Hot new social networking site BlueSky has an interesting approach to usernames. Rather than just being @example you can verify your domain name and be @example.com! Isn't that exciting? Some people are @whatever.tld and others are @cool.subdomain.funny.lol.fwd.boring.tld I wanted to know what the distribution is of these domain names. For example, are there more .uk users than .org users? …
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A few weeks ago I was moaning about there being no OpenBanking API for personal use. Thankfully, I was wrong! As pointed out by Dave a company called Nordigen was set up to provide a free Open Banking service. It was quickly bought by GoCardless who said: We believe access to open banking data should be free. We can now offer it at scale to anyone - developers, partners and Fintechs - looking…
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A few months ago, I had a lovely rambly chat with Harry Keir Hughes about the nature of data, transparency, and how it can tie into the Net Zero agenda. Harry and his team have taken my pontifications and placed them in the very swanky Digital Radar Report. The full report quotes lots of people - not just me! - and is mostly about "Live data" i.e. data that is transparent, readily accessible,…
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How do you fairly split a country into electoral subdivisions? This is a difficult problem. Whatever you choose, you'll piss off someone. A politician will be annoyed that their loyal voters are no longer in their district. And voters will be annoyed that they're now lumped in with people from the wrong side of the tracks. This is a very human problem. So let's ignore all the human aspects and…
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Every so often, an employer asks me to help make a dashboard. Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watching the pretty graphs go up and down, and making real-time decisions about Serious Business. Ugh! What a waste of time! The thing is - that's not what a dashboard is for. And that's generally not why a …
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Here's an idea that can't possibly work. People used to pay-per-minute for telephone calls. Some numbers were "zero-rated". That is, if you called them you wouldn't be charged. At first it was calls to the emergency services which were free. Businesses and other organisations realised that it was good customer service to provide a free-to-call number. Generally speaking, this means that the…
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I am very interested in your opinion on this. Imagine that you work at a company which sells widgets. Each widget has a unique serial number. The number is a fixed length, and can contain leading zeros. That is, the following are all valid identifiers: 00001 01010 12345 What data type would you use to store these data in a database? This is one of those strong opinions, weakly held. I'm…
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Previously on Terence Eden's blog... About 4 years ago, I wrote about Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. Based on an idea by Lucy Pepper, I built a quick hack to show what Twitter threads actually looked like. Well, lockdown finally got the best of me, and I finished the project! TweeView.ml Here are a few screenshots of "interesting" trees, and a little bit about how it works. …
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Here's set of visualisation I've been working on. Last night, at #TapIntoTwitter, I demonstrated a fun way to view your Twitter conversations as a force-directed graph in 3D space. I'm going to show it off to you, then explain how it works. This is a designed as a "fun" demo. Here we go! So, what's going on? As I've previously blogged about, Twitter has a new conversations API. That allows…
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my paper from the Data Analytics module. I enjoyed it far more than the previous module. This was my second assignment, and I was amazed to score 72%. In the English system 50% is a pass, 60% is a commendation, 70% is distinction. Nice! A few disclaimers: I…
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I want to buy a big chunk of data and use it until it runs out. I'm not interested in a contract. I don't want a bundle of phone calls, SMS, or ringtones. Just give me DATA that lasts for as long as possible. Here's the best data deals that I could find. Stick them in your 2nd SIM slot, use them as broadband backup, or shove in a dongle and attach to a Raspberry Pi. Operator Cost Data …
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10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIs there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing.❤️ 0💬 2🔁 018:55 - Thu 21 July 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI just earned the 'Newbie' badge on @untappd!…
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