Quirks and Limitations of Emoji Flags


A screenshot of a list of country flags

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 […]

Continue reading →

Episode 27 - Hannah Cameron's makerspace adventures


A woman with 3D printed cubes as earrings.

Hannah works for Eagle Labs, where she 3D prints things and builds IoT lamps.

Continue reading →

NHS Hack Day


NHS Hack Day Logo. For geeks who love the NHS.

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 […]

Continue reading →

Alexa Skills - get custom slot names using Flask-Ask


Alexa Skills Page.

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 […]

Continue reading →

The worst morale boosting gesture I've experienced


The Vodafone logo with the text "The future is exciting. Ready?"

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 […]

Continue reading →

Episode 26 - Dan Pope's trntxt.uk


A white train on a blue background.

Do you want an ultra-minimalist, open source, train times website? If so, Dan Pope, has created trntxt.uk just for you!

Continue reading →

Introducing the new HTML element - welcome <clippy>!


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 […]

Continue reading →

Review: The Jennifer Morgue


A demonic apocalypse of a book cover.

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.

Continue reading →

Queer Computers In Science Fiction


Two robots embracing.

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 […]

Continue reading →

Falsehoods programmers believe about flags


A dropdown box showing the flag of Canada next to a plus 1.

(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 […]

Continue reading →