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 …
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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. …
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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 ch…
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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…
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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.…
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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 -…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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A quick report into a nasty privacy vulnerability I found with the CAB. Unusually for me, this has no Internet component. Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. As part of that, I had to telephone the CAB Volunteers at the court who look after witnesses. I called, and was put on hold, then asked to leave a message. There's a popular myth that you can trick phone systems to…
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I've never written a Week Note before, but I was encouraged to do so after an excellent session at the One Team Gov Global conference. Here, in the spirit of openness is what I've been up to, and what I've got wrong in the last few weeks. NHS Open Source A four hour train journey to Newcastle - and four hours back. But so worth it. Chatting to NHS BSA about their plans to open source some of…
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This is the story of my encounter with our justice system. It's a personal post that doesn't necessarily reflect my employers' opinions. September 2017 - I was standing by a bus stop when I noticed a man playing with his phone while driving. So I snapped a couple of photos of him and his car. London's Metropolitan Police have an excellent, mobile friendly, web portal for reporting traffic…
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