One of the sessions I lead at Open Data Camp was "Open Data Horror Stories" - we talked about some of the disasters we've had when requesting or using Open Data. This lead on to a session ran by Gaia Marcus on how to create the "perfect" FOI request. This is not an exhaustive guide to making FOI requests. I strongly suggest that you read WhatDoTheyKnow's recommendations and FOI Man's Top Ten …
Continue reading →
(Inspired by a session at Open Data Camp called "Open Data Horror Stories") I was having an argument spirited discussion with my friend John the other day. He was sympathising with Tony Blair's regrets over the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently, FOI requests put too great a strain on departments and government bodies. Not only is there a huge cost of compliance, but…
Continue reading →
The Motorola built Nexus 6 is just about the worst Android handset I've owned. The USB port is upside down, the screen is smeary at low light, the back is so slippery it spins wildly on any flat surface, the battery is average at best, and the curve of the back makes impossible to type on without gripping firmly. All acceptable annoyances in a cheap handset, but for a "premium price" device,…
Continue reading →
Twitter now allows people to upload videos directly to the micro-blogging platform. It's an attempt to bypass 3rd party sites like YouTube (owned by Google) and Instagram (owned by Facebook). In an uncharacteristic display of openness, Twitter's API allows developers to get direct access to video. This is a quick blog post to explain how you get access, and what you can do with the…
Continue reading →
Who made your iPhone? Sure, the back of the box says "Designed in California" - but who were the men and women who assembled your phone? How well are they treated? Are they paid well? Are they trapped in a living hell where many of them feel the only way out is suicide? Christoph Lutz@lutzid"achieve productivity or the sun will no longer rise." #foxconn slogan "motivating" their workers;…
Continue reading →
Just a couple of silly experiments on a Sunday afternoon. I think it's beautiful to overly animated GIFs on top of one another. If the topmost GIF has a transparent background it becomes hypnotic to see the synchronisity which appears to develop - akin to listening to Dark Side of the Moon while the Wizard of Oz is on the TV. The background and foreground have differing periods of motion,…
Continue reading →
Yesterday I attended an OII talk on the Ethical Treatment of Data in New Digital Landscapes. Amy O'Donnell from Oxfam lead a discussion about how the charity is seeking to improve the way that Aid Agencies deal with the data they collect. Oxfam collects data for many different reasons - sometimes it is incidental (for example the bank account details it needs to make payments), sometime it is …
Continue reading →
tl;dr If you have no need for Prime Video, you can ask Amazon for a discount. They'll knock £30 off the price - taking it down to £49. I spoke to customer services - here's the transcript (edited for clarity) : To be clear, Amazon weren't forthcoming in whether this was available to everyone. I suggest you ask Amazon very nicely! In my case, I haven't watched a single Amazon video. I don't e…
Continue reading →
OMG! Good Old Games has the amazing Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds available for a mere £3.99. That was the game which introduced me & my wife to collaborative gameplay, so I was incredibly excited to see it available again. This is a brief guide to getting the game working on Linux - including multiplayer and widescreen. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 - but the steps should be broadly similar on …
Continue reading →
Twitter has just launched embedded videos in Tweets. How can we, as app designers, present them to our users? So, what options do we have? First of all, let's take a look at what the Twitter API provides. Send a signed request to : https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show/560070183650213889.json In return, we get these entities : "entities": { "hashtags": [], "symbols": [], …
Continue reading →
BlackBerry have drawn scorn from the technology world with their calls for Network Neutrality to apply to app developers. The CEO thinks that NetFlix - and others - should be forced to provide apps for BlackBerry's minority platform. Is he serious? It sounds like an insane and bureaucratic solution to BlackBerry's woes - but I'm not so sure that it's necessarily a bad idea. Yesterday, I was…
Continue reading →
Whenever you send a Tweet with a URL, Twitter automatically replaces the URL with a "t.co" link. This means that long links only count for 23 characters against Twitter's 140 character limit. Mostly, that's great - but sometimes it's not. Inspired by this StackOverflow question, I decided to see if it was possible to write a URL in such a way that Twitter wouldn't auto-link it. Here's what I…
Continue reading →
