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…
Continue reading →BMW are sending their software updates unencrypted
by | | 7 comments | 950 words | Read ~15,371 times.
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.…
Continue reading →Inside a Physical Web BLE Beacon
by | | 400 words | Read ~414 times.
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…
Continue reading →Cheap BlueTooth Buttons and Linux
by | | 40 comments | 750 words | Read ~41,954 times.
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…
Continue reading →3D Printed, Arduino Powered, Educational, Open Source, Micro-Robots!
by | | 300 words | Read ~1,568 times.
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…
Continue reading →Smart Lights - Dumb Decisions
by | | 18 comments | 1,000 words | Read ~8,550 times.
(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…
Continue reading →Why I'm Boycotting Yodel
by | | 2 comments | 600 words | Read ~2,580 times.
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…
Continue reading →Goodbye Amazon Prime
by | | 5 comments | 500 words | Read ~374 times.
(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…
Continue reading →Help! How do I extract 3D objects from PDFs?
by | | 21 comments | 350 words | Read ~13,590 times.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…
Continue reading →How to type Emoji in Ubuntu
by | | 6 comments | 150 words | Read ~4,634 times.
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,…
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