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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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."…
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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. …
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I've just seen that I can now add sponsorship to my GitHub projects. Here's a quick guide to how it works: Repo settings There's now a new option in your repository settings. Tick the box and click the button. Easy! WTF is YAML? This is a bit of a weird one. To set up sponsorship, you have to hand-edit a YAML text file. I would have expected this to be a easy to use GUI. Or something to…
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Another day, another Gmail bug which won't get fixed. The original Android phone - HTC Dream - had 192MB of RAM. The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in a decade. Laptops have also leapt forwards in speed and memory. Sadly, no one on the Gmail team has noticed. It's 2019, and Gmail app users are still seeing the dreaded "[Message Clipped] View entire message"…
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At the recent BarCampLondon Ⅺ I decided to run a little experiment. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentAnyone coming to @barcamplondon fancy doing a Tech Swap Table with me?Bring bits of (working) kit and old gadgets that you don't want in the hope they find a loving home.Let me know if you want to take part 😁#bclxi❤️ 7💬 3🔁 016:20 - Sat 04 May 2019 The idea is similar to Swishing - a popular way t…
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Here's a curious bug I just discovered in Firefox 67 for Linux. Can you see this unicorn: →🦄 ← What happens if you use CSS to change the opacity of an emoji? Here's a unicorn, with a pink font colour: 🦄 Unicorn Let's wrap that in this scrap of CSS to make it 50% opaque. color: rgba(255, 105, 180, 0.5); 🦄 Unicorn Hopefully, you see a semi-transparent philosophical argument. What if we set …
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It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but I've seen a recent influx in outright scams. Let me step you through a couple of examples. A typical click-bait headline. What has our favourite celeb done this time? In a moment of weakness,…
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In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? Having read Newitz's brilliant sci-fi novel "Autonomous", I thought I'd try her pop-sci book from a few years ago. The central thesis is that animals survive when they "scatter" (find new habitats) and …
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