I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁 208:10 - Fri 27 November 2015Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentIn related news, @summerbeth is the best wife of them all! #PiZero pic.x.com/utsf2m13jo❤️ 11💬 1🔁 00…
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Another day, another bug! LetsSaveMoney.com is a "money saving" site. It offers discounts on a wide range of products and services, and is financed through affiliate marketing. Links removed, because the site has disappeared. My Trade Union, Prospect, has just launched a white-labelled "Members' Rewards" based on LetsSaveMoney - that's how I came across this bug. It's a depressingly familiar story - do a search which includes some HTML and watch it being echoed back to the user. Once you…
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It's always interesting to read over older Sci-Fi books and see what they got right about their future. I was re-reading Cory Doctorow's excellent "Makers" recently, when I came across this passage: Now the place was *spotless* -- and what's more, it was *minimalist*. The floor was not only clean, it was visible. Lining the walls were translucent white plastic tubs stacked to the ceiling. "You like it?" "It's amazing," she said. "Like Ikea meets *Barbarella*. What happened here?" Tjan did…
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I'm really enjoying driving the BMW i3. I'd love to have it tweet its driving efficiency, or upload its location to my server, or let me turn on its air-conditioning when the temperature gets too warm - there are a hundred interesting things to do with the car's data. The official app has some of these features - but is slow, ugly, and a pain to use. BMW used to have an API available for hackathons, but they shut it down. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @BMW@BMW I've just got…
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Nominet has, after much prevaricating, launched its latest money grubbing venture plan to revolutionise the UK Internet industry. Rather than having fusty old example.co.uk or example.org.uk businesses can go straight for example.uk - Mind = BLOWN! There are, of course, some obvious downsides to this plan. It's always been the case that people could register misspellings of domains and snaffle up all the email which was misdelivered. Nominet is just doing their best to make it a little…
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The good folk at THZY-UK have sent me a gadget to review - the YHDO Security Camera with Night Vision. I'm comparing this to other cameras I've reviewed in the past - including Y-Cam and Sercomm models. The first thing to note is that this is one of the cheaper cameras on the market. At around £40, it's a third of the price of the Y-Cam models. But does that low price means it compromises on features? What's In The Box As well as the camera and power supply (output of 5V, 2A) you …
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One of the questions we frequently get asked at work is "would you recommend the company's products and services to your friends and family?" It's a question which I've been asked in just about every company I've joined - and it's getting increasingly harder for me to answer. Obviously, if you work in a B2B company making industrial blast furnaces, it's unlikely you're going to recommend Aunty Joan buy a ForgeMaster 5000 - but for those of us who work on products for the public it's a…
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In every company I've worked for, the Intranet has been where good ideas are sent to die. Outdated org charts, canteen menus which are updated sporadically, attempts to write an FAQ for the antiquated expenses system, and a maze of links dedicated to the Byzantine HR process. One thing I've never seen was information which could in any sense be considered confidential. Don't get me wrong, occasionally someone manages to upload a salary scale to Sharepoint, or posts a rant about a late-paying …
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Regular readers will know that I take a keen interest in Twitter spam. It seems the more popular a network gets, the greater the propensity for spam. A shame, but it seems to be the way of the world. Recently, one of my Tweets which mentioned SoundCloud was retweeted in rapid succession by a variety of accounts. Take a look at the mugshots below and see if you can spot a pattern. Ok, let's ignore the obvious - spammers apparently think that blonde women attract more attention. A quick…
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There's a meme which makes its way around the 'net whenever a popular service makes a significant change. I've seen this said about Reddit, imgur, Twitter, Facebook, Xbox, Spotify, FourSquare - and just about every other modern product. It imagines a Product Manager thoughtfully contemplating the future direction of their service. In the 1990s, I was a teenager and my parents gave in to peer pressure and subscribed to cable TV. Like many kids my age, I raced home after school to watch MTV. …
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If you've been following this blog, you'll know that Google unjustly shut down my YouTube channel. They've now reinstated it - but I can no longer trust them as custodians of my data. So, here's a quick tutorial on how to download all your videos - and metadata - from YouTube. The Official Way Google offers a "takeout" service which will allow you to package up all your YouTube videos for export. It creates a multi-gigabyte archive - which isn't particularly suitable for hosting elsewhere. …
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(Trigger Warning - violent swearing and criticism of your employer / focus of your fanboi-ism.) Google knows me. I've been using Google since long before they were fashionable. I have a Gmail account (in my name), YouTube (also in my name), an Android developer account (name and bank details), Play account (name, credit card, and PayPal), and I've successfully reported security bugs to them. Google, I would suggest, has a pretty good idea of who I am. Which is why I was somewhat confused to …
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