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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The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before ‘queer’…
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Yup - I'm still banging on about this! This time, in R Result The colours are wrong, and the labels need adjustment - but not bad for a few lines of code! Code library(tidyverse) library(rnaturalearth) library(rnaturalearthdata) library(sf) centre <- 160 # NZ mostly centred, prevents Africa and South America wrapping. projection <- "eqearth" # Other…
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I see this quote pop up occasionally: Nikola Tesla's last message to his mother: "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation." pic.twitter.com/OmfbsC5GHR — World of Engineering (@engineers_feed) July 25, 2021 But what's the source of it? The most prominent source appears to be…
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After my rant the other day about Adobe Digital Editions, I discovered libgourou by Grégory Soutadé libgourou is a free implementation of Adobe's ADEPT protocol used to add DRM on ePub files. It overcome the lacks of Adobe support for Linux platforms. There are a few limitations, but nothing too serious: Only ePub is supported.…
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It's useful to share negative results. Not every experiment has an amazing or successful outcome. tl;dr you can't register Punycode .ss domains. This also means Internet users in South Sudan can't register domains using their own writing system. Background The Republic of South Sudan became independent and joined the United Nations back in 2011. A…
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Adobe's accursed eBook DRM is just the worst. Not only does it lock up books that you have purchased - but it's impossible to use sensibly on Linux. Sure, you can futz around with Docker, WINE, and old versions of Python - and if you're lucky, you might get a book out of it. I…
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Unconscious bias: persistent, unintentional prejudiced behaviour that clashes with our consciously held beliefs. We know that it exists, to corrosive and even lethal effect. We see it in medicine, the workplace, education, policing, and beyond. But when it comes to uprooting our prejudices, we still have far to go. With nuance, compassion, and ten years'…
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The Doctor and Rose arrive in an underground vault in Utah in the near future. The vault is filled with alien artefacts. Its billionaire owner, Henry van Statten, even has possession of a living alien creature, a mechanical monster in chains that he has named a Metaltron. Seeking to help the Metaltron, the Doctor is…
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I've been experimenting with Amazon's Polly service. It's their fancy text-to-sort-of-human-style-speech system. Think "Alexa" but with a variety of voices, genders, and accents. Here's "Brian" - their English, male, received pronunciation voice - reading John Betjeman's poem "Slough": The pronunciation of all the words is incredibly lifelike. If you heard it on the radio, it…
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