I've been thinking about words. The Chinese word for "train" - the mode of transport - is 火车. Which literally translates as "fire chariot". Long gone are the days when trains were pulled by a fire-breathing engine at the front, and yet this linguistic skeuomorph hangs around. English is not immune from this. The television still asks us to "tune in" even though no-one manually tunes in a rad…
Continue reading →
I've been playing with Google's Cloud Vision API. It is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) - but in THE CLOUD and uses MACHINE LEARNING! When it works, it is indistinguishable from magic. When it fails, it reveals a very limited understanding of human text. Let's take a look at this quick example - a piece of evidence from Leveson Inquiry Considering that the document is a digital scan of…
Continue reading →
I've found a delightfully exploitable social hack which I presented at UK GovCamp. It applies to any uncooperative bureaucracy. Here's how it works. You ask someone to do something and they reply with "I'm sorry sir, that's against our policy." You should say "I'm sorry to hear that. Please can you send me a copy of the policy?" Turns out, most times, there is no policy! Shocking, I know. …
Continue reading →
An annoying privacy violation from leading email newsletter company MailChimp. Responsibly disclosed on 2017-12-04. When you click a link on a webpage or an email, your browser opens up that link and sends the newly visited webpage a Referer Header. (The misspelling is a historical artefact.) This says "Hello new site, I was referred here by this previous website." This has some privacy…
Continue reading →
"Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!" "I'll create a GUI interface using VISUAL BASIC, see if I can track an IP address." "I love you, let's get married!" Technobabble sounds convincing to a lay audience. If you're not a computerist, then "hacking the mainframe" sounds plausible. If you're emotionally immature, then "I love you! That's why I have to leave you!" sounds like something a…
Continue reading →
The good folks at BlueSkySea have sent me their 1080p dashcam to review. It's a sub-£50 dashcam with built in WiFi and a 150° field of view. Let's take it for a spin! Unboxing and first use Video Samples Video resolution: 1920x1090 formatted to play back at 1920x1080. Audio: 16KHz AAC stereo - although seems to be mono. Just about good enough to clearly pick up voices in the car. File S…
Continue reading →
I've started using Google Cloud Vision for running text detection on OpenBenches images. There's just one problem - Google limits the size of the files that it will accept to 4MB. Why? Who knows! Obviously, it's easy to shrink an image server-side, but how do we do it in the browser? First, let's take a bog-standard file chooser and add a <canvas> element. <input id="userFile" type="file"…
Continue reading →
The good folk at RC Moment have sent me another drone to review! This is the Linxtech IN1601 Mini Drone and it is crazy small! Fits in the palm of your hand, sends 720p video, is USB rechargeable, and costs under £30. Let's get straight on and give it a whirl! What's in the box? Drone! Tiny! It comes with a battery which is 3.7V 200mAh - good for several minutes of flight. There's a USB …
Continue reading →
I've an unhealthy amount of smart gadgets at home. Enough so that it's worth running an orientation session when friends come to visit. This is what the Alexa does, here's which light switches not to use, don't be scared if the Roomba attacks. That sort of thing. I don't know how long we'll live in this place. It's more than likely we'll move at some point. So what happens to the smarthome…
Continue reading →
I go to lots of conferences, unconferences, hackdays, and tech events. As a vegetarian, I'm used to being relegated to second-class when it comes to event catering. If I'm lucky, I get some cheese sandwiches mingled with a plate of meaty snacks. That's why I was overjoyed at ODF Plugfest Rome when the organisers made this announcement: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edent"All lunch boxes will be…
Continue reading →
Me being grumpy and stupid again. I have an IP Camera on my LAN, I want to connect to it via HTTPS. I can't. Why is that? Why do this? I have a username and password to access my IP camera. And my TV. And my lightbulbs. And all my networked gadgets. If I try to enter the passwords on a modern browser, I get this error message: It is now an accepted fact that data should be encrypted…
Continue reading →
When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢ either. There was no way to get around the cultural knowledge required by the t…
Continue reading →
