A jQuery Emoji Chooser

I finally managed to find a legitimate place for Emojis at work, so I needed a plug-in to select them.

Even though there are plenty of good options out there, I take my emoji very seriously, and I just couldn't find anything that had:

A jQuery base - we're old-fashioned at workA small download - no graphics for the emojis pleaseSupport for skin-tones 
So here we are, I've made a thing.  It doesn't happen often.  It's called jquery-emoji-chooser.  You can find it via that link to GitHub or you can install it via Bower.  It's a fork of the otherwise excellent jquery-emoji-picker which I also recommend if you don't have the same needs as me.

Feel free to try out the demo and if you also think emojis are serious business, use it as you see fit.

Django Girls Sheffield

I don't really like to mention my job or where I work, but just this once I'd like to say how pleased I was that ZOO agreed to host Sheffield's 2017 Django Girls event last weekend.

We use Django for all our software so it was good to be able to give a little something back to the community.

A few of us from the Software Engineering team went along to volunteer as mentors for the day.  It was a lot of fun. I'm impressed with the tutorial we worked through.  If you're looking to learn Python or Django it's a great place to start, even if you can't get to one of the events.

Apple's Podcast Updates

Apple has announced some extensions to RSS to add podcast-specific features.  Of particular interest to me is the ability to group episodes into seasons and specify the play order of those seasons.

Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order—“start at the first episode!”—or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important.Apple Makes Major Podcast Updates -  Jason Snell
This sounds great to me and I hope that podcast players other than Apple's embrace it.  Diving into a podcast mid-stream is not handled well by players today.  I got so frustrated by the experience that I made a service to manage my catch-up experience.  I (and a couple of dozen Germans) have been using it for years, and while I'm not ready to retire it just yet, I am hopeful that I might have to use it a bit less soon.


I have always loved RSS.

Since way back when, RSS readers are what I have made in my spare time.  You, or rather I, spend so much time reading the internet, you want the be experience to be tailored to you.

I have been using the current version of my hand-rolled web-based feed reader FeedThing for something like 7 years.  After the initial burst of activity to get it working, I haven't touched it much except to fix the occasional bug or annoyance.  I got it going to the point that (and only I) could use it and then just tailed off.

During those 7 years, RSS and feeds have become way less popular.  Obviously they were always very niche, but even amongst the small corner of the internet that ever liked them they have fallen by the wayside in favor of Twitter and Facebook and the relentless onslaught of the social.

So it was a pleasant surprise to have a post announcing a new feed format pop up.

I don't know if JSON Feed will take off.  What I do know is that since it has appeare…

Why an Internet Watershed is not actually dumb.

A lot of my friends come down heavily on the anti-censorship side of most debates, and if I'm honest so do I.  So it's not surprising that they are deeply troubled by government proposals to limit access to pornography.

The debate is not helped by government's habit of using vague and confusing language that often conflates legal and illegal content and their desire to ban some things outright but merely limit accidental (read: child) access to the rest.  Equally though the debate is not well served by opposition that amounts to little more than "no no no, internet filtering is always ineffective and/or overreaching you stupid, stupid technophobe".
Rhoda Grant MSP thinks you can stick a "watershed" on the internet, so the smut can be avoided. This isn't a spoof.
— Chris Nicholson (@EraseThisTweet) July 24, 2013Just because someone is technically unsophisticated in your field, does not mean that they are stupid.  MPs lack the…

Sometimes your problems are not caused by Windows

I have a Media Center PC. For my sins, I really like it.

However for the past few (well many) months it has been failing to power manage correctly, never sleeping and running the fan all the time. It has also been running like a dog.

Being the clever computer type I am, I immediately diagnosed a bad case of Windows Rot and tried to make time to reinstall it.

Then we moved house and I noticed it was filthy. Every vent at the rear was choked with vacuum-cleaner-bagesque dust bunnies.

Having administered a quick stiff brushing, it is now running cooler, quieter and faster.

Sorry Windows.

Five minutes with SocialThing

So a five minute play with SocialThing makes it seem really promising.

Being able to into easily import all your friends from all your social networks (eventually) and then easily alias them together sounds like it would be awesome.

Sadly it goes downhill really quickly.

Firstly it requires your usernames and passwords. They explain why - to get otherwise unavailable private data (friends only Livejournal posts for example), but it seems unnecessary and phishing-like. What they really need is to do is offer a "publicly viewable information only" option for these services.

Secondly there doesn't seem to be any kind of history. New items push old items off the list and then, poof, they're gone. That's kind of limiting. There's also no feed produced so I can't subscribe to this stuff anywhere else, I have to go to their site.

Lastly you can only see an aggregate view. Having aliased my friends (when I've been fortunate to have two of their posts from se…