This blog post contains emoji which your system may not be able to display. You may see broken text, weird symbols, or other buggy rendering. The Transgender Flag is a draft candidate for Emoji 13.0 under the name Blue, Pink, and White Flag. A number of platforms include an image for this emoji, but do not show it on the emoji keyboard. As of June 2019 this is now supported on Twitter platforms that use Twemoji. Emojipedia The (proposed) Transgender Flag looks like this (image) or…
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Hannah works for Eagle Labs, where she 3D prints things and builds IoT lamps. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. …
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It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the event, and what I learned. What's the point of a hackday? There were three common reactions from people when I said a bunch of geeks were going to an NHS Hack. Ah! But the real problem is [some incredibly complicated thing] -…
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Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete. So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a custom slot. Here's the code, with a fuller explanation afterwards. from flask import Flask, render_template, request from flask_ask import Ask, statement, question, session app =…
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I promise you this story is true. Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... Work was not going well. Our recently launched product was a flop. Rumours of job cuts were swirling. Things were tense. I was sat in work, headphones on, trying to drown out the sound of the open-plan office. Grinding through emails. When suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me," the vaguely familiar woman said, "do you work for Vodafone?" I was wearing a Voda lanyard,…
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Do you want an ultra-minimalist, open source, train times website? If so, Dan Pope, has created trntxt.uk just for you! 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. …
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Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an animated virtual assistant. I've spoken to several people in Microsoft, and we all agree it is a good idea. We looked through a number of great software projects (mostly from…
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Bob Howard is an IT expert and occasional field agent for the Laundry, the branch of Her Majesty's Secret Service that deals with occult threats. Dressed (grudgingly) in a tux and sent to the Caribbean, he must infiltrate a millionaire's yacht in order to prevent him from violating a treaty that will bring down the wrath of an ancient underwater race upon humanity's head. I met Stross in a crypt in London several years ago. He was unknown to me as an author, so I brashly asked him what…
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An interesting question appeared on Twitter - where are the queer robots in Sci-Fi? Let's first define what we mean by Queer. This usually means outside of binary gender and/or someone who is attracted to the same sex - what's commonly referred to as LGBT+. Feel free to supply your own definition. As for what we mean by AI - let's go with "mechanical or non-biological autonomous being." That's probably wide enough - but do please suggest better definitions. So is a gay/lesbian robot one…
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(For more about the "Falsehoods" meme - read the big list of falsehoods programmers believe.) Do You Want To Phone A Friend? A popular website asked me to confirm my phone number. It "helpfully" pre-filled the country-code with +1. And proudly displayed the Stars and Stripes. Except, of course, the USA isn't the only country to use +1 - our friends in the Great White North also use +1. Thanks to the North American Numbering Plan, a full 25 countries or territories use +1. From …
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