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 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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Invisible Pink Unicorns - a Firefox emoji rendering bug


The upper image is partially transparent. The lower image is completely opaque.

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 the opacity to 0.0 - that is, completely transparent? 🦄 Unicorn There's a shunicorn there. If you …

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Emoji Alchemy


Lots of colourful emoji.

I'm a fan of the Little Alchemy series of games. Combine earth and fire to get lava. Combine fire and water to get steam. Steam and lava combined makes... You get the picture. I've been toying around with making a version which only uses emoji. Here's what me and my friends have come up with so far. Feel free to add others. ❄+⛄=☃ 🌧️+☂=☔ 🌦️+🌱=🌳 🔥+💧=♨️ 🚰+🦠=🚱 🐟+🍚=🍣 🥕+🥬+🥒+🍅=🥗 🔒+🔑=🔓 🌌+🔭=☄️ 🧔+💈=👨 🚬+🚫=🚭 🧬+🧫+🧪=☣️ 🦘+🐨=🇦🇺 🥝+🧝+🐉=🇳🇿 🐄+🔪+🧀=🍔 🌽+🔥+🧂=🍿 👩+🎬+🎥+🎞️=📽️ 🖌️+🎨=🖼️ From Amanda 🥖+🧂+🔥=🥨 🦅+🌭+🏉+🗽=🇺🇸 ☀…

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Obsolete Technology in Unicode


Screenshot of the Unicode standard. The page shows symbols for Telephone Receivers, Pagers, and Fax Machines.

A short meander through some of the more obscure miscellany within Unicode. Languages hang around far longer than there are native speakers, and symbols get reused and repurposed (🍆). Here are some of the delightfully old-fashioned symbols hidden in your thoroughly modern smartphone. Tapes Long before solid-state drives, we used to record data on long thin strips of magnetic tape. 🖭 📼 I'm sure there's a hipster somewhere who only listens to Kraftwerk on C90 cassettes, and claims that the ima…

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An Animation of Every Emoji


A friendly looking chicken stares at you

The Video Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentEVERY EMOJI! pic.x.com/2fcuqwu67c❤️ 1,306💬 54🔁 020:09 - Tue 24 October 2017 Download the WEBM version (19MB). The Process Mostly notes to myself, but I thought you lot might be interested 🙂 Get Every Emoji from Twemoji Twitter maintain the Twemoji Project - it contains high quality SVGs of every emoji. They generously make them available under CC-BY. But grabbing all the SVGs we want is a little tricky. GitHub don't make it easy to download a sin…

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Where do these arrows point?


This is a blog post about user interfaces. I was wandering along the beach one day, when I noticed some clever chap had drawn some arrows in the sand. Can you guess where they led? The more astute of you will have realised that these are not human drawn arrows. They are, of course, footprints left by birds. A bird's foot is a "backwards" arrow. The apex points to the bird's rear. It is conceivable that had birds evolved greater intelligence and developed a writing system then their → …

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Making a Twitter Collage


This is a lazy way of making a collage of Tweets. I was originally going to use this method: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @6byNine@6byNine it is all I've got so far!❤️ 1💬 0🔁 019:11 - Sat 29 October 2016Mike@6byNineReplying to @edent@edent No idea about getting urls, but this may or may not be useful (cmd is also in image alt-text) pic.x.com/jh3yh4yki0❤️ 4💬 2🔁 020:01 - Sat 29 October 2016 but, sadly, gnome-web-photo crashed repeatedly when I tried to use it. It is a typically u…

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How to type Emoji in Ubuntu


New tech site Gadgette has a great article on how to type Emoji on Mac and Windows - but they (understandably) didn't cover Ubuntu. So here I am to show you how. Get The Fonts If your computer doesn't have the requite font, install the latest version of Symbola. Simply open up the .zip file, double click on the .ttf font, then choose "Install". Find The Character You almost certainly have the GNU CharMap app installed. If not, run apt-get install gucharmap. You'll find it in…

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How Gmail lets spammers grab your attention with emoji


What could be worse than email spam? Animated gifs in the subject line of email spam! This is a trend I've recently started to see on Gmail - here's what it looks like and how it works. So, what's going on here? How have they got an animated image into the subject line? Here's the raw text of the message's subject line: …

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