Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Tracey Emin, Cambridge University, QR Codes, Statistics and Bit.ly

· 450 words · Viewed ~333 times


I spend yesterday wandering around London and, as is my wont, spotted some QR codes which I think may interest readers of this blog. Tracey Emin The Hayward Gallery are having a Tracey Emin retrospective. At the start of the exhibition is this rather odd QR code. Why odd? Three main reasons. It leads directly to a 14MB MP3 file. The code is really quite small considering it's a…

Getting Images from a Foursquare Checkin

· 500 words · Viewed ~1,483 times


Photo of a MacBook. The decal sticker is of Iron Man. His hand blaster is replaced with the Apple logo.

"Oi!" shouted Whatleydude, "Get Dabr to show images from foursquare checkins!" "Righty-ho sir!" I said. I started coding furiously. Of course, things are never quite as simple as I first thought.... So, how do we go from http://4sq.com/fgIWov to 1 Expand the URL Get your Bit.ly API Key. http://api.bitly.com/v3/expand ?shortUrl=http://4sq.com/fgIWov &login=YOUR_BIT_LY_USERNAME …

Metro's Use of QR Codes

· 4 comments · 600 words · Viewed ~1,721 times


Updated! 2011-01-11 20:00 - see the response from the Metro. The Metro is a London-based UK newspaper national newspaper which is distributed in 33 cities across the UK. Around a year ago, I reviewed the Metro's mobile website. It wass a perfectly fine mobile site and I'm pleased to see that over the last 12 months it has undergone substantial improvements. You can visit it at…

QR Codes and Error Correction

· 1 comment · 300 words · Viewed ~7,617 times


QR Codes are big news at the moment - both Google and Bit.ly announcing URL to QR services. What's interesting is their differing approach to error correction. From the creators of QR Codes, Denso Wave QR Code has error correction capability to restore data if the code is dirty or damaged. Four error correction levels are available for users to choose according to the operating environment.…

Expanding URLs in Dabr / Twitter

· 7 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~499 times


I hate shortened URLs with a passion.  It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before.  If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went. So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes those horrid little links and turns them in to full sized URLs. Here's the basic code in PHP to use the service. function l…