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.❤️ 18💬 23♻️ 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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Our community website - OpenBenches - has over seventeen thousand crowd-sourced entries. The nature of user-generated content is that there are bound to be duplicates. Especially around popular walking routes. Here's how I culled around 200 duplicates using the awesome power of SOUNDEX! Soundex is a clever algorithm for reducing a string of characters into a string which roughly represents its …
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If you've been around programming circles long enough, you'll probably have read the seminal "If PHP Were British". If not, go read it now. I'll wait. I love the idea of a non-American programming language. I'm aware that there are some, but I'm unaware of any which are in British English. Except, perhaps, BBC Basic. Although that also allows traitorous American spelling for some keywords. HTML …
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It's always fun to look back at the predictions ancient man made about life in the future. 11 years ago today, Loïc Le Meur wrote 30 predictions for the future of Twitter (Video of the talk). This is a non-snarky look at those predictions. Not to ridicule his ideas, but to understand the errors made in order to help up make better predictions. 1. It will reach masses of people Yes! Perhaps …
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I've never seen "The Shining". Or, at least, that's what I thought. It turns out that every single shot in that movie has been recycled, homage'd, and parodied in the last 40 years. It gives the whole movie a weird sense of déjà vu as your brain struggles to identify which scenes you think you've seen before. It is a beautiful and kinaesthetic film. The camera chases the action in such a way a…
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Legendary performer Judy Garland arrives in London in the winter of 1968 to perform a series of sold-out concerts. It can't be stressed enough how magical a transformation Renée Zellweger goes through. Almost impossible to believe. Zellweger is nowhere to be seen or heard; it is 100% Judy. As a biopic, it straddles the fine line between reality and what we think we remember about Judy. This …
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. It's a lovely morning in the home, and you are a horrible cat. Your aim is to cause mayhem and destruction by knocking over as many things as possible. This is a joyful little game - although I suspect it is a lot more fun in VR than on a laptop. The cartoony graphics ran…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. I have mixed feelings about this. It isn't really a game - and admits as much - more of a low-stakes exploration simulator. It is gorgeous. I couldn't believe my laptop was capable of rendering some of the scenes that it did. It worked perfectly on Linux running Wayland. …
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Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... I was working for a Big Corporate on a Big Product. We were negotiating launch dates. It was the sort of thing where you have to book TV advertising months ahead. We were all set to go, when someone on our team said "Is this really the date when we want to launch?" The Big Scary Manager looked down at them and said "Yes. The…
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After writing about how to use MoneyDashboard's unofficial API, the good folk at Moneyed told me about their officially supported API! So here's a quick review & howto guide. Moneyed is a slightly strange service. I think it is designed for companies to give as a benefit to their employees. But you can sign up as an individual. The first month is free - but I don't see a way to tell how much…
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