Microsoft's amazing new app helps the blind see.

At the 2016 Microsoft Build event, Microsoft announced a lot of  cool technologies, but one particular announcement, really stood out and inspired me.

Saqib Shaikh, a visually impaired Software Developer at Microsoft, developed an app that identifies objects in the user's environment and it describes it back into the user's ear. The app uses a smartphone camera or a camera equipped glasses to see it's environment.

"I think it's a man jumping through the air doing a trick on a skateboard," the app says.

"I see two faces: 40-year-old man with a beard looking surprised; 20-year-old woman looking happy."

The "Seeing AI App", is still in development, but looks really promising. Can't wait to see the finished product and to see how it will positively improve people's lives.

Enjoy the video below.

List of the tools & services used to build GOV.UK

I've always thought the GOV.UK site was well built aesthetically and even in it's robustness. After visiting a couple of other government sites I decided to find out what was used to build the site and what makes GOV.UK so amazing compared to the others.

I was well pleased to find out that there was a blog post on their website dedicated to the tools and services used to develop the site.

I've listed some of them here:

Frontend:

• HTML/CSS/JS - using HTML5 where appropriate, with a heavy focus on accessibility, and validating where we can
•  Jquery
• SCSS
• A2-Type for font production 

The core of the servers:

• Infrastructure As A Service (basically, they don't host in-house servers. This will ease scaling and mitigate maintenance costs) from Skyscape
• Akamai as the Content Delivery Network 
• Servers run on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04

Redirection:

• nginx used for redirection
• perl used to manage redirections  
• node.js was used to build a side-by-side browser for reviewing redirections

SolePower - Charge your smartphone by walking

Watch the video of how it works

"SolePower is another contraption that lets you charge your smartphone through a very basic action that everyone does at some point during the day: walk. Similar concepts have been proposed before, but a group is finally taking action and their proposed device is called SolePower. It’s dubbed as a “power-generating shoe” that allows the wearer to charge portable electronics like smartphones, MP3 players, and tablets as they walk.