My date of birth is the 1st of January 1901. My phone number is 0000000000. My gender is decided on a coin flip. My country of residence is Afghanistan. And my Mother's maiden name is a random mix of upper-case, lower-case, numbers, and symbols. Well, that's what you would believe if you were any website I've registered for. If you're a free WiFi provider, you get random details. Unless you have …
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One of the things I loved about Facebook was its "On This Day" feature. There's something delightful about seeing what nonsense you were talking about on this day a decade ago. Twitter doesn't have anything like that. So I built it. Introducing - Twistory.ml Note: Twitter's recent changes means this no longer works. Stick your @ name in, hit the big button, and you'll get a list of everything…
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Academic citations are hard. One of the joys of the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) is that every academic paper gets a unique reference - like: 10.34053/artivate.8.2.2. As well as always leading you to a URl of the paper, a DOI also provides lots of metadata. Things like author, publisher, ORCID, year of publication etc. I've built a simple website that turns any DOI into a semantic…
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I recently had an interesting voting experience which I'd like to share with you. Perhaps you can give me some advice? I'm a member of a board and we recently held an election for new board members. We had 8 spaces and 19 candidates. Candidates wrote a short application and we each ranked them in preference order. My most favoured candidate was ranked 1, the worst candidate was ranked 19. …
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I have a distinct and unpleasant memory of my parents not-arguing-in-front-of-the-children. It was the early 1990s and my parents had decided to take us on a road trip across America. My dad's experience of driving the sleepy high-streets of the UK suburbs had not prepared him for the terror of the Los Angeles freeway at night. He was jetlagged and my mum, bless her, can't read maps. On the hard …
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Welcome to the world of endless conference calls! My last pair of headphones broke after a few months of constant use, so I decided to treat myself to a new, sturdier pair. These Aftershokz are SEVENTY QUID! Which is about £40 more than I usual spend on a pair of cans. But these use magic to get the sound into your head. They make your cheekbones vibrate and that sends the music direct to your …
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All dogs go to heaven, that's just science. But cats are contrary buggers and hang around long after their nine lives are up. My cat, Busby, was the scourge of squirrels. The menace of mice. The dispatcher of rats. Legend tells of the day a dozen foxes ran screaming from the bushes, being chased by a jet-black missile of fury. I'm not saying he was maliciously evil. But we frequently saw…
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Without your permission, or even your awareness, tech companies are harvesting your location, your likes, your habits, your relationships, your fears, your medical issues, and sharing it amongst themselves, as well as with governments and a multitude of data vultures. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide for you. Even when you've explicitly…
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It has been over five years since I added WiFi to a Roomba. Technology has come a long way since then. I've just bought a WiFi enabled mopping robot for under £150. This is the snappily named Muzili G9070. It is a rebranded Tuya model - more on that later - which is available under a range of names. It is... good! Not just for a cheap Chinese robot, but it is genuinely good. Fill it with …
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Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI'm trying to build up my tolerance of scary movies. The Shining was pretty good - but not too scary. Now @summerbeth is making me watch An American Werewolf in London.❤️ 16💬 19🔁 019:50 - Fri 30 October 2020 I have a theory about certain movies. Take, for example, "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace". It is not - so I theorise - a movie designed for audiences. It is …
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In the late 1960s/early 1970s, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree. This is a rather plodding police procedural. There are a few directorial flourishes, but lacklustre compared to David Fincher's previous work. After the first hour and a quarter…
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I'm an advocate for open data - both in my professional role and in a personal capacity. One of the hard things is succinctly explaining that "open data" means "non-personally identifiable data at a sufficient granularity to be useful without proving a risk to any individual's (or group's) reasonable expectations of privacy while still being useful to researchers and civic society." What a…
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