Short week! Monday was a bank holiday (mostly recovering from my mate Pete's wedding) and Friday was off to EMF Camp. But, I managed to get some work done! LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! And the accompanying blog post NHS Majority of my time spend on helping run a design sprint for improving some NHS processes with Data Science. At my dark moments, I wonder if we can ever break free of the inefficiencies of paper and fax. Standards Submitted a request to The European Multi Stakeholder Platform…
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My mobile provider - Three UK - offers WiFi calling, but only if you have a phone purchased directly from them. For everyone else, they have a crappy app which hasn't been updated in two years. So, let's break out of their artificial restrictions and get some WiFi calling on the OnePlus 5T! Step-by-step Open your phone dialler app. Dial *#800# You don't need to press send, you should automatically be taken to this engineering menu Touch the top menu item "oneplus Logkit" Scroll to the…
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Welcome back! These are my brief thoughts on what I've been working on this week. Work Blogging! I've written two new blog posts for GDS. I love blogging - but I sometimes shy away from doing it for work. I naïvely think I write practically perfect prose - and then a team of brilliant editors descend. They always leave my words looking better - but I struggle with the resentment of any writer who sees their precious words being reworked. I know! I know! "Kill your darlings!" But it's …
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Google is a company with nearly unlimited resources. It often chooses to use its power for the greater good of the Internet. Creating amazing projects like digitizing every printed book, bringing Internet access via high-altitude balloons, and offering high-quality language translation. And sometimes it just gets bored and abandons them. Google Noto is such a project. It is an attempt to create beautiful fonts for every single human language. It promises No ToFu - no more blank boxes where a…
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Twitter is dead! Long live Mastodon! I've written lots of 'bots for Twitter - and been part of their developer outreach programme. Lots of us have politely requested improvements to the bot experience on Twitter, but to no avail. So, today I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily write your first Mastodon-bot. Bots In Spaaaaaaace Step 1 - you need to set up a new account for your bot. Create it on https://BotsIn.Space/ - a Mastodon instance specifically for robots. Set it up just…
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More adventures with Unicode. I logged in to my Virgin Media account to see when my promotional discount would end. Here's what their billing PDF said. Let'S Ignore The Weird Capitalisation Virgin'S System Uses. What's that  doing there? Their website says: No  symbol, but also no £ sign. Ah, but let's look at the underlying code. What's that weird character? It is the control character string terminator, of course... Well, my discount is nearly finished, so I asked them for a la…
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Work A light-ish week - which allowed me to concentrate on my backlog. If you're getting a reply from an email you sent last year, sorry! Actually, that's not true - since switching to Google's Inbox I've found it much easier to keep on top of things. Being able to snooze mails and mark them as done is so helpful to my workflow. My only wish is that I could organise mails by folder. Sad news that David Pearson died. Civil Service Choir@CSChoirWe are very shocked and saddened by the…
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Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt was unavailable due to "security certificate issues" - but Twitter worked. Sort of. As soon as I opened the page, I was redirected to mobile.twitter.com/i/guest - don't try it…
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The good folk at Meross have sent me some of their smart-home gadgets to review. Let's dive in! Unboxing Products Smart Plug Socket And the Smart Power Strip. The single plug socket is good for 10 amps. It is smaller than the Wemo and Sonoff plugs I've reviewed. It has built in power monitoring - which is handy. The surge protector is curious. You get three regular plug sockets - each of which can be switched independently - but there is no power monitoring. There are also 4 USB …
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Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. I was grumpy about the lack of connected digital services within the court. As I left court, I asked if there was anything they needed me to fill in or sign. They said there wasn't. I just sort of assumed that I wouldn't get any expenses back - my travel was mostly within my regular season ticket anyway. Then this dropped on my doorstep. A hand written envelope. Let's ignore the fact they've misspelled my name (I won't ignore this). …
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One of my first jobs was as a nudity moderator for Vodafone. People would send in photos and videos and I'd have to manually classify whether they featured nudity or were otherwise unacceptable. It was a bizarre job - one I've discussed before - but today, wouldn't we just throw an AI at it? I recently read "How AI/ML algorithms see nudity in images - Comparison of image moderation APIs by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and, Clarifai" - a blog post by DataTurks. In it, they use a training set of…
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Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time... Talks The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG. Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes. Work Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate after a holiday. As for the rest... Bugs in publishing. As part of my quest to ensure all government documents are open, I occasionally come across quirks like this. Better ODF…
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