The UK has some excellent laws preventing discrimination. According the Equality Act (2010) it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of... age being or becoming a transsexual person being married or in a civil partnership being pregnant or having a child disability race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin religion, belief or lack of religion/belief sex sexual orientation That's a pretty good set of principles! Ok, so what can a prospective employer …
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The BMW i3 is an amazing electric car - let down by very shoddy software. That's a huge problem - software runs our lives and, if it is defective, it can ruin us. We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. The Coming Civil War over …
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As regular readers know, I've turned a BLE Beacon into a wireless business card. Physical Web used the Bluetooth beacon standard to continually broadcast not an ID number, but a URL. If you're in my proximity, you can grab my contact details. The one problem with the beacon I have is that it has an exposed button. Every time it got bumped in my pocket, the token would emit a couple of shrill beeps and set itself into config mode. After a couple of months, the CR2032 battery died. …
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Selfie sticks - like most modern inventions - are utter tosh. But they've rapidly brought down the price of Bluetooth buttons. So who am I to complain? Let's take the venerable AB Shutter 3 - You can find it on Amazon for around £2 including postage - or around $2 on AliExpress. Frankly, that's stupidly cheap. OK, let's put this to work as something other than a vanity clicker! There are no instructions which come with this, it's delivered in a little plastic bag and that's it. Time to …
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Last week I was invited to attend a product launch by BQ. They're a small company based out of Spain who create some curiously innovative products - including smartphones which natively run Cyanogen. I'm particularly looking forward to reviewing their Ubuntu Tablet later in the year. The thing which really caught my eye was Zowi (pronounced Zoë). It looks like this: And it dances like this: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/zowi.mp4 Ok, but what is it? Here's what you …
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(A somewhat rambling post about a very inconsequential problem.) I'm slowly building a Smart Home. I've security cameras emailing me when a cat has the temerity to walk past a window, a Roomba which tweets me, a thermostat which knows if I'm working from home, and a car which knows when to charge from my solar panels. Now it's time to focus on something a bit more useful - lighting! A few months ago I treated myself to a Lifx SmartBulb. It's a cracking bit of kit! There's a widget on my…
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The British courier firm Yodel are one of the most disreputable delivery companies in the country. Owned by the same tax exiles who run The Telegraph newspaper, the company is frequently complained about and has an unenvious reputation for poor service. The rot seems to start firmly at the top, with CEO Dick Stead. A few months ago, a company arranged to send me some delicate electronics for urgent testing. They selected Yodel for a "guaranteed" next day delivery. By noon on the day of…
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(To the tune of the popular Elton John song.) I've often joked that if my employers could pay me in Amazon vouchers, it would save me a lot of hassle. I'm one of those insufferable people who prefers a delivery driver dropping off a single light bulb rather than having to pop to the shops like some sort of savage. But now the dream is over. Amazon have bundled their sub-standard video offering, a moribund music subscription, and an underwhelming photo backup service in with their excellent…
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You know how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic, nor particularly for the people, nor a republic? Yeah, so it turns out the "Universal 3D" format is pretty far from Universal! A little backstory... The Europeana Carare Project has some gorgeous 3D scans of ancient monuments and heritage sites. The only problem is that the 3D files are trapped inside PDFs. Yup - did you know the PDF spec supported 3D models? Me neither. The only way to view these is with the…
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New tech site Gadgette has a great article on how to type Emoji on Mac and Windows - but they (understandably) didn't cover Ubuntu. So here I am to show you how. Get The Fonts If your computer doesn't have the requite font, install the latest version of Symbola. Simply open up the .zip file, double click on the .ttf font, then choose "Install". Find The Character You almost certainly have the GNU CharMap app installed. If not, run apt-get install gucharmap. You'll find it in…
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