This is a great video all about the inappropriate use of QR codes. There's one area where I think Scott Stratten is wrong - and that's on the issue of QR codes where there is no signal. It's a common trope to bemoan QR codes on the tube, or on an aeroplane - but I believe it's not a very good argument. Firstly, take a look at the posters on a typical tube train. All of them have phone…
Continue reading →
As you may know, the Miro Exhibit is fully equipped with Catalan compatible QRpedia codes. Here's a great video showing off the exhibit: You can jump straight to the two-minute mark if you're just interested in the QR action. …
Continue reading →
I've been investigating some rather nasty SMS spam. I have finally heard back from Switchfire, the SMS gateway who sent the message. According to them, the originator of the message was PeekabooTV.com. Take a look round that site - it hasn't been updated since 2007, and the Contact page leads to a 404. A quick wander into the DNS registration produces this rather stale information: GPRS…
Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my last post, we've just had solar panels installed! Because of Greg Barker MP's idiotic decision to scrap the Feed In Tariff with only six weeks' notice - we've had to get this done in rather a rush. Thanks to Angi and Philip at Sunny Future Solar, we were able to get our system installed before the deadline. Yesterday, we received confirmation that panels were installed and …
Continue reading →
As many of you know, I worked for Vodafone for nearly 7 years. I left shortly before the "entirely legal and justified tax avoidance" scandal came to light. I didn't know anything about the tax issues while I was working there - other than the fact I had some colleagues working in Luxembourg - otherwise (I like to think) I may have raised the matter internally. Not that the accountants would…
Continue reading →
As I've mentioned before, I hate SMS Spam. Last night, I received this unsolicited message. Now, I can try to unsubscribe using STOP ALL - and I have forwarded the text to VSPAM. But that's not enough for me. I want to stop them sending any more spam SMS to anyone. Let's do a little stalking investigating and find out what we can. Who Supplies Their SMS Gateway? The people who provide the…
Continue reading →
Bitcoin me! 1LJmePYmet9VjpeAqqLbd0RVGoYcLqAZhk If that "sentence" makes any sense to you - you're not a muggle. Muggles (for want of a better epithet) don't want to invest a lot of time into things which don't fit with their mental model of how the world works. Without getting into a philosophical discussion on what money is and how value is generated - let's look at how Bitcoin works in…
Continue reading →
It's Time To Switch Banks are fucking us over. They gamble with our money, lose it, ask us for a bail out, lose more money, then ask us for yet another bail out! They are resisting even the very modest changes the government is imposing on them. No more. We have a very easy way to stop the banks pissing about with our money. Take our money from them. I'm not talking about taking out your…
Continue reading →
This is a project I developed for OTA11 - but didn't feel confident showing it off. Not least because I was one of the competition judges! Preamble Many people download BitTorrent files. There are no BitTorrent search engines which are mobile friendly. Users have to try to navigate non-mobile-optimised websites. This is slow, inefficient, and may cost the user money in…
Continue reading →
Every so often I find a device which - inexplicably - doesn't include Linux support. I've been very impressed with how well Ubuntu runs on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200. Everything worked out of the box - with the exception of the fingerprint reader (AuthenTec AES2810). Now, I know that fingerprint readers can easily be defeated by jelly-babies, but it annoys me when something doesn't work. The…
Continue reading →
The journalist Shiv Malik took a rather intriguing photo at the recent student protests. It appears to show a group of police officers gathered around a blue box. No one seems to know what the box is for. I'm sure it's got a rather prosaic function - but that doesn't stop the speculation! As soon I saw it, I could think of only one thing; chroma-key! (Or Colour Separation Overlay if you're…
Continue reading →
As the Student Protests were starting outside my office door, I decided to pop down and see what was going on. I nominally joined in and took this selection of some of the more humorous signs I found. The photos seemed to go down well on Twitter - this one had 15,000 views and Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentFather Ted school of protest #9nov twitpic.com/7cej0x❤️ 12💬 3🔁 013:05 - Wed 09 Novembe…
Continue reading →
