No. (N.B. I work for a mobile advertiser - but this is my personal blog. This post isn't written on their behalf. Naturally I'm biased.) (N.B. I'm in India and jetlagged to hell - this may not make any sense!) Wild headlines abound - but very few people seem to have read the original Microsoft sponsored paper. The 75% claim is based on... one app, running on the very first Android…
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The heat. That all oppressive heat. Not that you'd ever notice it; you move from air-conditioned hotel, to air-conditioned taxi, to air-conditioned office. Yes, cars everywhere. A fifteen minute walk quickly turns into a twenty minute taxi ride. No one walks here - the streets are too crowded for that. Our hotel is hollowed out inside - very reminiscent of the Luxor. Same faux stone walls,…
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Today was my first day in India. Bangalore, to be precise. The city is hot, noisy, full of dangerous drivers, cows on the road, and a disturbingly potholed pavement. I entered a modern looking mall. Partly out of tourist curiosity, mostly for the air conditioning! I saw something which shocked me. As I was coming down as escalator, I noticed a teenage boy stood at the bottom of the "up"…
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This is a review of the Y-Cam Knight SD. I previously reviewed the Y-Cam S in 2009. I got this camera for a 30% discount thanks to Y-Cam's social media team. Adjust your bias filters accordingly. Unboxing Linux Set Up To set the camera up, you need to use its internal webserver. So, how can you find out the IP address of the camera? Use the provided network cable to connect the…
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Wandering through London today, I noticed that Southbank London has put QR codes on its posters. I've mentioned before the dangers of using Bit.ly as a QR code generator - as it allows us to peek at the codes' performance statistics. Here are the codes on the posters - click for bigger. As all the codes use Bit.ly so we can see how well they've performed - click on each one for the latest…
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The Telegraph's headline screams "Christians have no right to wear cross at work, says Government"! Personally, I think it's good that the Government is standing up for secular values. I also like the cognitive dissonance which this case must be causing the right-wing as it seems to be about the religious right using the much derided "Human Rights!" Act. Whoever wins, they lose. What struck…
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(Unlike most "open letters" this one was sent to my MP using the fantastic WriteToThem. I've added hyperlinks for context.) Dear Jonathan Lord, I want to thank you for highlighting the inadequacy of South West Trains service from Woking. As commuters for four years, my wife and I are sick and tired of trains which are overcrowded, frequently late, and often filthy. As the answer you…
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I've been thinking a lot about APIs and their design recently. I stumbled on this fantastic quote from Greg Parker: Greg Parker@gparkerA programming language is a user interface for developers. Language authors should learn from HCI principles.❤️ 41💬 6🔁 019:10 - Wed 22 February 2012 When I first started learning C++ (back in the bad old days) I was convinced that any 1st year student could desi…
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When people ask me which QR generator to use, I usually suggest Google Charts. However, recently I've become dissatisfied with its limitations, so I've decided to write and release my own QR encoder. I'm still looking for a catchy name for it (suggestions welcomed) - so for now it's called "QR Generator PHP". It's available on GitHub or you can use it directly. So, how does it compare to…
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This is a quick tutorial to show you how to rip DVDs on a headless server. That is; one which only has command line access. The documentation for MakeMKV is available. It's a bit sparse. It also doesn't have many of the features of the GUI. For example, the GUI allows you to select which video, audio, and subtitles, you want to copy. So if you only want the original German director's…
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Dave Winer is totally off base when he says "Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made." Perhaps it's different in his part of the world, but over here, hackdays are fun! All the hackathon / hackdays I've been to are, essentially, Scrapheap Challenge* for software people. *Note to Americans, Junkyard Wars is the US remake of Scrapheap Challenge. The last hackday I went to was…
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As Twitter now have a UK office, I thought I would see what data they hold about me. Thanks to the UK's Data Protection act, it's really simple to request the information. I wasn't expecting a whole CD's worth of information - like Facebook provides users - but what I did get surprised me. Twitter UK has no control or responsibility over the user information in the Twitter service and cannot…
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