necropost – Terence Eden’s Blog

Today was very mixed emotionally

@edent — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 23:46:24 +0000

This is a necropost. Originally written in 2017 on a defunct social network and now resurrected. I had been working for GDS for 6 months and was beginning to brush up against the HR bureaucracy.

Today was very mixed emotionally.

I had to do more Line Management Stuff - which I loath. Being trapped in a room with other managers picking over other people, their performance, their ability. I don't want that sort of power over someone else. I sure as hell don't want to spend half my day judging people I've never met and packing them into neat boxes.

I like the guy I manage - but I will feel nothing but relief once he has a permanent manager.

I know I'm a selfish person, but I'm just not interested enough in other people to make a good manager. It needs someone who both cares and has the skills to manage. Neither of these things are part of me and I get incredibly frustrated and upset when I have to apply myself to something I'm no good at (and have no desire to get better at).

And then tonight was just delightful! An evening soirée talking technology with a diverse (ish) bunch of industry experts in the Vogue boardroom⁰. People listened to my expertise, challenged my assumptions, laughed at my jokes, and shared why they were going to take over the world.

Some fine vegetarian food (with bespoke wine pairings) certainly helped - but it was the spirit and creativity of people on the cusp of driving technological and societal change which inspired me.

There is so much good in the world - more than enough to conquer all the misery and hate. But it is mostly untapped potential. While we trap people in the busy-work of filling in forms, harness their labour in repetitive drudgery, waste their minds on vapid schemes to profit from others' naïveté - we can't free them to be the best that they want to be.

Interesting days ahead.

2026 addition: Although I distinctly remember this being described as a "Chatham House" / off-the-record event, Wired wrote it up with attribution. ↩︎

Tim Berners-Lee and the Freedom of The City

@edent — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 10:04:33 +0000

Originally written in 2014 - but lost somehow.

Last week, I had the privilege of being invited into the Guildhall to watch Tim Berners-Lee receive the Honorary Freedom of the City. I was one of a dozen bloggers and tweeters asked to live tweet the ceremony. As The City moves into the digital era, it is beginning to modernise and so this was the first ceremony open to bloggers and the first to be live broadcast on the web.

I got a pretty good seat for the ceremony :-)

The ceremony was full of the pomp and circumstance you'd expect.

Horse-hair wigs, a golden mace, ceremonial chains - the full works.

The ceremony was fairly short, about 30 minutes, mostly taken up with Sir Tim's speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XIUaOyaAds

2024: The video is dead, but you can read a transcript of his speech.

TimBL, as he's known, gave a power talk about how spying on citizens is even more insidious than outright censorship. Why network neutrality must be a cornerstone of any future Internet development. And the overwhelming needs for these rights to be codified in a "Digital Magna Carta."

A passionate and compelling argument - for more information, visit The Web We Want.

Thanks to the City for inviting me, and to Sir Tim for these inspiring words:

The Internet needs to be open so the web can serve humanity - and so that humanity can thrive.
Tim Berners-Lee

You can see contemporary tweets at https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=%23worldwidethanks%20since%3A2014-09-23%20until%3A2014-09-25&src=typd

Quick Thoughts on Google Glass

@edent — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 07:13:44 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.

Well, I've had Google Glass for all of 30 minutes - so I thought I'd give you my first impressions. No, I haven't read the manual. The first thing to note is that it is really well packaged. Everything from the USB cable to the bundled sunglasses are held together beautifully.

As someone who doesn't wear glasses, I found them fairly light and not too intrusive. The screen sits slightly above my line of site but - even when it's off - it is a distraction. It has a tendency to display light refracted from screens and lightbulbs. I almost wish it was larger so the edges were less noticeable.

When the screen is displaying white text on a transparent background, there is a noticeable "rainbow effect". As my eye darts around, there are little spectrum trails ghosting behind the text. I've previously experienced this on cheap DLP projectors - I've no idea why it's present on the Glass.

Compared to something like the Oculus Rift, the screen is great. There's no noticeable "screen door" effect (where you can see the gap between the pixels). That said, it's quite hard to get the focus of the screen perfect - either one side of the other seems permanently…. it's hard to describe… smeary?

The interface is a mixture of simple and maddening. Swiping forward moves you right - which just feel wrong to me. I get that it's moving right through a stack of cards - but it feels like it should be moving me right. Hard to describe - but certainly something which should be user customisable.

Everything is heavily tied into Google's ecosystem. I get that - but it's annoying to find yet another product which forces the beleaguered Google+ upon users. For example it seems to be impossible to share stuff with contacts unless they're on G+. I've got hundreds of contacts in my phone - which is paired via Bluetooth - yet Glass will only send to the half-dozen people who use G+. There just didn't seem to be any obvious way to send a picture to a work contact.

This also causes a problem with Caller ID. My mother called me and all Glass displayed was her number! My Android phone (in my pocket) was displaying her name and photo - and it was paired via BlueTooth - but nothing like that came up on glass.

Call quality was mixed. In an absolutely silent environment, the bone conduction technology works really well with voice calls. As soon as there's a bit of background noise, the quality drops and I had to stick a finger in my ear (literally!) in order to hear anything. Callers weren't overly impressed with the microphone quality from my end.

The various beeps and boops of the operating system work very well - even in a loud environment. I guess the pure tones work better than a human voice.

Finally, the voice interface. There's no doubt about it - you look like a muppet when you suddenly blurt out "OK Glass …. …. OK Glass …. Read aloud …. Read aloud…. cancel."

Voice interfaces haven't become socially acceptable yet. They're loud, crass, and rarely work first time. It's well supplemented by the wink gesture (takes a photo after a 3 second delay - which is just long enough to be irritatingly slow) and swiping at the arm. Tipping one's head to wake the unit looks like you're having a minor tic.

Overall, is this the future? Yeah, probably. But it's easy to see why these aren't on sale to the general public yet. The cost'll come down with mass production - but the user interface is far too alien. The mixture of swipes, dodgy vocal recognition, winking, violently swinging your head, and then sticking your finger in your ear make you look like an idiot. Mind you, I'm sure that people looked weird when the first walkman came out!

The real problem with Glass (after a few hours of playing with it) is that it is intentional crippled by Google. Everything goes via the moribund Google+. There doesn't seem to be any way to get it to integrate with your phone's contacts - or send videos and images to non-Google services.

Google have taken a brave step by releasing this as a technology preview to the wider community. It shows their strengths and the technology's extreme weaknesses.

Can You Power an iBeacon with a Lemon?

@edent — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:34:08 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination.

Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices every single day. Even if cold-fusion brings us unlimited free energy - plugging your gadgets into a wall just seems so primitive!

That's where BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) comes in. It's an ultra low powered transmitter which can be found in FitBits, iBeacons, pacemakers, and all sorts of other devices.

The key, as per its name, is that it uses very little energy. A simple watch battery should be enough to power an iBeacon for a year.

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Today was one of The Lab's regular hackdays. We challenge ourselves to spend a day playing with new technology, trying to get it to do something interesting.

I'm sure you remember from school building a simple power source using a lemon or potato. Zinc plated nails, copper wiring, an acid source, and - hey presto - a lightbulb comes on.

So, can we harness the awesome power of fruit to bring life to a little iBeacon?

We used RedBear Lab's BLE Mini board. It can be powered via USB (boring!) or via a direct electrical contact on the back.

Better BlueTooth Through Chemistry

It's been ages since any of us in The Lab did basic physics and chemistry at school, so we turned to the Mighty Internet for help.

With three lemons wired in parallel, we got approximately 0.5 Volts and 120μAmps.

According to Red Bear's support forum, we'd need about 3 volts and 340μAmps.

With 6 lemons, we were at ~200μAmps, closing in on the figure we needed.

It occurred to us that we may need to construct some kind of super-fruit mega battery in order to get the voltage up as well. I really wish I'd paid more attention in GCSE physics. Sorry Mrs Perkins…

10 is the Magic Number

With 10 C. limon in parallel, we hit 369μAmps! Perfect!

That still wasn't enough to get the BLE Mini board to power up - we needed to raise the voltage. But how?

Errr…. with difficulty…! Turns out it's really frickin' hard to get enough power out of a bunch of lemons to power modest hardware.

So we did what any enterprising startup does - pivot!

Power Extreme!

Ok, so can our juicers deliver sufficient juice to act as an emergency battery for your smartphone?

We found the lowest powered phone we could - the GeeksPhone Keon - running FireFox OS.

In keeping with our fruit theme, we butchered an old BlackBerry charger - and got to work…

Wires stripped, plugged into our lemon battery… What was the result?

Errr… The square root of nowt! Nothing happened. The power wasn't high enough for the phone's charging circuitry to register anything.

We grabbed a Nexus 5, installed a power monitor widget, and tried again.

Ooooooh!

This is the very definition of trickle charging. The amount of energy from 10 lemons, zinc plated nails, and copper wire is just enough to give you a few more minutes of talk time - nothing more. In a MacGyver situation, you're probably better off squeezing the lemons into your enemies' eyes.

Lessons Learned

Hackdays are a great way of playing about with technology and having a bit of experimental fun.

It's temping to think BLE is so efficient that it can be powered from harvested kinetic energy and stray WiFi beams - that's not the case. Modern battery technology is pretty complex - and that's why tiny button cells can power modern electronics and a whole bunch of lemons doesn't even get close.

One of the reasons The Lab exists in O2 is to develop a culture of "Fast Failure". We didn't spend millions of Euros and half-a-dozen months in planning meetings, requesting proposals from suppliers, and updating PowerPoint decks to do this - instead, two of us spend half a day actually trying to build something and finding out pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work.

For those of you wondering just how much of your monthly bill we spent on this? The cost was a couple of quid for the nails and wire, and we had the multimeter already. The lemons cost £3.00 for 10. I wonder if I should have splashed out on organic ones…. ;-)

What's Next

It's possible to power Xmas tree lights from hundreds of Brussels Sprouts. Would it be possible to set up a "Charge your Apple with apples" stand at one of O2's larger stores? Sure! It could make a great marketing stunt - and teach people a little basic science - but, for now, I'll stick to my wall socket.

Toodle pip!

QR Codes on Energy Bills

@edent — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:09:57 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, the follow-up post has fallen down the memory hole. You can still read Sharon's response to it.

Well, we can finally unwrap one of the little projects The Lab has been working on. Along with the Department of Energy and Climate Change we're aiming to stick QR codes on customers' energy bills.

The proposal has the grand name of: "A consultation on proposals to amend domestic energy supply licence conditions - requiring provision of key energy data in a machine readable format"

How Will It Work?

Customers will receive their energy bill as normal. Printed on the bill will be a QR code which lets the customer compare their usage, get energy efficiency advice, and potentially switch to a cheaper tariff.

You can read more on BBC News, The Guardian, Sky News, ITV News, MarketingWeek, The Drum and City AM.

This project has been gestating for a while - being first mentioned in the House of Commons in October 2012 - and is now being empowered via the Energy Act.

This is the first time The Lab has helped with such a stately project - and we certainly hope to do more of this sort of work in the future.

What Next?

We know that QR codes are divisive for some - but they remain the cheapest way to put complex information on a piece of paper. They don't require a proprietary app, and can be used even on really quite basic phones.

We'd love it if you were to respond to the consultation.

Credits

Terence Eden led this project, along with Lab Intern Yuan Phoon.

Paper (Plane) Prototyping

@edent — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 12:34:52 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, all of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination.

One of our missions in The Lab is to introduce the ideas of prototyping and rapid innovation into the business. That's a fairly hefty systemic change for any company - so how do we go about doing it?

Paper aeroplanes.

Yup. Sheets of paper, crudely folded and then thrown are the perfect way to get people collaborating, innovating, testing, and refining. Let me explain…

We took a conference of ~250 people and split them in to teams of 8. Each were giving loads of coloured paper, drinking straws, string, tape, and instruction cards.

They had three tasks to complete (feel free to use these images if you want to run this event for your team - each links to a full size version)

Jumping Through Hoops - throw a plane through a hoop as many times as possible in 30 seconds.

Taken For A Ride - how far can you throw a plane while keeping a pilot safe?

Round The Bend - how many times can you throw and catch a plane around a pole?

We gave each team a scorecard which allowed them 3 attempts at each task - and 60 minutes to score as many points as they could.

A Simple Start

The first planes which people built were, I think it's fair to say, crude. Vaguely remembered childhood skills were dredged up to make serviceable craft.

But, with testing, iteration, and "inspiration" from other teams, new planes began to take flight.

Some of the planes were of a less orthodox nature - yet still managed to complete the task set.

Engineering Complexity

Some were beautiful and baroque piece of engineering which took ages to build - yet fell short of their intended target, veered wildly off course, and nose dived. It's almost like it's a metaphor or something….

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YKP-OThqJi0

Team Work

Even the best designed and build planes still need a competent team working in tandem to deliver results.

Bending The Rules

In each task, teams came up with clever ways around the limitations of the rules.

We saw people using zip wires, stuffing multiple small planes within bigger planes, and - in one memorable case - using trebuchets.

Evolution

Everyone got into the spirit of the event - we saw people attempt a task with one sort of plane, see it fail, then rapidly design another plane, test it privately, and bring it back for another attempt - all within a few minutes.

Some teams started by saying "we don't know how to build a plane" and then realised that the only way you learn is by trying, failing, trying again.

We had teams who were convinced that their design was perfect - only to have to radically reassess what they were doing when faced with competition.

By the end of the hour, every team had build dozens of planes and had experienced the joy of rapid design and prototyping.

What no one did was ring up a big consultancy company, pay a million pounds, and then end up with a poorly performing plane which didn't meet any of the needs of the users. Funny that…

Huge thanks to Jez and Nic for coming up with the paper plane concept, Joe and James for keeping score, and everyone else on The Lab team for helping out with the event. Special thanks to Brendan O'Rourke for letting us experiment at his conference :-)

3D Printing at Over The Air

@edent — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 15:44:53 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.

We had an amazing time at Over The Air 2013. We’ve teamed up with ThingMaker to digitally scan attendees. Our long term aim is to release on GitHub a collection of faces which artists and game designers can re-use.

The definite highlight was scanning Annie, one of the veterans of Bletchley Park.

Our thanks also to Faberdashery who were able to supply us with filament for the 3D printer in exactly the right shade of blue for our logo.
I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on some of their glow-in-the-dark material.

Here are some of the great photos taken by us and our new friends. Special thanks to Rachel Clarke and Simon Kisner

Demoing BlipDrop at Mobile Monday London

@edent — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 16:01:15 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I really loved the idea of geolocated ephemeral content. And I was a little disappointed that the business never saw the potential for it. Maybe I'll find a way to relaunch it in the future.

I’ve been attending Mobile Monday London for years. It’s a great (free!) way to meet people in the mobile industry, to learn about new trends, and to demo products.

Because I know so many people there, it’s always a bit nerve-wracking when I stand up to demonstrate some crazy new idea. Obviously I crave the approval of my peers but, more than that, I don’t want to look like an idiot in front of my friends.

On Monday, I gave BlipDrop its first public demonstration at Mobile Monday Demo Night. We’ve been running for a couple of days with a closed group of 10 beta users so I was eager to see what people thought of it.

I can really recommend getting involved in Mobile Monday. They offer some great free talks, and provide excellent opportunities for new and established businesses.

Massive thanks to Julia Shalet for all her organisational skills, and to Jo Rabin for being such an effective host – indeed, the whole team put on a fantastic event.

Are Megabytes Meaningless To Customers?

@edent — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:25:36 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer..

youtube.com/watch?v=nTEqKd92kcI

Pop quiz: How many MB did you use watching that YouTube video?

When dealing with data usage, a familiar cry in the telco world is “Customers just don’t understand what a MB is!”

Is this true?

The theory goes something like this…

Some elements of a phone bill are easy to conceptualise.
Customers understand how many minutes they’ve used, texts they’ve sent, etc.
Telcos are able to explain the usage limits that apply to these elements of their customers’ tariffs.
Customers are happy because they know what to expect.

So far, so good. But now we move to data usage…

Data is fairly ephemeral.
There’s no way for customers to know how much data they are using.
Customers get angry and complain because they don’t know what a MB is and what it allows them to do.

It’s fairly easy for anyone to guess how long their last phone conversation was.
I’m fairly technical – I know the difference between my Megabyte and Mebibyte – but I couldn’t tell you how many MBs a paritcular YouTube video uses.

Is This A Problem?

There’s a very superficial solution to this problem – give everyone unlimited* data.
*Fair use policy applies, not between 9AM and 7:30AM, except weekends, terms and conditions apply, excludes P2P, VoIP cost extra, only on a 36 month contract, see back of pack for details.

Let’s assume, for now, that’s a little way off.

We have three questions:

Do customers understand what a MB is?
Can customers tell how many they have used?
How can Telcos educate their customers?

Does The Average Customer Understand?

No. I wish they did – hell, I wish I understood.
A recent article on the BBC goes some way to explain how widespread the confusion is.

This confusion spreads to the fixed line Internet world.

The New York Times conducted a brief survey which reflected just how hard it is to explain this to customers.

So, How Much Is A MB?

Try to visualise how much Internet usage 1MB is. Various providers in the UK have tried – and all produce fairly different estimates.
According to O2.co.uk:

Every 500MB of UK data will allow you to (approx):

Send 500,000 emails, without attachments

or send 1,000 emails, with photos attached

or visit 5,000 simple sites, like Twitter or your favourite blog

or visit 1,500 rich content sites, like bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk or yahoo.co.uk

or download 50 (low quality) or 12 (high quality) music tracks

or watch 60 YouTube videos, about 4.5 minutes long

According to Vodafone.co.uk:

Service	Usage	Average data size
TV	Watching a 30 min episode of a series	90MB
You Tube	Music Video – 4 mins	11MB
Radio App	10 mins	15MB
Facebook	15mins with no video streaming	5MB
Email	100 emails sent/received with no attachment	2.5MB
Email with photo or doc attachment	10 emails sent/received containing attachment	18MB
Web Browsing	100 web pages	20MB
Web Browsing	1 hour	26MB
Google Maps	10mins	6MB

Whereas Everything Everywhere talk about how much you can do in general.

A chat with a T-Mobile UK rep reveals that PAYG customers get “unlimited browsing – but a 500MB download limit.” Huh?

So, as clear as mud.

What Is Data?

One of the problems is that the amount of data a service uses changes over time. Recent studies have shown the average webpage now consumes 30% more data than it used to.

This is vividly illustrated by looking at Orange’s old data advice, which used to state.

1MB is approximately equal to:

160 wap pages
or viewing 20 web pages
or downloading 10 games
or downloading one high quality music track
sending around 100 short emails each containing up to 100 words
or sending/downloading up to four video clips

Reasonable enough in 2009 – but today you’d struggle to find 1 game – let alone 10 – that weighs in at under 1MB.

Even if we assume that users know that 1MB = 1024KB, and that YouTube uses roughly 1MB per minute, and that their emails are all under 1MB – they still don’t know what all the apps on their device are doing.

What if Angry Birds decides to download new levels? What if someone emails them a 10MB attachment? What if their DropBox app decides to upload all their photos?

How can anyone keep track?

Keeping Track

Modern versions of Android have a data use tracker hidden away in the menus.

The iPhone gives its users a slightly less detailed view.

But the problem with these is that the customer needs to make a conscious choice to view these apps.

In my decade in the mobile industry (not all of it spent at Telefonica!), I’ve tried half a dozen different ways to help customers understand their usage.

I was involved in a crazy plan to bill users by time. With the rise of background data usage, that died an ignoble death.
One company tried to sell me a system which would charge for web browsing, but not for email.
I looked at artificially slowing down data once a certain cap was reached.
We investigated charging for separate services – YouTube is £X per month, Facebook is £Y per day etc.
Using operator apps and portals which would give a real-time summary of where all your data allowance had gone – YouTube was 50MB today, Facebook 3MB this week etc.
Sending reminder texts to customers to inform them of their usage.

All these services exist throughout the world. All of these services fail at their primary purpose – educating customers. They serve only to confuse customers and obfuscate the process by which they are billed.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible – even for a committed geek like me – to understand data usage in the same way that call and text usage is intuitively understood.

I know that my minutes have gone down because I placed a call to my mother. I have no idea when my PodCast client decides to kick off a download – nor how much data it is using by doing so.

What we need to do is constantly inform customers of how much they’re using and how much of their allowance they have left. Either daily or weekly alerts – or when they’ve used 10%, 25% of their allowance.

An interesting alternative is Vodafone UK’s Data Test Drive. They give customers 3 months of unlimited data – at the end of the trial, Vodafone tells the customer how much data they used on average. The goal being that the customer can then make a more educated choice of tariff based on experience of “regular” data usage.

Until we can give every user unlimited data (at what speed? With “fair use”? Domestic or international?) we need to clearly communicate to users what they’re using and how much they have left.

What do you think? Would you appreciate a regular SMS telling you how many of these ethereal data packets you’ve used? Or is there a better way?

Apps For Good

@edent — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:34:28 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer.

Last night, InMobi attended cdi’s Apps For Good in London. What a wonderful event!

Teams of school-children presenting their ideas for apps that could change their world.

But this wasn’t just kids showing off drawings of theoretical apps, the Apps For Good course that runs in these schools get participants thinking about problem definition, market research, business cases, and – crucially – building apps. Using Google’s Android App Inventor, the students were able to create working prototypes of their applications.

It’s great to see young people building amazing apps which have the power to influence the world around them. We were particularly impressed with how professionally the apps were presented and how confidently they answered questions from the “Dragons’ Den”. There’s a podcast of the event available.

Too often apps are seen as frivolous distractions from the real world. The pupils had developed apps which tackled bullying in schools, a fun way to look at personal finance, and a translation app to help Bengali speaking parents understand what’s going on at their child’s school.

Huge thanks to the pupils from Central Foundation Girls’ School and http://www.high-trees.org/ for being so committed and developing such wonderful apps. You can also read more about the event at Tom Curtis’s blog.

We’ve decided to join the Apps For Good “Expert Community” to see what help and support InMobi can offer these young developers. If you’re interested in helping, you can

Fill in the expert signup form
Join the LinkedIn group
Follow AppsForGood on twitter

So, what apps are you developing that are going to change the world?

Back to BlackBerry

@edent — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:34:29 +0000

This is a Necropost - rescued from AudioBoo and transcribed by AI because I'm lazy.

🔊 Back to BlackBerry boo
🎤 edent

💾 Download this audio file.

Hello there, AudioBoo. I'm just in the middle of another grand phone experiment. I'm moving back to BlackBerry.

Yes, after about a year, year and a half of being an Android Boy, it's time to go back to BlackBerry. So I've picked up the Torch, which is the slider and I'm having mixed feelings. It's hard to go back.

I wanted to go back to a BlackBerry because it does seem so much better than the Android. The the email is more reliable. The calendaring is better. The the the text messaging, you know, works and the delivery reports happen in the same way which I find with Android are really quite weird. And this new BlackBerry seems to do a lot of things a lot better than the old BlackBerry. So this is OS six. So the browser is really good, but I'm I'm finding it a bit... It's a bit disorienting. Getting back to it.

The keyboard was the main reason that I got this because I love a hard keyboard. I just I just can't type on the on-screen keyboards on iPhones or on Androids or on anything. I make spelling mistakes. I can't get up a good rhythm. But this the keyboard here is I don't know whether it's slightly smaller or the keys aren't quite as firm, but it just doesn't feel right. And, oh, I don't know. It concerns me. The the camera's nice.

So there doesn't seem to be a hole for a for a lanyard for for wrist strap, which is a little disconcerting because that's how I killed my last BlackBerry by not using a lanyard, and it slipped out and went thunk uh onto the cold, hard pavement of Dusseldorf.

One other thing, which I'm finding slightly weird, is the the BlackBerry's insistence that I have a SIM in here. So with Android, I can do everything with on on just Wi-Fi. I can download apps. I can send emails, but here it it doesn't seem to let me do much without a SIM so I can get on the browser. OK, but going into APP World says you do not have sufficient wireless coverage or your connection to the wireless network is turned off, but it's not. I've got WiFi. So seems rather beholden to the SIM.

I'm gonna try it. You know, I'd give it a few a few days, maybe a few weeks. Let's see how I get on with it. It's got a nice nice clunking slide. Listen to that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Touchscreen is weird. The touchscreen is good on the on the BlackBerry Torch. But what's weird is the buttons below it are clickable. Whereas on Android, Certainly the last two Androids I've used, they've not been. So you have to touch on the screen, but click on the bars below the buttons below, which is is weird, but the track balls nice.

I'm sure I'll get used to it. And hopefully, my next my next audio boo will come from a BlackBerry.

Come on, AudioBoo team, Let's make a BlackBerry client. Well, client, when I say "we" I mean "you". And by "make" I mean "code furiously".

Right, onwards and upwards.

Luncheon vouchers?!?!

@edent — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:34:47 +0000

🔊 Luncheon voucher boo
🎤 edent

💾 Download this audio file.

Hello, AudioBoo and Internet World. I'm just weirded out. I've been sent as payment for a small project I did... Luncheon vouchers!

I know it's churlish to complain when people pay you, but I've literally in my life, in 31 years of living on planet earth, I have never even seen a Luncheon Voucher. I thought they died out in the 80s, but I'm here with £14 worth of 50p luncheon vouchers. I don't know if I have to use them individually or all at once, but it's just weird.

Why if you were going to pay someone and offer them a voucher, wouldn't you say have an Amazon voucher? You know, they don't cost any extra to send out and they can be emailed, used everywhere, or at least offer a choice. You know, would you like PayPal or a high street voucher at play.com, but just to send out Luncheon Vouchers?

It's a bit weird isn't it?

N8 Fail - Reasons Why the Nokia N8 Sucks

@edent — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:16:39 +0000

Way back in 2010, I was sent a Nokia N8 to review. It was dreadful. Simply one of the worst devices I've ever used. My original ranty blog posts have been lost from tumblr, so I've reposted it here as a single post. It is pretty slapdash. I've added some commentary. Warning! There be swearing ahead!

On signing in to the N8, I was prompted to log in with my Ovi account. I have an account, but I can't remember the password. In order to retrieve it I must prove that I am human.

Oh, cool! A captcha when I try to recover my password. I’ll just type it in… Wait! What? I have to remember the captcha as well? Grrr….

Not only do I have to memorise it, I've got to try and type it in on a crappy T9 keypad! Why? Because the N8 doesn't support a portrait QWERTY keyboard!

One of the first things I do on a review phone is wipe it.

Considering how often you’ll need to resent the damn phone, this isn’t a very professional message. Why can’t the message box expand? Fckd if I knw.

This is a delightful usability fail.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/N8-Usability-Fail-Small.mp4

Clicking “delete” pops up a box with a header and Yes/No buttons. Only the buttons are clickable.

Clicking on a link pops up a box with a header, a cancel button and a blank button. The header is clickable.

Consistent – kənˈsɪs tənt

I JUST WANT TO DISMISS THIS MEETING REMINDER!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/N8-Dismiss-reminder-small.mp4

NOKIA - WHY DO YOU HATE ME?

The web browser is pretty crap.

Fuck No? Why would I ever want to use a secure connection on the Internet? Guess what? There’s no way to permanently remove this “helpful” message.

The misleading battery indicator was a nice touch.

There are only 5 bars showing. Mind you, there are only 7 bars in total. That’s nice and intuitive, isn’t it…?

The entire UI was a collection of bugs held together with bug juice.

A) WTF? There’s loads of space there?
B) What is going on in the background?
C) Android is quaking in its boots.

There were loads of weird help options hidden within the UI. Here are two of my favourites.

Just what’s needed to beat the iPhone. A “Breathing Light”. What. The. Juddering. Fuck?

Damn. And I was going to sell the N8 for scrap.

The UI was a weird mish-mash of "modern" touchscreen Symbian and "physical buttons" Symbian. Here's a particularly good example.

See that weird symbol on the Zero key? That launches the web browser. No! Seriously! It does! Because everyone starts to dial a phone number and then thinks “Damn, wish I could go to the web instead…”
Fun fact - 99% of people surveyed think that the icon resembles a phoenix rising from the ashes. It doesn’t.

Symbian was just full of legacy issues. Because of the N8's "unique" unibody design, you can’t open it. No user replaceable battery. No switching the phone off to change SIM card. Naturally, the OS hadn't been updated to reflect this.

Wait… What? Once I rip my fingers to shreds trying to open the rubber flap to get at the SIM card (no iPhone blessed paper-clip here) I have to restart the phone? Why? iPhone doesn’t do this. Android doesn’t do this. In fact…. no phone I’ve ever had asks you to restart the phone when you change SIM. What gives, Symbian?

The N8 does not have Ovi preinstalled!

When you go to the app store for the first time, you go to a website which then asks you to install Ovi.

This process takes ages. Well… 2 minutes. See for yourself in the video.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Nokia-Install-Ovi-Small.mp4

Why Nokia? Why? Why not just pre-install Ovi? Would it really be that hard for your teams to talk to each other?

Oh, and while you’re at it, sort out the install process. When the bar reaches the end - that means the install is done. It shouldn’t mean I have to scratch my ass for another few minutes.

While I’ve got your attention - why don’t those animated gifs rotate smoothly? What’s wwwwwwwwwith the judddddddddddddddddder?

FYI - here’s how it works on Android. Click on Market - Market launches.

Pretty much the same on iPhone and BlackBerry. You guys should totally buy one of your competitors’ devices. They have this thing called “out of the box experience”. It rocks.

Of course, once you install Ovi - it doesn't work properly.

My thought process…

1) Hey! There’s a WebTV icon taking up valuable screen space. I bet there’s something really amazing in there….

2) I… uh… oh… What? A single icon? No cool stuff for me? Why not just take me into Ovi rather than pushing another icon? Oh well… at least I’ve already installed Ovi. I can just click on the Ovi icon and go straight to the Ovi marketplace I already downloaded. Right?

3) Kill. Me. Now. Despite having already installed Ovi - this piece of stainless steel encrusted excrement has taken me to the web and wants me to download it again? Ah… no… it says I should download it again. But it automatically opens the Ovi store. I hope this is worth it.

4) This is literally the most depressing thing I’ve seen. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Erotic Bollywood. I bet people from / in India are well chuffed to see India Today on there. What else is there? Hmmm… a 1 star rated “Gazzetta”. Something called “E!” which is apparently a utility. Or I can pay 4GBP for a cartoon.

No.

No. I simply don’t believe that this is what I am being offered. I refuse to believe that Nokia are this cack-handed. I’ve obviously got a defective unit with a defective Ovi store. That is literally the only explanation that makes sense. Who in their right mind at Nokia would have approved this? An icon that leads to another icon that leads to a web page that leads to a store with only 5 items in it?

Are Nokia playing a practical joke on me? IT’S NOT FUNNY GUYS!

This is the Nokia Ovi twitter client which is installed by default. It’s called social.

Notice the delightful light blue text on a light grey background. That’s SUPER EASY to read.

The client doesn’t support new style retweets either.

FFS. Shooting a video on the excellent 12MP camera. Can I play it back? Can I fuck.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/N8-Play-Video-Small.mp4

I hope that my N8 is broken. I really do. That’s the only excuse I can think of. How hard is it to test these things?

It's not just me! My good friend RadioKate was practically in tears describing this horrible phone.

My original feedback to Nokia was "I actively resent using this device." It was true. The N8 was the nail in the coffin for Symbian. The N95 came out before the original iPhone and was hugely competitive for a non-touchscreen device. They saw the twin threat from Apple and Android and slapped a crappy touchscreen shim on their OS. It wasn't nearly enough. They pissed away their advantages until it was too late. The inadvisable switch to Windows Phone then killed the company. Shame.

XMTS - X Marks The Spot

@edent — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Back in 2010 I tried to launch a Location Based Services app. It didn't quite work - mostly because I didn't have the business acumen to sell it onwards. Still, here are the slides, audio, and some photos of the presentation I did at BarCampBrighton 5.
Terence, 2016.

Location Based QR Codes - Introducing //xmts.mobi/ from Terence Eden

🔊

💾 Download this audio file.

Porn and Social Media #SMCLondon

@edent — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:00:54 +0000

This was a talk I gave at Social Media Camp London in 2009. In it, I describe my experiences working with user-generated-content, pornography, and other adult material. This was one of my earliest BarCamp talks, and contains several ideas which now seem quite outdated.
I was attempting to warn people about accepting UGC - not only the danger it posed to their sites, but also to their sanity.
The tone is a bit too jokey in places, and some of my ideas around sex, gender, sexuality, and the like are quite naïve.
Terence - 2017

Video originally by Damien Austin-Walker - rehosted by kind permission.

Contemporary Tweets

Photo by
Basheera Khan CC by-nc-sa

Speech to TUC

@edent — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:53:40 +0000

Terry Eden (Connect) speaking in support of Composite Motion 10.

I want to focus on public procurement and the role it can play in driving forward social and environmental goals and, in particular, raising labour standards. The money public authorities spend on buying goods and services amounts to £108 billion every year from major capital projects to buying office stationery. Our public money supports private business. It is right that our public money should be used to encourage the private sector to support social goals. It is in the public interest that companies invest in high labour standards and measure which protect the environment. It is in the public interest that companies are good employers, and it is in the public interest that public authorities should go beyond laying down simple technical specifications for goods and services. Contracts should oblige companies to meet social and environmental goals. For example, in the interest of equal opportunity and social cohesion, publicly funded contracts should require companies to be actively committed to race equality. I have chosen this example because, in a Cabinet report, the Government themselves have recommended this course of action.

As we heard yesterday from Ken Livingstone, the LDA is already working hard to ensure that the Olympic contracts set new standards in social justice.

A new European law, which must be implemented by January, enables and encourages the inclusion of social goals in the tendering process. There is support from some sections of the business community; those good employers who invest in high labour standards but have to compete with those who do not.

The Government, however, appear very reluctant to make any practical steps in this direction. All around we hear the sound of dragging feet. Commitment to real progress from the heart of the Government is lukewarm at best. Value for money is defined too narrowly. Complaints about burdens on business are accepted too readily and social goals are abandoned too easily. That is why we must keep up the pressure. Writing social goals into public procurement contracts is not difficult. It is not in conflict with EU policy and it can be done, and unions, both in the public and private sectors, can work together to make sure that good intentions become real commitments. Please support.

Transcription from 2005 Congress verbatim report

Doctor Who "Rose" - a review of the CulTV review

@edent — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 11:54:18 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from one of my ancient USENET posts.

In an exclusive preview of the new series, GEORGE MURPHY tells CulTV why the show is possibly the worst thing you will watch on British Television in 2005
CulTV's review of "Rose"

Here's my exclusive review of CulTV's review.

Get over it, Granddad.

I sat and watched it with a bunch of guys (and girls! You know, girls - the ones that are a bit like boys but smell nicer) all in our mid-twenties. We loved it.

I've never seen a "live" episode of Doctor Who - only the repeats on UK Gold or the occasional video a well meaning uncle would buy me.

Let me put it painfully simply for you. The old Doctor Who is rubbish.

The old Doctor Who takes seven episodes to tell a short story. That's not an arc, nor a well paced tale - it's just a measure to keep the budget down.

The old Doctor Who had weird synthesiser squarks and squeals instead of background music.

The old Doctor Who required an encyclopaedic knowledge of past episodes to have any idea of what was going on.

The old Doctor Who had wobbly sets. This was not part of its charm - it made it look crap.

Now - before the lynch mobs attack - let me say one thing. I love the old Doctor Who. My Logopolis VHS tape has holes worn in it, I've played it so much. I once went to a convention and *gasp* had a good time. I've had heated arguments in pubs about whether Tom Baker's Doctor had the right to blow up the Daleks in Genesis.

I love the old Doctor Who. But it is painfully of its time.

Think of Doctor Who like Shakespeare. I love a bit of Shakey - I've acted in a few of his plays and I've even been to the Globe. It's damn good stuff. But do I want every waking moment of the TV schedules filled with thees, thys and wherefore arts? No. I appreciate that it belongs to a specific time and place and, if you want to get people into it again you need to do a Baz Luhrman and make a hyped up, media savvy, tragically hip Romeo+Juliet.

Do you know why?

Because the storys and the themes are universal. How they're dressed up isn't important as long as the story gets through to people.

This new Doctor Who show has to compete with 24, The Office, Spooks, The West Wing, Ant 'n' Dec. And to do this, it needs to play them at their own game. And it does it well.

The other night I watched the beginnings of a great new TV series called Doctor Who. It was different, kooky, funny, creepy, engaging and well made. I'd like to see how it turns out before you consign it to the scrap heap.

All you're doing is criticizing this show because Christopher Ecclestone isn't wearing a long scarf. And how can it be Doctor Who without a long, multi coloured scarf?

I also have a Blackberry

@edent — Tue, 11 May 2004 12:26:35 +0000

I use a RIM Blackberry (6720 I think) to get my emails and browse the web on the move. I think its interface is deeply lacking and the hardware is flakey to say the least.

But it has an amazing keyboard. I couldn't imagine typing anything this long using predictive text - or even handwriting recognition.

I still love my Treo 180 - but its consigned to a drawer until there's a Blackberry client for it. The same goes for any smartfone - unless my email comes to me I'm just not interested. (Imported from my old blog)

Review: Teal Movie

@edent — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 12:34:40 +0000

This is a Necropost. Resurrected from a long forgotten PDA review website.

Summary

TealPoint's TealMovie 3.50 claims to do the impossible - and it delivers.

Palm Pilots are great for displaying text, there's no doubt about that, but I've never seen one handle full motion graphics with any kind of clarity before... until now. TealMovie 3.50 allows you to convert AVI and Quicktime movies into a format that can be played on your Palm.

There are limitations, of course. A lot depends on the speed of your PDA. For the purposes of this test I was using a Handspring Treo 180 running OS3.5h - different machines will perform with varying quality.

The first thing to note is that, depending on your PDA, the movies you will produce will only be 160*160 10fps greyscale (on a Zire or m100) and up to 320*320 25fps true colour if you have a very modern PDA. I successfully got up to 20fps, which is more than suitable for watching short movies.

Your PDA's speaker also limits the quality of the audio reproduction. Although the software can drive the speaker to incredible volumes, the fidelity is very poor. Listening to speech is fine, but once music comes into the equation the sound is little more than a garbled mess.

The software comprises of two parts - makemvoi.exe, which performs the conversion on your PC, and tealmovi.prc that allows the movies to be played on your device.

If you have the latest multi-gigahertz machine the video encoding process will fly by. On a more modest machine it can take up to a second to convert one frame. I was using a 750MHz Duron that took about 2.5 times real time to convert a movie.

About the software

The interface for makemovi isn't wonderful. It suffers the same usability flaws as products like TMPEncode - too many option presented in an unclear and inconsistent manner. It allows you to set the resolution, speed and orientation of the movie and allows you to make minor adjustments to the audio.

The files it produces are impressive in size, a 6MB Quicktime Movie (Kylie's Agent Provocateur, if you must know!) compresses to around 3.5MB. This may vary depending on whether you choose colour, high resolution etc. Movies can be stored in your PDA's internal memory of on a media card.

The main problem with makemovi is that it is very particular as to which movies it will encode. There is no way to encode an mpeg, nor DivX. Many movies would convert video, but not sound. If they could bundle a few more codecs into the software it would improve its usefulness immensely.

The playback software (tealmovi.prc) is very good. It presents you with a list of the movies you have loaded and during playback allows you to adjust the Gamma Contrast (making the movie brighter or darker), the volume and the position in the movie. Playback is incredibly smooth as long as you encode in a format that is suitable for your machine. The encoding software does give you some idea of what your machine can handle, but it's best to experiment.

So, the software does exactly what it says it will - it allows smooth video playback from your PDA. The real question is whether that's a good thing...

Conclusion

I'll admit, it was fun to have Kylie in my pocket and at my beck and call... but my Palm screen just isn't designed to watch full motion video. If you have an external media card you could place a full-length movie on it, but for the time it would take to encode is prohibitively long. The quality, while impressive, isn't sufficient to keep your eyes from melting after a few minutes and the sound quality isn't good enough to stop it annoying the people around you.

The software is ideal for showing off and if you have a fast and full colour PDA you could watch The Simpsons on the way to work. This is an amazing piece of software engineering. It squeezed every last drop of power from my Palm and gave impressive results. For $19.99 it's a fun way to show off your gadgets, but for general entertainment, I think I'll stick to reading eBooks for now. If someone wants to send me a Sony Clie to see what results it produces on a high-end machine - I'd be more than happy to change my opinion!

Icons are usually not culture-neutral

@edent — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 19:41:01 +0000

This is a necropost - resurrected from one of my ancient USENET posts.

Some web-browsers use "Stop Loading" icons that were represented with USA stop signs. To anyone else in the world, that's just a red octagon.

Similarly the spell-check button in MS products is a tick over an "ABC". I don't know what the spell check button is like in countries with a different lexicography.

Also, in countries which read right to left, are the back and forward buttons reversed?

If you are only writing software for citizens of your own country, you can probably get away with icons. However, if you have a wider userbase, why not use just text (or place text with the icons)?

To my mind I prefer plain text - here's why.

Depending on the size of the icon, there can be more screen real-estate. Usually this is the opposite, but this is outweighed by...
Never having to wait for a tool-tip or read the help file.
Very easy to internationalise without worrying about cultural differences.

I was doing a usability study the other day and I asked "What do you think would happen if you pressed this button?" The answer surprised me, "I wouldn't. I know which buttons I need to use. If I press anything else I might break it [the machine]."

Most of us here (I imagine) would either press a button to find out what it did, or read the help file. It turns out that people who have been trained in one aspect of a program usually wouldn't dream of expanding their horizons. This is slightly reduced when text is used rather than icons.

However, a short description can be as unhelpful as a long one. Does "Attach" mean "Attach this to something else" or "Attach something else to this"?

The other problem is that it can be hard to differentiate between a textbutton bar and a menu bar. The subtle underlining of menu bars is probably not enough (and is turned off in WinXP!)

So, in conclusion (to a rather rambling post!) it's impossible to get an icon to work as effectively as a description, but text brings with it the problems of space and mental-model clashing.