All the Cool Kids™ use emoji. On Android, they're usually built right in to the keyboard. But that's not the case on desktops and laptops. Well, unless you build a dedicated emoji keyboard. So I was delighted to find this brilliant little Gnome Extension called Emoji Selector. It sits in your dash, until you click it or press 💠+e. Then you get this pop up. The search bar focuses as soon as you open it, and the results are keyboard selectable. There's the usual groupings of emoji, if yo…
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Five New Yorkers must band together to defend their city in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five. But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and …
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In the last few months, I've received dozens of spam calls which appear to come from a similar phone number to mine. If my number is 07700 900 123 I get calls from 07700 900 124 or 07700 900 456 Here's my working theory on why spammers do this. Americans. In the UK, there's a separate "area code" for mobile phones. If a number starts 07 then it is mobile (it's a bit more complicated than that). In the USA, there's no cellular prefix. If you buy a SIM card in Las Vegas, you'll probably get…
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A Lithuanian company has created a for-profit training company called Turing College. The word "College" isn't a protected term in most of Europe. Unlike, for example, "University", anyone can call themselves a college. It is also unaffiliated with Alan Turing. I asked them about this - because it seems a bit weird to me to name yourself after someone without their estate's blessing. They pointed me to their FAQ, which opens with this: My initial thought was "keep his name out of your…
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I've been experimenting on my colleagues (sorry gang!) and I've found that video meetings go a little better when they start with a bit of mood music. This is, of course, highly unscientific and just a little bit silly, but it is fun. I log in to Google Meet a minute before the meeting start time and immediately share a YouTube video. Meet has this nifty ability to directly stream the audio from a tab - so I don't need to hold my microphone to my speakers. It's a low effort way to set the…
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I accidentally watched a TV advert the other day. A woman was on a Zoom call with friends. Her blurred background failed and revealed her ugly kitchen. Her friends all laughed at her. So she went along to AMAZING KITCHENS DIRECT 2 U and got a brand new kitchen. Now her friends are embarrassed about their kitchens! What kind of fucking psychopath puts that out there into the world? Preying on people's insecurities when there's a pandemic on is disgusting and irresponsible. I stopped watching…
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(Yes, I'm back on my bullshit!) Regular readers may remember that I'm trying to create an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. That is, a map with a Gall-Peters Projection and with South up. Oh, and Aoteroa centred. For reasons. I've got one step closer! I wasn't able to find and decent Peters projection map tiles, but I did find the next best thing. The "Equal Earth" projection. This is what it normally looks like: So, how to flip it and spin it, while maintaining…
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