Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Game Review: Islands Non-Places

· 150 words


Weird chairs on top of a tangle of roots.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow. It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything…

Localisation is too hard for Gmail

· 10 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~8,109 times


Google email interface.

/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well…

Game Review: WitchWay (and getting it running on Linux)

· 200 words


A witch pushing some blocks.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This starts as a fun little logic puzzle, but quickly descends into frustration. Like Portal, you have limited array of actions and have to manipulate your environment in order to get move on to the next level. But it has a bit of a problem. It is so easy to get lost.…

Movie Review: Identity Thief

· 300 words


Movie poster with the subtitle "She's having the time of *his* life!"

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…

Game Review: One Night Stand

· 200 words


Hand drawn artwork.

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 …

Replacing the MotionEngine on a Panasonic TV

· 3 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~421 times


Two identical circuit boards.

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…

Unofficial MoneyDashboard Neon API

· 700 words · Viewed ~259 times


A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

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. …

Unofficial MoneyDashboard API

· 8 comments · 1,000 words · Viewed ~1,539 times


A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

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…

Man Goes And Perishes - inside some cheap motion sensitive LEDs

· 3 comments · 350 words


Circuit board with PIR sensor.

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 …

Movie Review: That Gal... Who was in that thing...

· 200 words


Movie Poster.

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…

Movie Review: That Guy... Who Was in That Thing

· 200 words


A montage of actors.

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…

Please stop using CDNs for external Javascript libraries

· 36 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~46,311 times


The HTML5 Logo.

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…