Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Perhaps the meat lobby has a point...?

· 2 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~1,360 times


Some sausage rolls. Their vegan nature is hidden in the small print.

I've been a vegetarian for half my life and I have been blogging about crappy vegetarian labelling for a decade. Usually it's a rant about how a seemingly innocuous dish has hidden bone jelly in it - but today I experience the reverse situation. So, I was in the "veggie snacks" aisle of my local supermarket. I grabbed some tofu bites, mushroom sausages, a bean burger - and then I saw this. …

Book Review: Deep Medicine - Eric Topol

· 400 words


A robot hand holds up an apple.

One of America's top doctors reveals how AI will empower physicians and revolutionize patient care. Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol…

How I got my username on (nearly) every site

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An error message on Flickr's edit name screen.

I go by "edent" on most websites. It's short, relates to my real name, and is usually unique. I quite often sign up to things just to snag the name. But there have been a couple of sites where someone else has got there first and started using "my" name. I don't own the trademark, nor have any special rights to that name. So I wanted to document how I recovered it on a few prominent sites. …

Tell the audience what you want them to do

· 2 comments · 450 words · Viewed ~623 times


24 tweets from people - including photos of the slide.

I do lots of public speaking as part of my job. I'd like to share one of my tips for giving engaging and impactful talks. Two caveats: This is a sort-of work post. In that, I'll be discussing something I did for my employer - but they haven't asked me to write this, nor have they reviewed it. Just because this works for me, doesn't mean it is right for you. Sometimes you have to find your own…

Sending 1.2 Million Tweets

· 1 comment · 400 words · Viewed ~7,112 times


A beautiful blue sky with scattered clouds. Text reads 2586 Watts - 68% battery.

Back in 2014, I set up a rather silly Twitter account - @OxfordSolarLive. The premise was simple. A camera took a photo of the sky above my house. It took a reading from my solar panels to see how much electricity they were generating. It superimposed the reading on the photo. Then posted it on Twitter. Solar Realtime Edent@OxfordSolarLive1206 watts. pic.x.com/ip2cp5rrao❤️ 0💬 0🔁 014:11 - Fri 24 …

Quirks and Limitations of Emoji Flags

· 4 comments · 700 words · Viewed ~5,112 times


A screenshot of a list of country flags

This blog post contains emoji which your system may not be able to display. You may see broken text, weird symbols, or other buggy rendering. The Transgender Flag is a draft candidate for Emoji 13.0 under the name Blue, Pink, and White Flag. A number of platforms include an image for this emoji, but do not show it on the emoji keyboard. As of June 2019 this is now supported on Twitter platforms …

Episode 27 - Hannah Cameron's makerspace adventures

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A woman with 3D printed cubes as earrings.

Hannah works for Eagle Labs, where she 3D prints things and builds IoT lamps. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. …

NHS Hack Day

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NHS Hack Day Logo. For geeks who love the NHS.

It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the event, and what I learned. What's the point of a hackday? There were three common reactions from people when I said a bunch of geeks…

Alexa Skills - get custom slot names using Flask-Ask

· 1 comment · 500 words · Viewed ~512 times


Alexa Skills Page.

Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete. So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a custom slot. Here's the code, with a fuller explanation afterwards. from flask…

The worst morale boosting gesture I've experienced

· 22 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~35,720 times


The Vodafone logo with the text "The future is exciting. Ready?"

I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding through emails. When suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse …

Episode 26 - Dan Pope's trntxt.uk

· 50 words


A white train on a blue background.

Do you want an ultra-minimalist, open source, train times website? If so, Dan Pope, has created trntxt.uk just for you! 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. …

Introducing the new HTML element - welcome <clippy>!

· 14 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~47,192 times


Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an animated virtual assistant. I've spoken to several people in Microsoft, and we …