A few months ago, I blogged about how cost efficient electric cars are. Last week I took delivery of a BMW i3 REX - so here's a quick review of the vehicle. A warning, I'm a grumpy, demanding, sod. I really like the car - but that doesn't blind me to its flaws. But first, and brief diversion into PHYSICS and MATHS! Physics Imagine a kilogram weight (1Kg) sat on an ice rink. You want to push the object 1 metre. The energy you require to accomplish this is 1 Joule. If you want to…
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(Because what the world needs is another CoC thinkpiece from a straight, white-passing, cis-gendered man.) This is a rambling blog post inspired by Cate Hudson's "Codes of Conduct and Worthless Manfeelings". You should read that first, it's pretty good. Don't worry, I'll wait. (In which I do my best not to insult all my friends and colleagues.) I go to lots of conferences. Fewer than I used to (we'll come on to that) - but I can honestly say that I've spoken on panels, attended…
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I was at a hackday recently. During one of the talks, a speaker from a small company made a fairly stinging criticism of a large tech firm. As it happened, one of the audience members was an employee of said behemoth and heckled the speaker. After the presenter told him to shut up, he spent the rest of the session snarkily subtweeting his objections to her arguments. Geeks are people who run on dissent. We see the world is broken, refuse to accept it, and try to fix things. Then other…
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by Terence Eden, aged 35 & ⅚ths. I often wonder how much I read during the average day. A few thousand words of tweets, couple of hundred in Facebook posts, a dozen articles on blogs and news sites - and an unhealthy smattering of Reddit and other fora. All told, I am probably reading the equivalent of half a novel per day. (Now, there's an idea for a "quantified self" app - "how much have I read today?") And yet... it doesn't feel like I'm doing proper reading. I don't get my teeth stuck …
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It was the best of FoI requests, it was the worst of FoI requests. While some data holders are wise, others are foolish. Some strengthen our belief in the promise of open data, while others leave us reeling with incredulity. I hereby present a tale of light and darkness, which will bring you equal measures of hope and despair. Earlier this year, I decided to embark on an open-data-quest. I wanted to find all the fire hydrants in my local area and map them. Where where the areas of poor…
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(This post kindly sponsored by Dell) One of the most common complaints in large companies is just how dreadful corporate supplied equipment is. Wheezing old laptops running out of date Windows, using ancient browsers, hamstrung by lousy anti-virus programs. The time between booting up and being able to work is often long enough to make a coffee, have a biscuit, read the morning paper, and contemplate your future with the company. Phones aren't much better. Best case scenario you get given…
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There's a pernicious myth - often spread by tabloids - that the poor and hungry don't deserve the meagre possessions which make life worth living. You see this in headlines like "Benefit Scum Have Flat Screen TV!" It ignores the fact that a) they may have bought the TV when they had disposable income, b) that a TV can provide nearly limitless free entertainment, and c) Flat Screen TVs are really fucking cheap! As the refugee crisis in Europe grows, there are those who wish to exploit human…
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This is a quick tutorial on how to encrypt your Twitter messages using PGP with the help of Keybase.io. I read an article yesterday which seemed to imply that Twitter was mangling PGP encrypted messages (albeit unintentionally). There is a minor bug in Twitter's web interface - but PGP seems to work perfectly in apps. So, I want to demonstrate how it can be done successfully. I've written this article with a non-technical audience in mind - feel free to point out any areas where I can make…
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The other day I fished my old nook out of deep storage - only to discover that the battery wasn't holding charge. More seriously, the back had swollen out and looked like it was about to burst. Uh-oh! Inflating batteries are dangerous batteries. Taking apart the nook is incredibly simple, pop off the power button, use a Torx 5 screwdriver to undo the single screw, and then spludger your way around the edges. This is what I found in mine... VERY BAD! A replacement nook battery is less…
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Last year, I wrote about how to extract Location History from Google. Once again, Google have changed their URLs to make it even harder to get one's current location out of their data-greedy hands. It used to be the case that Latitude gave that information - but they killed it. Then they promised it in Google+ - but never delivered. Now they offer you a data-dump which they will email to you. Hardly convenient if you want a single day! sigh Recently Google released Timeline - an…
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