Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Run Internet Explorer 5 in your browser!

· 3 comments · 250 words · Viewed ~4,077 times


About screen for IE 5.

This is a slow, and very silly, way to experience an ancient browser. I'm aware that you could spin up a virtual machine, or pay for a browser testing service. But there's something nice about running a browser in a browser. Like wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Using Copy's v86 it's possible to recompile x86 code to browser native WASM. This means you can load up Windows 98 in your …

Book Review: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon

· 600 words


Book cover with a big red cross on it.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the gender on his birth…

Reprojecting Satellite Maps

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South up satellite photo.

Regular readers know, I'm Creating an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. I've already had some success using an existing NZ Centric, Equal Earth Map. And I've programmatically created a correctly projected map with R. But is it possible to do this with Satellite imagery? YES! Install gdal For this to work, you'll need GDAL - the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library.…

You don't need external assets in an HTML file

· 8 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~3,783 times


The HTML5 Logo.

(Written mostly to settle a good-natured disagreement.) One of the great advantages of HTML is that it can call on external resources. Your index.html can load a style.css and display a picture.jpg. But... it doesn't have to use external resources. (I know this isn't news to some of you - but everyone has to start somewhere.) Here are three techniques for inlining external assets. Easy Mode …

Did Dvorak Die "A Bitter Man"?

· 4 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~1,123 times


Scan of an old document with the quote highlighted.

Yet more MSc yak-shaving. I'm currently reading Melissa Schilling's book "Strategic management of technological innovation". In a passage talking about customers' resistance to new inventions and the destruction of domain knowledge, it talks about the invention of the Dvorak keyboard. Supposedly better than the QWERTY keyboard - but ignored by the majority of customers. August Dvorak is said…

A Decade of Drinking Beer on Untappd

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Map of the world with dots all over it.

10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIs there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing.❤️ 0💬 2🔁 018:55 - Thu 21 July 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI just earned the 'Newbie' badge on @untappd!…

Book Review: No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front 1970-73 by Lisa Power

· 750 words


Book cover featuring a GLF protest.

The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before ‘queer’ was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we…

South Up Equal Earth Projection in R

· 2 comments · 50 words · Viewed ~367 times


Map of the world, south up, NZ in the centre, with labels and colours.

Yup - I'm still banging on about this! This time, in R Result The colours are wrong, and the labels need adjustment - but not bad for a few lines of code! Code library(tidyverse) library(rnaturalearth) library(rnaturalearthdata) library(sf) centre <- 160 # NZ mostly centred, prevents Africa and South America wrapping. projection <- "eqearth" # Other good projections are wag1 wag7 eck4…

Did Nikola Tesla receive "nothing but insults and humiliation"?

· 2 comments · 1,100 words · Viewed ~18,150 times


IMPORTANT: The authenticity of this letter has never been confirmed...

I see this quote pop up occasionally: World of Engineering@engineers_feedNikola Tesla's last message to his mother: "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation." pic.x.com/OmfbsC5GHR❤️ 21,733💬 367🔁 022:00 - Sun 25 July 2021 But what's the source of it? The most prominent source appears to be this article from March 2015 in Telegraf.…

Download ACSM files in Linux - without using Adobe Digital Editions!

· 13 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~6,584 times


A cute penguin.

After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported. No PDF Command line only Alpha quality software. It works - but i…

🔥.me.ss! You can't register emoji domains in South Sudan

· 4 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~331 times


Dear Terence, We have contacted the registry and they said they don't allow 2 successive dashes.

It's useful to share negative results. Not every experiment has an amazing or successful outcome. tl;dr you can't register Punycode .ss domains. This also means Internet users in South Sudan can't register domains using their own writing system. Background The Republic of South Sudan became independent and joined the United Nations back in 2011. A decade later, and it's now possible to…

A brief look at ACSM files

· 550 words · Viewed ~1,068 times


An eReader with a pen.

Adobe's accursed eBook DRM is just the worst. Not only does it lock up books that you have purchased - but it's impossible to use sensibly on Linux. Sure, you can futz around with Docker, WINE, and old versions of Python - and if you're lucky, you might get a book out of it. I wasn't quite so lucky. I wanted to see if I could download an ePub without using Adobe Digital Editions. Spoilers! I…