Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Theme Switcher:

About A Minute - Introducing Ind.ie

· 150 words

I had a chat with Laura Kalbag, one of the designers at Ind.ie. 🔊 Ind.ie with Laura Kalbag🎤 Terence Eden 💾 Download this audio file. If you're interested in helping build platforms and phones which are free of corporate spyware - please donate to their crowdfunding campaign. Get About A Minute as soon as each episode goes live. Stick this Podcast Feed into your podcatcher Or you …

Localisation is Hard - Nokia Here and Roundabouts

· 650 words · Viewed ~288 times

Last year I complained about a dangerous change to Google's Maps app. When driving, you want to spend the majority of your time concentrating on the road ahead. Flicking one's eyes to the mirrors & speedometer should be enough to quickly assess one's environment. The same applies for SatNav apps - every second that is spend trying to figure out what the graphics means is a second where the…

Walking Under The Thames

· 2 comments · 650 words · Viewed ~552 times

Earlier this year, I won the BlueLightCamp Hackathon. Usually prizes are a token of appreciation - vouchers, a books, maybe even a new phone if you're lucky. This, however, was a "money can't buy" prize - a trip through the Thames Barrier. And so, during one of London's delightfully wet summer's days, I made my way to the site in Greenwich. Here are some of the photos I took during the trip. …

The Curious Case of Amazon's IMDb Adverts

· 1 comment · 350 words

The Internet Movie Database is one of the most venerable sites on the Web. It was founded by a British programmer in 1990 as a collection of Usenet posts (kids, ask your parents). By 1993 it was on the nascent World Wide Web - and was hosted out of Cardiff University in Wales. IMDb was one of the earliest success stories for the UK Internet industry when, in 1998, Amazon.com bought them. …

Introducing About A Minute - A New Podcast

· 3 comments · 150 words

Me wearing a Google Glass headset

I've decided to start a new podcast. Something nice and short - snackable content, if you will. 🔊 About A Minute🎤 Terence Eden 💾 Download this audio file. I'll be interviewing people for about a minute on something interesting they've done or found. If you'd like to appear on a future episode, please get in touch. For the first podcast I'm interviewing myself. So here's a picture o…

Do Comrades Dream of Electric Proletariat?

· 1 comment · 2,200 words · Viewed ~234 times

AI generated image of Karl Marx as an Android.

For the benefit of those who are hard of thinking: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. One of the delightful things about living in Oxford is that there are a wide range of events going on. Events run by people who I like, run by people I vehemently disagree with, events run by intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I enjoy hearing from a variety of people …

Disassembling the MyKronoz ZeWatch Smart Watch

· 550 words · Viewed ~2,953 times

When I was about seven or eight, I asked Santa to bring me a set of screwdrivers. Our family was about to take its first transatlantic flight, and I wanted to make sure I'd be able to repair the aeroplane if it got into any difficulties. Ever since then, I've loved taking things apart. Putting things back together...? Eh... not so much! Recently I "acquired" the latest Swiss made smartwatch -…

Pair Programing At The Code Club

· 450 words

Code Club Logo.

Running a Code Club sometimes means thinking quickly on your feet. I recently started a new Code Club at work. We thought we had everything set up perfectly when disaster struck. We went in to our assigned room half an hour before the club started and began to set up. Of the eleven computers we needed, only three had mice! Nicola - my co-educator - frantically rushed around the building…

Fronius and PVoutput

· 14 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~6,278 times

I've been playing around with PVoutput.org - it's a community site which lets you quickly and easily publish live details of your solar panels. I couldn't see a pre-built library for my model of Solar Power Inverter - the Fronius - so I thought I'd build one. Important: the PVoutput API doesn't run over HTTPS. All of your communications with it are in the clear. While there's a limit to the …

Why do we continue to pay for open location data?

· 3 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~607 times

Two men are confused by a paper map

I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses". The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were…

Apartheid Boycotts

· 3 comments · 850 words · Viewed ~213 times

My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by…

Don't Use Colour To Indicate Binary States

· 1 comment · 200 words

Earlier this year I was playing around with DogeCoin. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn't get their API working. I delved into the settings, to see what was up. Take a look at this setting, is it obvious to you which state is active? I clicked around on it, and the state changed. Had this enabled it or disabled it? By carefully hovering my mouse over the options, I could see what I…