Terence Eden’s Blog – Regular nonsense about tech and its effects

On the 6th of January 1995, viewers of BBC Two were treated to a new series of
Waiting for Godot
Bottom. Stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel,

I couple of years ago, I developed ActivityBot - the simplest way to build Mastodon Bots. It is a single PHP file which can run an entire ActivityPub server and it is less than 80KB.
It works! You can follow @openbenches@bot.openbenches.org to see the latest entries on OpenBenches.org, and @colours@colours.bots.edent.tel for a slice of colour in your day, and @solar@solar.bots.edent.tel to see what my solar panels are up to....

Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a...

When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced.
The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything developed in-house by the state is available under an OSI Approved licence. The UK is generally pretty relaxed about people, companies, and states re-using its code. There's no...