Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman) gets a nice call confirming his name and other identifying information. The next thing he knows, a spa in Florida is reminding him of his appointment and his credit cards are maxed out. With his identity stolen, Sandy leaves his wife, kids and job to literally bring the thief to justice in Colorado. Keeping tabs on the other Sandy (Melissa McCarthy) and run-ins with bounty hunters is harder than he was expecting, and ultimately the cross-country trip is going …
Continue reading →
I'm (slowly) playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. Remember all those one-night-stands you had when you were younger? No - me neither. I was a paragon of virtue... But, if you did engage in such shameless behaviour, did you ever wonder how the morning-after-the-night-before could have gone if you'd played things just a little differently? ONS is a simple piece of interactive fiction; gather up clues and converse…
Continue reading →
Working from home without a monitor SUCKS. My wife decided that she didn't want to peer at her tiny laptop screen any more, so we decided to repurpose an old 37 inch TV. MEGAMONITOR! I bought the Pansonic TV back in 2012 and it served us pretty well over the last 8 years. But when we came to switch it on, it just displayed a blinking LED. The brilliant folks at ElectroMix helped confirmed the error code was to do with the decoder board. They had the replacement part in stock for only £30. …
Continue reading →
Note: MoneyDashboard is now closed. Yesterday, I wrote up how to use the MoneyDashboard Classic API. Read that blog post first before reading this one. MoneyDashboard have launched a new "Neon" service. The API is a bit more simple, but authentication is harder. Here's a quick guide to the bits of the API that I found useful. I've lightly redacted some of the API responses for my privacy. List of all supported institutions MoneyDashboard only supports a limited number of OpenBanking…
Continue reading →
Note: MoneyDashboard is now closed. The OpenBanking specification is brilliant. It allows you to aggregate all of your financial accounts in one place. You can give read or write access to apps and services. Magic! API access is restricted to registered financial institutions. That's good, because it puts up a barrier to entry preventing dodgy companies slurping up your data and sending all your money to scammers. But, whether by design or not, it means that you as an individual cannot get…
Continue reading →
I was recently asked to review some motion sensitive LEDs. Not usually my thing, but they charge via USB - so why not! It has the most bizarre product description I've seen: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentAlways nice to review a gadget which comes with a reminder of your own mortality… pic.x.com/wGJYcWCVyJ❤️ 9💬 3🔁 014:46 - Wed 07 October 2020 I think it is trying to say that if you leave the room the light will extinguish. Anyway, this is what it looks like: Four columns of LEDs - two a…
Continue reading →
Actresses talk about their personal lives and dealing with a balance between family responsibilities and being a professional actor. This is a sequel to the critically acclaimed "That Guy... Who Was In That Thing". A movie which looks at the varying careers of working actors who never quite hit the big time. Despite the weirdly unfeminist title ("That Guy 2"), it's a beautiful look at the horrors of acting from a female perspective. It is a simple format - talking heads and archive…
Continue reading →
Documentary about sixteen actors who detail their ups and downs as they struggle to forge careers in Hollywood. They've played cops, lawyers, bosses, best friends, psychopaths, politicians and everything in between. Now you'll know who they are. The best thing about me being a failed actor, is that I never have to wonder if I would have "made it". I wouldn't have. No one does. The best most people can hope for is for someone in the street to half-recognise you as the eponymous "guy... from …
Continue reading →
I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network like so: <script src="https://cdn.example.com/js/library-v1.2.3.js"></script> There are, supposedly, a couple of advantages to doing things this way. Users may already have the JS library in their cache from visiting another site. Faster download speeds of large libraries from CDNs. Latest…
Continue reading →
Four years ago today, I turned up in Holborn for my first day at GDS - Government Digital Service. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edent🅁🄴🄶🄴🄽🄴🅁🄰🅃🄸🄾🄽 🅂🅃🄰🅃🅄🅂▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓100% COMPLETE> @edent is now part of @GDSTeam > Press any key to continue…>❤️ 49💬 16🔁 006:37 - Mon 10 October 2016 I've now experienced two Prime Ministers (Primes Minister?), two departments, and one pandemic. So I thought I'd take a look back at some highlights and lowlights. I've worked for half-a-dozen brilliant …
Continue reading →
Last week, I gave a talk at the Maps for the Web workshop. As part of the discussion, I talked about how some HTML elements are really easy for developers to use and understand, and others are hard. I'm not aware of any formal research on this - all I have is my experience as a user and teacher of HTML. If you know of anyone who has looked into this more deeply, I'd love to know. Let's take a look at the <video> and <audio> elements for adding multimedia to a page. <audio controls> <source …
Continue reading →
When Gretchen Carlson slaps Fox News founder Roger Ailes with a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, not a soul could predict what would happen next. Her decision leads to Fox News correspondent Megyn Kelly coming forward with her own story, as well as multiple other women, inciting a movement that reverberates around the world. This is a grim film. No one deserves to be sexually assaulted or harassed. Toxic work environments need to be tackled and dismantled. But the protagonists - so the …
Continue reading →
