My wife likes to set reminders for herself in Google Calendar. Recently, she added a note to her personal Google Calendar reading "Email alice@example.com to discuss pay rise" and set the date for a few months from now. She'd had a discussion with her boss, Alice, and they'd agreed to talk about salary later in the year. A few moments later, Alice sent her a "Meeting Accepted" email. What... The...? Although pretty embarrassing, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been "Email…
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Numbers matter to some people. It's sometimes not important who did something first - but rather who did things on "milestone" numbers. Here are the billionth messages posted on Twitter. 1,000,000,000 annchan@annchan2「ほのちゃんに歯が生えた」のほのかちゃんがもう１９歳て！あれから１９年！http://tinyurl.com/5lrcjv❤️ 424💬 5🔁 005:49 - Tue 11 November 2008 Although Ann is still on Twitter, the website they pointed to is long since gone. 2,000,000,000 Star1051@Star1051Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine - 11:11 PM vis…
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I've just launched a campaign to get the IEC Power Symbol into Unicode! A couple of months ago, I asked this question on HackerNews I was looking for the electrical "standby" symbol - AKA IEC5009 / IEEE1621. You know, the circle with the line through it. The one that's on every single bloody piece of electronic equipment produced since the mid-1970s. It's not in the Unicode standard. I can, if I want, have a snowman ☃ or a reversed rotated floral bullet ☙. What other useful and/or imp…
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I guess most newspapers use the same CMS to add articles for their printed edition and their web edition. It's mostly ok - but when a journalist (or copy editor) creates content, they should always think about all the ways it can be displayed. Even if they had inserted an image of The Attorney General in the website, there's no guarantee that it would be displayed to the right of the text. For example, on a mobile site it may be below. …
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There is a new API in town! HTML5 will (soon) let you make the user's device vibrate. What fun! Obviously, it's useful for triggering alerts, improved immersivness during gameplay, and all sorts of other fun things like sending Morse Code messages via vibration. At the moment, Chrome (and other Android browsers) ask for permission before accessing features such as geo-location, camera, address book etc. This is a security measure to prevent your private information leaving your hands…
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I have been reading a wonderful account of how The ANC in South Africa developed and used encryption to avoid persecution by the Apartheid regime. The article is a good 15,000 words and will take you some time to read. It is a fascinating account of how an ersatz encryption technology was developed by enthusiastic amateurs using acoustic couplers, DTMF, tape recorders, and early mobile phones. I'm going to ignore the technical aspects - which are wonderful to read - and talk about the human…
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In app design, we often talk about designing for the user in context. For example, a taxi app can't rely on a perfect GPS signal in a crowded city, a user in the countryside may not have brilliant bandwidth, battery life is not infinite so we should limit certain features when power levels are low. The common theme in those examples is that we are designing for the phone's context, not the user's context. We rarely say "let's introduce a left-handed option" or "do we need a night reading…
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As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm sick of people not being able to spell or pronounce shkspr.mobi correctly. So I've decided to double down and start using my alternate domain 莎士比亚.org. It's pronounced "Sha-shi-bi-ya", if that helps. Getting my email account set up with my hosting provider was easy enough but it turned out to be quite tricky to send email to my account. This is what happened when I tried to send an email from Gmail to test@莎士比亚.org: Error The address "test@莎士比亚.org" i…
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Updated - see end of post! I am not a happy bunny. Last year, while trying to buy a house, Symantec's MessageLabs decided to block my Estate Agent and my bank from receiving any emails from my personal domain. In the middle of a rather stressful house purchase, I had to swap my email addresses and convince the parties involved to all to use the new one. This year, they're blocking me from contacting media organisations, potential clients, and the Houses of Parliament. What on Earth is…
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I've started talking a lot more over VoIP. The microphone on my MacBook Air is basic, but serviceable - so I thought I'd treat myself to a new mic headset. I went with the HP Premium Digital Headset from Amazon. The headset is USB - and worked instantly with Ubuntu Linux: It even has a dedicated "mute" button to cut off the microphone. Handy when on a conference call. The only problem was, the stereo was reversed! Testing the left speaker played a sound through the right, and vice versa. …
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Let's play "Spot The Difference"! The review on the left comes from the North American version of Plants vs. Zombies™ 2 whereas the one on the right is from the Worldwide version of Plants vs. Zombies™ 2. The above screenshot was taken shortly after the release of the North American version. The scores as of today have harmonised (4.2/5 vs 4.4/5) but there is still a disproportionate number of 1 star reviews on the American version. Both have the same version number (1.8.265164), release da…
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The most distressing movie moment I experienced when I was a child, was watching R2-D2 being shot by a TIE fighter towards the end of Star Wars. (Spoiler!) The sheer callousness of a "baddie" deliberately inflicting pain on a cute a loveable character is, I suppose, understandably upsetting - especially to a small child. I also got upset at C-3PO being dismantled in The Empire Strikes Back, and at Johnny 5 being beaten up in Short Circuit 2. But both those characters have anthropomorphic…
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