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 first1 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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%…
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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…
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10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Is there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing. — Terence Eden (@edent) July 21, 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later:…
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A couple of months into the pandemic, I realised that I was vastly overpaying for my mobile usage. I was paying £10/month for unlimited calls, texts, and 8GB data. That's a pretty reasonable price, but I was sat at home all day on WiFi - so I had no need for data. I don't send…
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A few months ago, I wrote about how data is so cheap it is being given away. Mobile network Three were offering £10 data SIMs which came with 200MB of zero-cost data. Recently, I've found another free provider of data, with an intriguing price-plan. RWG Mobile are a Welsh MVNO who use EE as their…
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As I am a bear of very little brain, these are notes to myself on my slightly shonky process for creating animated TreeMaps in R. The aim is to end up with something like this: Generate the images Getting the data is left as an exercise for the reader (sorry!). This loops through the data…
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