Just a couple of silly experiments on a Sunday afternoon. I think it's beautiful to overly animated GIFs on top of one another. If the topmost GIF has a transparent background it becomes hypnotic to see the synchronisity which appears to develop - akin to listening to Dark Side of the Moon while the Wizard of Oz is on the TV. The background and foreground have differing periods of motion,…
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Yesterday I attended an OII talk on the Ethical Treatment of Data in New Digital Landscapes. Amy O'Donnell from Oxfam lead a discussion about how the charity is seeking to improve the way that Aid Agencies deal with the data they collect. Oxfam collects data for many different reasons - sometimes it is incidental (for example the bank account details it needs to make payments), sometime it is …
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tl;dr If you have no need for Prime Video, you can ask Amazon for a discount. They'll knock £30 off the price - taking it down to £49. I spoke to customer services - here's the transcript (edited for clarity) : To be clear, Amazon weren't forthcoming in whether this was available to everyone. I suggest you ask Amazon very nicely! In my case, I haven't watched a single Amazon video. I don't e…
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OMG! Good Old Games has the amazing Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds available for a mere £3.99. That was the game which introduced me & my wife to collaborative gameplay, so I was incredibly excited to see it available again. This is a brief guide to getting the game working on Linux - including multiplayer and widescreen. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 - but the steps should be broadly similar on …
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Twitter has just launched embedded videos in Tweets. How can we, as app designers, present them to our users? So, what options do we have? First of all, let's take a look at what the Twitter API provides. Send a signed request to : https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show/560070183650213889.json In return, we get these entities : "entities": { "hashtags": [], "symbols": [], …
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BlackBerry have drawn scorn from the technology world with their calls for Network Neutrality to apply to app developers. The CEO thinks that NetFlix - and others - should be forced to provide apps for BlackBerry's minority platform. Is he serious? It sounds like an insane and bureaucratic solution to BlackBerry's woes - but I'm not so sure that it's necessarily a bad idea. Yesterday, I was…
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Whenever you send a Tweet with a URL, Twitter automatically replaces the URL with a "t.co" link. This means that long links only count for 23 characters against Twitter's 140 character limit. Mostly, that's great - but sometimes it's not. Inspired by this StackOverflow question, I decided to see if it was possible to write a URL in such a way that Twitter wouldn't auto-link it. Here's what I…
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There's something poetic about watching a film you know intimately being performed in another language. Like many children of my generation, I don't remember a time before Star Wars. My birthday cakes were sloppy green Jabba The Hutts, my brother always got the "baddie" toys and I got the "goodies", every cardboard tube became a deadly lightsabre in my hands. The force run strong in my…
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I've spent the last few days writing a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game on Twitter. This blog post briefly discusses how I did it - and what pitfalls I discovered when creating it. But, first, if you want to play.... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentYou should probably be asleep.I've created a "Choose You Own Adventure" on Twitter.Start here ➡ @wnd_goPleasant dreams.❤️ 6,416💬 429🔁 022:50 -…
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Way back in 2008, David Carrington created Dabr - a really simple mobile website for accessing Twitter. Dabr@dabrFact of the month: @dabr is now 5 years old! Born in August 2008 when @davidcarrington was inspired by @Whatleydude.❤️ 7💬 10🔁 013:59 - Mon 16 September 2013 In those days, Twitter had a kick-arse API and were happy for people to build exciting new services on it. I was eager to contr…
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I've nothing against the Swedes. Lovely people. Sweden is the third-largest country in the European Union by area. But I'm not from there. Neither, as far as I am aware, is Facebook. But Twitter seems to think so. When I share a link to Twitter on Facebook, this (sometimes) happens. And sometimes, I get this delightfully mangled Unicode atrocity! So, what's going on? When Facebook wants…
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