Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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WordPress's undocumented stats API

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WordPress console showing a JSON output.

This blog runs on WordPress. Using their JetPack plugin, I get fairly detailed stats on views and visitors. But, bizarrely, the API is undocumented. Well, sort of... Let me explain: Just Show Me The Code Here's the API call to get a year's worth of data about your blog. https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/sites/shkspr.mobi::blog/stats/visits ?unit=day &date=2021-01-03 &quantity=365 …

Book Review: The Problem with Men: When is it International Men’s Day? by Richard Herring

· 1 comment · 300 words


Book cover witha broken masculine symbol

For the past decade, Richard Herring has been answering sexist trolls on International Women’s Day when they ask ‘when is International Men’s Day?’ in the mistaken belief there isn’t one. If only the trolls had learned to use Google they would realise that there is an International Men’s Day – it’s on November 19th. In The Problem with Men Richard expands on his Twitter discussions and tackles s…

The Mobile Phones of Doctor Who – Revolution of the Daleks

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Graham holding an iPhone.

Welcome back, friends! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every episode of Doctor Who! This post looks at the New Year's Day Special "Revolution of the Daleks". Do feel free to rummage in the archives. Wooooweeee! What an episode! Only a couple of shots of mobiles in this one - but worth sticking around for. Graham is rocking his iPhone - which we last saw in the S11 episode…

Best of: What I blogged about in 2020

· 2 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~316 times


My smiling face.

This is a quick round-up of the blogs which "did numbers" this year - and a few which I feel were cruelly overlooked. I posted a new blog every day in 2020 - so don't be surprised if you missed a few. OK? Here we go! January Watch out; there's a scam about. People love sharing horror stories. Scammers registering date-based domain names A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming …

Blogging Every Day For A Year

· 6 comments · 1,150 words · Viewed ~284 times


WordPrress stats showing 366 posts written.

Every year, I take part in NaBloPoMo the Judoon mating festival where people blog every day in November. I ended November 2019 with more blog posts than I knew what to do with, so I tried blogging every day in January. And then, well, February is only a short month, isn't it? If all has gone to plan, you're reading this at the end of 2020 and this is my 366th blog post! Fucking leap years, eh? …

Add .ics events to your main Google Calendar

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The Google Logo.

Google Calendar is one of the cornerstones of G-Suite. Sadly Google don't dedicate enough resources to develop into its full potential. Other than a new icon and forced Google Meet integration, it hasn't had many improvements recently. Leaving it to the community to pick up the pieces. Here's how to get an external calendar integrated with your internal calendar. Why is this useful? I'm…

Build - Don't Buy

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Two little Lego people try to build some flatpack furniture.

Lots of pixels have been spilled recently on whether you should build your own stuff, or buy stuff and then configure it. Wardley Mapping (which I still don't understand) seems to say that you should buy commodity items and only build where you can add unique value. And I think I agree with that. For work though, not for personal stuff. There are two reasons why you should build your own stuff. …

Screen recording on Wayland / Pop_OS

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Unix is user-friendly — it's just choosy about who its friends are.

One of the annoying things about being on the bleeding edge, is that some things don't work as you expect. I use the Wayland Display Server on my Linux box. And I couldn't find a simple screen recorder which worked. Turns out, Gnome has a hidden screen recorder! To activate it, press these keys simultaneously. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT ⇪+R A small circle icon will appear in your tray to show it is r…

Anatomy of my perfect ls command

· 4 comments · 350 words · Viewed ~520 times


Unix is user-friendly — it's just choosy about who its friends are.

Mostly notes to myself. Nestled away in my Linux Bash profile, I have this one-liner alias lh='ls -trhgGN --color=always | cut -d" " -f4-' When I run lh it outputs a list of files in the directory, showing their size, with the newest files on the bottom. I use this regularly to see what I've downloaded recently and how big the files are - so I made an alias. Here's how it works. Alias …

Data is so cheap it is being given away

· 2 comments · 500 words


Advert for 200MB of free data.

When I first started in the mobile industry, 3G had just launched. It was slow and expensive. Nowadays it is fast and free. UK Network Three are giving away free SIMs which comes with 200MB per month of free data. Visit three.co.uk/datareward to register. My SIM was delivered a few days later. Update - the SIM is now £10 but comes pre-loaded with 1GB for the first month. Then 200MB free for …

Utilizing Quantum BlockChain for 6th Generation Neural Networks

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Binary code displayed on a screen.

This pre-release whitepaper is a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges associated with using Quantum BlockChain technology to improve the performance of 6th Generation data networks for their performance with neural objects. By reconceptualising the way the nano-structures of 5th Generation (5G) networks interface with the OSI stack of traditional networks, we have found a way to perform…

Sometimes a bad patch is better than no patch

· 1 comment · 450 words · Viewed ~221 times


A screenshot showing the difference between two text files.

Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." Edent's 7th Law (My blog; my rules!) states "the best way to get an open source project to fix an issue is to send a slightly wrong Pull Request." Let me explain... Two years ago, I noticed an annoying bug in the markdown parser of WordPress's JetPack plugin. …