I like to listen to music while I work. I find - especially in an open plan office - that it is an essential aid to concentration. That said, I find music with lyrics particularly problematic as my brain prefers to concentrate on the words rather than the task in hand. On long flights, I often use a white noise generator to drown out sound. I've recently started listening to random music. A…
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Here's a quick way to display how many times a WordPress post has been read. For this, you will need: A blog running WordPress. The JetPack plugin installed. The ability to edit your themes. Here's the snippet of code I'm using to add "This post has been read 12,345 times". I'll explain how it works in a bit more detail. if( function_exists( 'stats_get_csv' ) ) { …
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I love my keyboards. I mean, I have an unhealthy obsession with them. I spend a lot of time typing and the cramped keyboards which come with most laptops and MacBooks just don't cut it for me. Their poor ergonomics leave my wrists in pain. For years I was a devotee of the Microsoft 4000 Keyboard. It's a big old beast - and that's its main drawback; it's just too large to carry around. It…
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Last week I was contacted by the BBC's consumer affairs programme "You And Yours" for my expert opinion on a new type of mobile phone scam. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentWarning! I'll be on @BBCRadio4's You And Yours shortly.Please tune your wirelesses accordingly. pic.x.com/6f3zsiwuin❤️ 4💬 1🔁 011:18 - Mon 11 April 2016 Several people had contacted the show to say that they had missed calls f…
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Here's a simple step that Twitter App Developers can do to reduce the amount of abuse which is generated on the platform. A few friends of mine regularly receive harassment on Twitter. Typically, there are two ways to deal with it: Mute the offending user. This means their tweets to you never show up in your replies. Block the offending user. The same as muting, except the offender…
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This is a quick unboxing / set-up / review of the Chipolo. This was a nifty piece of schwag from the Twitter Developer Relations team, to whom I'm grateful. The Chipolo is a multi-purpose Bluetooth Low Energy tag. It's like a high-tech version of one of those things which you attach to your keyring which will beep when whistled at. As the box says, it will work up to 60 meters away. It'll …
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I was listening to the excellent RHLSTP - because I am one of the cool kids - when the guest, Richard Bacon, made a curious confession about his adventures bringing News Bunny to the State Opening of Parliament. I got a letter from Black Rod - who runs both houses […] and it says that I am banned for life from the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It's at the 7 minute 20 mark on the v…
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Last week I ran a mentoring session with a young woman working in technology. She's smart, capable, dedicated, confident and utterly un-ambitious. She was incredibly frustrated that all of the training courses and women's networks she had found were fixated on her becoming a manager, an executive, or a CEO. We were both in agreement that our industry needs diverse representation at all levels…
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Just a bit of fun for a Friday afternoon - and spoilers ahoy! Star Wars VII contains the most magnificence dream sequence. When Rey lays her hand on a lightsaber for the first time, the world dissolves as a cacophony of audio hallucinations plague her. It's a short sequence - lasting just under a minute - but the sound design is beautiful. After seeing the fabulous Path of a Lightsaber video I …
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The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story. Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW's compliance with the licence terms. I took a look through the car's user interface and, hidden away, was…
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I've written before about just how many Internet connected gadgets I have. I've also blogged about my dodgy WiFi lightswitches which send data back to China. Every IoT device you put in your home brings a certain level of risk to the other devices in your network. For example, my Smart TV and my Lifx don't require a password to access. Any device on my network can control them. That's…
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Imagine, just for a moment, you could tell someone's most intimate secrets just by looking at them. Many year ago, when I was very young and you were even younger, I saw an advert in the back pages of some cheap comic. The implication was clear - SEE GIRLS NAKED! The reality was somewhat more prosaic. But technology marches on. Today, you can buy a smartphone with a thermographic camera. …
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