I've decided to start a new podcast. Something nice and short - snackable content, if you will. 🔊 About A Minute🎤 Terence Eden 💾 Download this audio file. I'll be interviewing people for about a minute on something interesting they've done or found. If you'd like to appear on a future episode, please get in touch. For the first podcast I'm interviewing myself. So here's a picture o…
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For the benefit of those who are hard of thinking: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. One of the delightful things about living in Oxford is that there are a wide range of events going on. Events run by people who I like, run by people I vehemently disagree with, events run by itellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I enjoy hearing from a variety of people…
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When I was about seven or eight, I asked Santa to bring me a set of screwdrivers. Our family was about to take its first transatlantic flight, and I wanted to make sure I'd be able to repair the aeroplane if it got into any difficulties. Ever since then, I've loved taking things apart. Putting things back together...? Eh... not so much! Recently I "acquired" the latest Swiss made smartwatch -…
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Running a Code Club sometimes means thinking quickly on your feet. I recently started a new Code Club at work. We thought we had everything set up perfectly when disaster struck. We went in to our assigned room half an hour before the club started and began to set up. Of the eleven computers we needed, only three had mice! Nicola - my co-educator - frantically rushed around the building…
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I've been playing around with PVoutput.org - it's a community site which lets you quickly and easily publish live details of your solar panels. I couldn't see a pre-built library for my model of Solar Power Inverter - the Fronius - so I thought I'd build one. Important: the PVoutput API doesn't run over HTTPS. All of your communications with it are in the clear. While there's a limit to the …
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I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses". The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were…
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My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by…
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Earlier this year I was playing around with DogeCoin. Try as hard as I might, I just couldn't get their API working. I delved into the settings, to see what was up. Take a look at this setting, is it obvious to you which state is active? I clicked around on it, and the state changed. Had this enabled it or disabled it? By carefully hovering my mouse over the options, I could see what I…
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Private Eye is the only "Dead Tree" publication I buy. I think its satire misses the mark more often than not - but its investigative journalism and general muck-raking are second to none. The Eye has reluctantly been drawn into the digital age. It has a piss-poor website run by the sort of "tired and emotional" gnomes who struggle with concepts like sanitising user input. EXCLUSIVE Push…
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Right, that's enough keyword stuffing! I've been trying to mount an OwnCloud instance via WebDAV. I kept receiving the error Mounting failed. SSL handshake failed: SSL error: sslv3 alert handshake failure Or SSL handshake failed: SSL alert received: Handshake failed The route of this problem seems to be that the version of libneon (the WebDAVS connector library) shipped with Ubuntu 12.04…
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The Citizens' Advice Bureaux have just released a real-time view of what people are searching for on its site. It's heartbreaking. Tom Loosemore@tomskitomskiInteresting new digital stuff emerging from @CitizensAdvice display-screen.cab-alpha.org.uk <-- uncomfortable, messy, visceral reality @mikedixonCAB❤️ 8💬 3🔁 010:03 - Tue 21 October 2014 who supplies my electricity why do some children become…
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Originally written in 2014 - but lost somehow. Last week, I had the privilege of being invited into the Guildhall to watch Tim Berners-Lee receive the Honorary Freedom of the City. I was one of a dozen bloggers and tweeters asked to live tweet the ceremony. As The City moves into the digital era, it is beginning to modernise and so this was the first ceremony open to bloggers and the first to…
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