incredibly shonky. But, to hear those in the gilded cage speak, iOS…
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