Bitcoin Sucks - But It Doesn't Have To!

Bitcoin me! 1JDDn6cHgzqsRtgQJZwhToJPAX4oYZg19T If that “sentence” makes any sense to you – you’re not a muggle. Muggles (for want of a better epithet) don’t want to invest a lot of time into things which don’t fit with their mental model of how the world works. Without getting into a philosophical discussion on what money is [...]

 
When is a URL not a URL?

Summary Twitter’s way of linking URLs is broken. It’s annoying to users, and a pain in the arse to developers. This quick post talks about the problem and offers a solution. I’ve raised a bug with Twitter and I hope you’ll star it as important to you. Summary Twitter’s way of linking URLs is broken. [...]

 
A Pun About Google Plus and The Circles of Hell

Google Plus has a serious flaw. It’s summed up in this question: Why are you following me? I know who I want to share my “I hate my job” posts, and “Oh, my cat is so cute” pictures – but I talk about a wide range of things, not all of which you’ll be interested [...]

 
Email Via QR Codes

The Metro have been on quite a QR splurge recently – this is their latest effort encouraging people to write in to the paper. On the surface, it’s quite a simple idea – yet Metro have needlessly complicated it. The Process The simplest process would be Scan Code Send Email That’s not what Metro have [...]

 
OAuth Will Murder Your Children - for one week only!

Why doesn’t Twitter’s OAuth let me specify the length of time a 3rd party has access to my account? Take a look at all the crap you’ve given access to your Twitter account. Are you ever going to use that “See how many of your friends like cheese” app again? No. Long time readers will [...]

 
The Design Of Everyday Hotel Rooms

One of the most influential books I have ever read is Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things“. In the book, Norman rails against the usability flaws which seek to undermine our comfort and sanity. Everything from lightswitches which never seem to have a consistent state, to to alarm clocks with impossible to figure out [...]

 
Google Contacts Copyright Madness

Google has rightly received praise for its reworked “Contacts” functionality. But there is still a rather glaring error. One of the things I love to do is add images to my contacts. It gives me a visual cue when I’m scrolling through looking for a person, it prompts my memory when I see the face [...]

 
Pair & Go Wii Fit Battery Pack - Rubbish!

I want to tell you a story about really appalling industrial design.  This isn’t about a nuclear reactor melting down due to covered switches, or even lethal doses of radiation – but of a much more sinister threat…. Pair and Go’s battery pack for the Wii Fit! Take a look at their promotional image – [...]

 
Bugs in Twitter Text Libraries

The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter’s style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a [...]

 
The Perfect Twitter Spam Attack?

This morning, when I logged on to Twitter, I saw a user who I didn’t recognise tweeting away in my timeline. I wracked my brains thinking about how they could have gotten in there before I realised it was a long-dormant friend who had changed their name and avatar. But, in thinking about how a [...]

 
Hashtag Standards

This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I’ve done. It’s a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a [...]

© 2011 Terence Eden has a BlogSuffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

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