Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Game Review: Catlateral Damage

· 150 words


Cat swatting objects off a shelf.

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…

Game Review: Fugue in Void

· 1 comment · 200 words


Pipes in a moodily lit room.

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. …

Every Date is Significant

450 words · Viewed ~528 times


A graphic of a calendar showing the date "February 25 Sunday"

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…

Moneyed - a personal OpenBanking API

· 3 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~278 times


API Token generation screen.

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…

Introducing Slowww - the slow web server

· 21 comments · 300 words · Viewed ~83,147 times


A digital watch.

This experiment has now ended. The code is available on https://gitlab.com/edent/very-slow-website One thing most websites try to do is try to serve you the page as fast as possible. So I've decided to do the opposite. I've made a (toy) web server which goes as slow as humanly possible. You can visit it at http://slowww.rf.gd - but you'll need to be patient. This delivers a page at about 175 …

Movie Review: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

· 1 comment · 500 words


The character of Borat wears a mask over his genitals.

There are two contradictory ways to view this movie. It's a dumb screwball comedy, sure, but it also tries to expose the depressing underbelly of the modern world. Part of the problem is that it rarely challenges the views that it exposes. It is content to let people make fools of themselves, but never asks them to reflect on their foolishness. Nor does it give us the tools to tackle hate…

Movie Review: Games Night

· 100 words


Movie poster with a cute dog on it.

A group of friends who meet regularly for game nights find themselves entangled in a real-life mystery when the shady brother of one of them is seemingly kidnapped by dangerous gangsters. This is "Smug Marrieds - The Movie". But it is so funny. Like most modern comedy movies, it is little more than a series of sketches tied together by a paper-thin plot. Weirdly, it is shot much more…

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 ~8,095 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 …