New Year! New Me! I'm crap at sticking to my multiple resolutions. I think I did okay on last year's resolutions. So this year, I'm just making a single one. At the start of the Gregorian calendar 2021, I'll begin an MSc Digital and Technology Specialist. My resolution is to get my coursework in on time. That's it. It has been so long since I formally studied anything that I'm a little nervous …
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It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. WHAT. A. FUCKING. YEAR! The year started with me getting a colonoscopy - and went downhill from there. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentWell gang, I'm drinking a litre of industrial strength laxative in preparation for a colonoscopy tomorrow morning.How's *your* Saturday…
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The Kendrick family have been making world-famous dolls for over 200 years. But their dolls aren't coveted for the craftsmanship alone. Each one has a specific emotion laid on it by its creator. A magic that can make you feel bucolic bliss or consuming paranoia at a single touch. Though founded by sisters, now only men may know the secrets of the workshop. Persephone Kendrick longs to break…
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In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child - not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power - the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. My brother…
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Academic citations are hard. One of the joys of the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) is that every academic paper gets a unique reference - like: 10.34053/artivate.8.2.2. As well as always leading you to a URl of the paper, a DOI also provides lots of metadata. Things like author, publisher, ORCID, year of publication etc. I've built a simple website that turns any DOI into a semantic…
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All dogs go to heaven, that's just science. But cats are contrary buggers and hang around long after their nine lives are up. My cat, Busby, was the scourge of squirrels. The menace of mice. The dispatcher of rats. Legend tells of the day a dozen foxes ran screaming from the bushes, being chased by a jet-black missile of fury. I'm not saying he was maliciously evil. But we frequently saw…
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It has been over five years since I added WiFi to a Roomba. Technology has come a long way since then. I've just bought a WiFi enabled mopping robot for under £150. This is the snappily named Muzili G9070. It is a rebranded Tuya model - more on that later - which is available under a range of names. It is... good! Not just for a cheap Chinese robot, but it is genuinely good. Fill it with …
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Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI'm trying to build up my tolerance of scary movies. The Shining was pretty good - but not too scary. Now @summerbeth is making me watch An American Werewolf in London.❤️ 16💬 19🔁 019:50 - Fri 30 October 2020 I have a theory about certain movies. Take, for example, "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace". It is not - so I theorise - a movie designed for audiences. It is …
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I'm an advocate for open data - both in my professional role and in a personal capacity. One of the hard things is succinctly explaining that "open data" means "non-personally identifiable data at a sufficient granularity to be useful without proving a risk to any individual's (or group's) reasonable expectations of privacy while still being useful to researchers and civic society." What a…
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Our community website - OpenBenches - has over seventeen thousand crowd-sourced entries. The nature of user-generated content is that there are bound to be duplicates. Especially around popular walking routes. Here's how I culled around 200 duplicates using the awesome power of SOUNDEX! Soundex is a clever algorithm for reducing a string of characters into a string which roughly represents its …
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If you've been around programming circles long enough, you'll probably have read the seminal "If PHP Were British". If not, go read it now. I'll wait. I love the idea of a non-American programming language. I'm aware that there are some, but I'm unaware of any which are in British English. Except, perhaps, BBC Basic. Although that also allows traitorous American spelling for some keywords. HTML …
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It's always fun to look back at the predictions ancient man made about life in the future. 11 years ago today, Loïc Le Meur wrote 30 predictions for the future of Twitter (Video of the talk). This is a non-snarky look at those predictions. Not to ridicule his ideas, but to understand the errors made in order to help up make better predictions. 1. It will reach masses of people Yes! Perhaps …
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