democracy voting · 2 comments · 500 words
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. …
Continue reading →gps technology · 5 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~576 times
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 …
Continue reading →audio gadget review · 7 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~337 times
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 …
Continue reading →meta NaBloPoMo · 5 comments · 450 words
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…
Continue reading →Book Review data privacy security · 1 comment · 350 words · Viewed ~371 times
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…
Continue reading →gadget NaBloPoMo review · 17 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~4,303 times
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 …
Continue reading →Movie Review NaBloPoMo · 350 words
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…
Continue reading →Movie Review · 250 words
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…
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo Open Data privacy · 2 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~225 times
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…
Continue reading →mysql NaBloPoMo OpenBenches · 2 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~305 times
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 …
Continue reading →HTML5 i18n NaBloPoMo · 8 comments · 550 words · Viewed ~731 times
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 …
Continue reading →NaBloPoMo predictions twitter · 8 comments · 1,600 words · Viewed ~411 times
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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