(To the tune of the popular Mary Poppins song.) How much does it really cost to drive an electric car? Well, I've had my BMW i3 for a few months, so I thought I'd crunch the numbers. As part of the UK Government's OLEV scheme, there's a subsidy for installing car charging points at home. One of the conditions of the subsidy is that a smart meter is installed which reports back details about the energy used to charge the car (aside: wonder if that's available as Open Data?). This means I…
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There's one of those "I've come up with a perfect analogy for life" blog posts going around. It's sort of like those stock photos with an "inspirational" quote on it - but in long form. Apparently, Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess. It's all vaguely plausible, life-lessony, woo - which tries to map one person's journey onto a greater human experience. Frankly, it's unmitigated bollocks, and I'd like to skewer some of its pomposity. 1. In life, your only opponent is yourself. …
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The UK's official web infrastructure is in a shockingly poor state. I've been doing some light digging into the security of UK Schools' websites. As I've written about ad nauseum, the Government takes almost no interest in the way some of its official websites are managed. The Department for Education is particularly inept when it comes to technology which - given that our country's future relies on technological progress - is more than a little depressing. The UK has a specific…
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I spent my Saturday crewing the reception desk at the amazing UK GovCamp Unconference. Part of our task was to check people in, hand them their name badges, schwag, and offer them a free conference T-Shirt. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of conference Ts stuffed in a drawer somewhere. They're all the same - a funky logo on the front, and usually a list of sponsors on the back. Not quite as glamorous as a rock-concert tour shirt but, hey, good enough from slobbing around the …
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I few days ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that one of my Tweets had been used as a citation in Wikipedia! I began to wonder - how often are Tweets used in citations? It's possible to search for your own Tweets using this (somewhat obscure) link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fedent Just edit the end of it to see if you, or your friends, have been cited. Note - the username is case sensitive, so "Edent" isn't the same as "edent". …
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This isn't a review of the new Star Wars film, it's a diary entry about my experiences at the première. No spoilers, sweetie! I love Star War. Probably more than is healthy. When tickets for the new movie were released, I snaffled up a pair... for the next morning! Look, I'm getting old, and I didn't fancy watching a midnight screening full of screaming fans. So I booked a 10 am showing on the (entirely correct) assumption that the cinema would be empty and I could enjoy it in peace. My …
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Regular readers will remember that I run Ubuntu on a MacBook pro. Why? I'm a contrarian sod. It's the machine work gave me. I can do everything I need to do with Linux without having to deal with OSX or Windows. What can I say, it works for me! The only problem is that the MBP is heavy. Much to unwieldy to carry around without a decent rucksack. The keyboard - while delightfully backlit - isn't ergonomic. I rely on an ergonomic keyboard and a vertical mouse. Basically, I…
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The British State's desire for its citizens' private data is becoming unquenchable. As part of a minor act of disobedience, I decided to send two Freedom of Information requests. The first to the Home Secretary asking for her email metadata. The second to the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey asking for her web browsing history. After all, if they can spy on me, why can't I spy on how they're using their taxpayer-funded computers? Unsurprisingly, the Home Office rejected my request…
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If you've ever reported a bug, you'll have seen the dreaded response "works on my machine." So, I was using a small open source project (I'll leave it anonymous for now) when I noticed a bug. Not a show-stopper, but one which would affect and annoy lots of users. I wrote as detailed a bug report as I could: Scroll Bars Always Showing In Browser In browsers X and Y on platform Z, I notice that the scroll bars are always showing, even when the content doesn't require it. This is confusing…
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Last year, the battery on my Motorola Nexus 6 died. It got hot enough to melt the glue holding the phone together and started bulging - so I replaced it. Now, sadly, the new battery has failed. The phone will suddenly switch off as though the battery were yanked out. After a few minutes it will happily turn on again. Most frustrating. Rather than go to the expense of replacing the entire handset, or trying my luck with a different battery, I decided to try a £18 extended battery case. …
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