Stop! You're talking to fake customer services on Twitter!

By on   4 comments 450 words, read ~865 times.

Ever had a moan at your bank on Twitter? You're not alone - it's one of the most popular ways to interact with large companies. But how can you be sure that you're actually talking to the real customer services team? There's been a worrying rise in the number of fake accounts which attempt to […]

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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families

By on   9 comments 550 words, read ~7,860 times.

I've written before about Solipsist design - those services which have been designed to work only for a very specific type of family. I was taking a look at Google's "Family" proposition - which allows users to share their purchases with other family members. What I found didn't impress me. File under "Falsehoods Programmers Believe […]

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KYLI - because it is superior to JSON

By on   2 comments 600 words, read ~1,584 times.

This is a (silly) attempt to fix some of the shortcomings of JSON. Hence it is named after the goddess of music. It uses C0 Control Characters Here is an example: ␜ ␁ This is a KYLI document ␂ ␝ GroupName ␞ data ␟ value ␛ Comments are supported too! They can be multilined easily. […]

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Where do these arrows point?

By on   7 comments 800 words, read ~313 times.

This is a blog post about user interfaces. I was wandering along the beach one day, when I noticed some clever chap had drawn some arrows in the sand. Can you guess where they led? The more astute of you will have realised that these are not human drawn arrows. They are, of course, footprints […]

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Training Customers To Be Stupid

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Companies face a complicated choice. Make things easy for the customers, or make things secure for them. Convenience seems to take priority most of the time. This forces companies to get their customers to risk their own security. In this example, we see Verizon Wireless asking their customers to type their passwords into Twitter for […]

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Inspecting Solar Panels using a Drone

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I'm probably not the first to do this - but it was a fun way to learn just how tricky it is to control a cheap quadcopter even in mild weather. This video has no sound. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video tag. Good enough quality to make sure the panels aren't covered in bird-mess, […]

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How to Hypnotise an Artificial Intelligence

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Last week I attended a talk by Dr Irina Higgins from Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind. It was a fascinating look at how their AI works, and how it is trained. If you've ever played a video game online, it is likely you've been training an Artificial Intelligence agent without realising it.Ethical? — Terence Eden (@edent) […]

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Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space

By on   1 comment 3,050 words, read ~2,501 times.

Update! The source-code for this app can be found at https://github.com/edent/TweeView Many years ago, I created a threaded conversation viewer for fledgling social network App.net. It was a unique way to flow through a conversation without having to be constrained by the linear vertical scroll of the typical web browser. App.net died - and I […]

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