WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

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A lot of techies are surprised when
I say I mostly use Windows.

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Why would anyone who writes code
and edits video use Windows?

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00:00:06.480 --> 00:00:08.800
Two reasons: one, it's cheaper.

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And two: it lets me bodge.

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So sit back, 'cos, yes, I'll tell
you how I made the emoji keyboard,

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but more importantly, I will
tell you about the art of the bodge.

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Bodging is a wonderful British word that means
to patch together, to make temporary repairs.

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A bodge is clumsy, it's inelegant,
it'll fall apart, but it'll work.

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And it'll keep working as long as there's someone around to bodge it again if it breaks.

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You know that bit in Apollo 13 where they have to fit the square peg in the round hole?

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That is a bodge. Actually, that's possibly the greatest bodge in human history.

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In fact, if you can think of a better one,
let me know in the comments,

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00:00:45.980 --> 00:00:49.920
'cos there's probably a book
on Great Bodges of History

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to be written there, and I'd quite like to
be the one to write it.

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Anyway. Bodging has always sort of been how I make things.

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I didn't study computer science,
I'm not writing elegant solutions here,

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I patch things together.

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The important stuff-- backups, password security--
I make sure I get that right...

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but stuff I'm making for fun, I bodge.

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Now I learned to properly Bodge when I was
filming a TV show a few years ago.

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Some of that show's made it online,
I'll put links in the description,

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but stick with me for now, 'cos you
need to know some context about it.

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I was filming with two people. Colin Furze,
who you might know off YouTube, he makes ludicrous,

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big, exploding physical things, and he has
the land speed record for a mobility scooter.

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And then there was
Charles Yarnold, who makes

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intricate microelectronics with
Arduinos and circuit boards.

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Like, last year Charles made
Barack Obama's Christmas tree.

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And people could go online to
customise the colours and patterns

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of the twinkly lights that went
up and down it. It was wonderful.

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And my job on the TV show was to be the bridge
between those two, between Colin and Charles,

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to get the creations that they physically fabricated

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working with the world and with each other.

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So when we made a remote control
for a horse --

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I'm not kidding, we made
a remote control for a horse --

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Colin built the framework for a robot jockey,

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Charles made all the circuits and relays to have it
pull the reins when it got signals,

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and I built a smartphone app that let you
send those signals to let you steer a horse.

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And it worked!

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And I probably had the easiest job of the
three of us, 'cos when I made things,

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I had an undo button.

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But the key part was this:
we were building prototypes.

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They had to work for one day of filming,
and we'd be there for it.

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But they HAD to work on that day,
or the TV show would be terrible

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and we'd have wasted a lot of money.
And we had basically no time to build there.

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We were working 16-hour days, 7-days
a week, and by the end of production,

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we had no time. We were bodging.

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And the bit of software that helped me, on
that show and since, more than anything else,

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was called AutoHotKey.

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AutoHotKey is such a good bodging tool that
it sometimes gets detected as a virus.

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00:03:04.909 --> 00:03:08.949
AutoHotKey was originally meant to
be really, really simple:

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it waits until the user presses a certain key,

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and then it starts a program,
or it types some longer text,

53
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or it presses a more complicated series of
key commands that'd be really difficult otherwise.

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Like, if you wanted your F10 key to make your
video game character suddenly spin 180 and fire?

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Got it. No problem. AutoHotKey was it.

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The thing is, AutoHotKey grew and
grew and grew and grew.

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And its scripting language,
the stuff you have to write in to make it work,

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is terrible. I mean really awful.

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It was meant to do just really simple things,

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and over time it's gained the ability to do so much.

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It can read files, it can look at
the colour of individual pixels on screen,

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it can call arbitrary Windows DLLs,

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it can parse regular expressions,
for anyone who knows what those are.

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But it's all in this weird non-standard
way that is inspired by Visual Basic.

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AutoHotKey is a bodge that
helps you make other bodges.

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But it works!

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And it means that instead of
having to spend hours of time

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diving into complicated
operating-system-level stuff,

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you just write a few lines of script
and it does the job.

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I used AutoHotKey, on the TV show,
to control the release of a skydiver's parachute.

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And it worked. I mean, really well.
I mean, we had a reserve, but it worked.

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The greatest bodge I ever pulled for that
TV show involved, and I swear this is true,

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a voice synthesiser and a
copy of Sibelius on a Mac

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being remote-controlled by
AutoHotKey on a Windows PC,

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which was blindly dragging the mouse around

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doing pre-recorded movements
through a remote desktop connection,

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while another PC fired commands to a
Google Chrome window open on the Mac over Wi-fi,

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because AppleScript and all the similar tools for Mac that we needed to run on Sibelius

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just weren't up to doing something that ridiculous.

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By the way, if anyone out there
suggests using Linux... no.

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The world loves emoji.

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I mean, seriously.
Individual people might not, sure.

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I don't really use them myself,
despite the keyboard,

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but the world loves them. People click on
headlines about emoji.

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Just putting the word in a headline
means you get way, way more hits on it.

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Emoji is basically the Donald Trump of computers.
There's a joke that won't date well.

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The very name is clickbait, you don't really need anything else on top of it.

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My friend Matt -- who's behind the camera
right now -- say hi, Matt.

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[MATT: Hi!]

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Matt and I made an emoji-only messenger last
year. And hardly anyone used it.

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Huh. That's not true.

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Loads of people used it...
for about five minutes

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before they realised it was utterly impractical
and never opened it again.

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But you should have seen the
press coverage, the emails we got!

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We even got confused investors
thinking it was a startup

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and emailing us to talk about equity.

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So this year, movie studios were bidding on
an emoji-based pitch.

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Not mine, sadly. I wish I'd thought of it,

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because they got nearly
a million dollars for it.

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The world loves emoji.

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00:06:04.420 --> 00:06:07.200
And here's the thing: the concept
of emoji, as we know it today,

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as is on this keyboard, is a bodge.

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You know, you might know the story.

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Around the world, every language
had a different way of translating

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between letters and binary code,
1s and 0s, for computers.

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Now Japan had a bit of space
in its text encoding scheme,

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they've got a lot more characters
than the Latin alphabet anyway,

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so adding a few more wouldn't
really have been a problem.

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And some clever engineer thinks,
"Hang on,

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"we can put little pictures in our text encoding,
we can let people send those,

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"and we can send pictures without
actually having to send pictures

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with all the bandwidth that entails."

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So there are a few competing versions of that,

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but they never left Japan until the
Unicode Consortium came along.

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Now, the Unicode Consortium's job
is to go to every country

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to work out how they encode text into binary,

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and turn all of these hundreds of competing approaches into one big worldwide standard.

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The most amazing thing about it
is that for the most part,

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they actually managed to make that work.

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But Unicode was meant to be two-way.

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You convert text into Unicode,
then convert it back out

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into your country's old legacy system,
and nothing should be lost.

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So the Unicode team get to Japan
and they go, "Oh, you've...

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"You've put pictures in your text. Okay, um...

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"We can deal with that. We'll add them
to the standard as little glyphs.

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That's fine. We had a smiley face
in there anyway. No-one'll notice."

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And no-one does notice, really, for a while,
until Apple, who want to sell iPhones in Japan,

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quietly add emoji as a...
a fairly hidden option.

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But as soon as one person notices,

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"Hey, I can send little
piles of poo to my friends."

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All their friends go, "Oh wow!
How do you turn that on?"

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And suddenly you have this kind of
ready-made viral explosion of piles of poo.

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Which I guess is norovirus.

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So suddenly the world has emoji, and
America is all, "What the hell are these?"

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'Cos they're used to having consumer electronics,
text encodings, everything...

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designed by America, for America.

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They have no idea what the
cherry-blossom stamp is,

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or why there's a rice ball
emoji, but no burrito.

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And they have no clue what
a love hotel is. Don't ask.

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'Cos bear in mind, these original ones
were designed decades ago,

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in Japan, for Japan, and there were
originally only about 100, maybe 150 of them.

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And America's like,
"Why can't we have a burrito emoji?"

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They mostly think it's an Apple thing,
not a international standard thing,

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so the Unicode Consortium suddenly finds itself
having to bodge in new emoji.

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And they have to bodge in
the flags of all nations,

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which is a really clever approach
where you're actually sending

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letters for country abbreviations,
but that's a separate thing.

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Then they realise every phone supplier has made the default emoji either yellow or just plain white,

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and realise they have to bodge in
what are now called skin tone modifiers.

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And let's face it: a one man, one woman, one boy,
one girl family is really stereotypical,

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so they make it so you can use something
called a zero-width joiner to

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any person characters you like and they will
come together into a single family emoji.

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You can do that with shift on this keyboard,
by the way, which I'm really proud of.

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And I know, I know someone out there
is about to comment,

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"Ooh, it's political correctness gone mad."

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No. No. To hell with that.
To hell with that.

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These are meant to be international.

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These are meant to be cross-cultural,
for everyone on earth.

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There had damn well better be those options,

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and thankfully, we are more or less there.

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But the emoji we have today
weren't designed as one worldwide thing.

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They're a bodge on top of a
bodge on top of a bodge.

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Cleverly done and standardised, sure,

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but they're a patchwork of rules.

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They've even got Wingdings in there now.

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That's why there's
Levitating Man in Business Suit,

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because that came from an American decision.

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And the latest version of iOS does
have a custom version of that in.

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You might even be able to add a
skin tone modifier to it, I'm not sure yet.

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So I get the idea for a physical emoji keyboard.

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I thought about trying a full-Unicode one,

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but I realised I would need hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of keyboards,

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but you can just about fit all
1,200 or 1,300 or so emoji

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that are currently out there
onto 14 keyboards. So they're all here.

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Actually getting the stickers to print
correctly on my home inkjet was a bit tricky,

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but I got there, it was just a matter of
lining everything up properly

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and then spending several hours
sticking the damn things on.

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And thankfully, you can just plug 14 USB keyboards
into a Windows machine, through USB hubs,

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and it'll go, "Yeah, alright. I've got
14 keyboards now. That's cool."

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But the trouble is: all 14 keyboards,
as far as most programs here are concerned,

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are counted as the same keyboard.

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You don't get to see which Z key's been pressed,

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you just know a Z key has been pressed somewhere.

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And even AutoHotKey, my old reliable
standby, couldn't help me with that.

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So I started looking around for solutions.

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And there are low-level APIs,
programming interfaces,

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in Windows that let you see the
raw input as it comes in over the wires.

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Mac and Linux folks in the comments,
are going to be going, "Oh yeah...

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All you have to do is connect the flumberboozle
to the GKX virtual port, then write a--"

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00:11:05.699 --> 00:11:08.439
No. No. Not going to do that.

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Because I got to the point of
installing Visual Studio on this

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and thinking of actually
learning the low-level stuff

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00:11:12.740 --> 00:11:17.580
and I thought, "No. I run Windows.
Someone will have done this before."

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And sure enough, they had.

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Of all things: there is a program
called LuaMacros,

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and it's meant for the
flight simulator community.

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Flight simmers are amazing,
they will build entire fake cockpits

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with a hundred switches in them
so it's all accurate.

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And if they can't afford that, they'll want
to plug in multiple keyboards

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so it at least feels a bit like they've got
a fake cockpit with a hundred switches.

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And so LuaMacros exists, and it's wonderful.

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Because it is basically a
modified version of Lua,

203
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which is a weird but not
too weird programming language,

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with a load of extra functions grafted in to handle detecting different keyboards and keypresses.

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And because it's a full programming language,
you can do full-on programming in it!

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Which is fantastic!
I mean, I was overjoyed.

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Like, literally, dancing around my flat
when I first downloaded and ran LuaMacros.

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Which was partly because I was really happy,

209
00:12:10.880 --> 00:12:14.820
and partly because I had Aqua's first album on,
but that's beside the point.

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I could detect individual keys
from individual keyboards. Great!

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00:12:20.640 --> 00:12:24.660
So here was the plan:
get each key's code.

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That's the number that gets sent to
the operating system when it's pressed.

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00:12:28.560 --> 00:12:32.540
Put those in a list, from top left to bottom right,
all the way down one keyboard,

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ignoring the complicated ones
like Enter, Control and Alt.

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Then, when a key gets pressed, take the code,

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00:12:37.900 --> 00:12:40.980
look it up in that list.
Remember what position it is.

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Then add to that the
total number of keys in that list

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multiplied by the number of the
keyboard it was pressed on.

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So if I hit the fifth key on the second keyboard,
that would come through as item 4 in the list

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and keyboard number 1 -- because computers
and programmers count from 0.

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So: fifth key. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.

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Second keyboard: 0, 1.

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Plug all that into the formula,
and you'll find where you are on the list.

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And the reason we count from zero is because
it makes maths like that so much easier.

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Keyboard 1, times the 94 keys in the list, plus 4,

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means you want the 98th item
on a list starting from zero.

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The equation is just so much simpler...

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and it didn't work. It didn't work.

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It took me half an hour to find out why it didn't work,

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and the reason it didn't work is that Lua,

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unlike every other programming
language in modern times,

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counts from 1, not from 0!

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Half an hour. Half an hour that took me.

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I fixed the equation, and it worked.
So I loaded in the full list of emoji,

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in the order that I'd put them down on the keys,

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and I told LuaMacros, "When you get a key,

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"calculate that number like we just did,

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"look it up in the big list of emoji,
go down that many lines,

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and type that emoji."

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And it didn't work either.

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'Cos there are no emoji keys on a regular
keyboard. Of course there aren't.

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No-one has been ridiculous enough
to make an emoji keyboard yet.

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So there isn't a key combination
that will get you an emoji.

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Alright. There might have been swearing
at this point. Just a little.

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So. Okay. What next? Well, it turns out that
Windows has a way of writing special characters,

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and quite a few of you will remember it:
you hold down the Alt key,

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and you type numbers on the numeric keypad.

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That's not even from Windows,
that goes all the way back to original

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IBM PCs and BIOS and DOS,
okay, it's decades old. But it still works.

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Because Microsoft is obsessive
about backwards compatibility.

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You can still type those
like it was the late eighties.

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But then they realised, "Oh, now
we've got all those Unicode characters,"

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so they used a bodge.
They extended it to Unicode.

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You do a quick registry tweak,
you can type Alt, plus sign,

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and then a Unicode code point, and it will type it,
all the way up to emoji! Hallelujah!

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And I got that working, and it threw emoji
into Microsoft Word. And I was laughing.

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And then I tried it in a web browser,
like for Twitter, and it didn't work either...

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00:15:09.800 --> 00:15:15.079
because that backwards compatibility means that Unicode code points only work in rich text boxes,

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00:15:15.079 --> 00:15:18.100
things that allow formatting, not plain ones.

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00:15:19.420 --> 00:15:22.720
Couple of hours went by at this point. Nearly there.

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00:15:22.720 --> 00:15:25.240
I got quite frustrated. And I took a break,

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00:15:25.240 --> 00:15:28.720
and I swear, at some point
while I was cooking dinner,

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00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:31.400
it was like a light came on in my head,

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00:15:31.400 --> 00:15:37.880
and the gods of bodging shone down upon me
and I shouted out loud, "AutoHotKey!"

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00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:43.200
Yeah, that wasn't just a pointless ramble
about bodging earlier with AutoHotkey. AutoHotKey.

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00:15:43.200 --> 00:15:47.120
Because it can't tell which keyboard
is being pressed, that doesn't matter.

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00:15:47.120 --> 00:15:50.640
What it can do is type emoji.
It can look down the list of emoji,

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00:15:50.640 --> 00:15:53.820
it can read a particular character from a line,
and it can enter it anywhere,

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00:15:53.820 --> 00:15:56.600
'cos it doesn't use key presses,
it uses low-level Windows stuff.

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00:15:56.600 --> 00:15:59.280
So. I have one program, LuaMacros.

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It can read the keyboards and
work out which emoji the user wants.

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00:16:03.100 --> 00:16:07.020
And I have one program that, if we
already know which emoji the user wants...

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can type it.

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00:16:09.920 --> 00:16:14.780
So it was bodging time.
Here's how this keyboard works:

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00:16:14.780 --> 00:16:18.339
You press a key.
LuaMacros intercepts it on the way in,

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00:16:18.339 --> 00:16:22.219
stops Windows actually typing the letter
or whatever's underneath it.

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00:16:22.220 --> 00:16:26.920
It works out which number emoji you want,
and it saves that number to a file on disk.

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Then, it presses the F24 key.
That's right, there's an F24 key.

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00:16:31.100 --> 00:16:33.920
It's not on my keyboard,
it's almost certainly not on your keyboard,

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00:16:33.920 --> 00:16:38.560
but it's still a key that Windows can deal with
because backwards compatibility.

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00:16:38.560 --> 00:16:42.520
And AutoHotKey is listening
for that F24 key and when it hears it,

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00:16:42.529 --> 00:16:46.850
it reads that same file, the file that LuaMacros
just put the number in, it reads that number,

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00:16:46.850 --> 00:16:51.670
it looks down the list of emoji,
and it types that emoji!

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That is how the emoji keyboard works,
that's why I use Windows,

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00:16:55.630 --> 00:16:59.990
and that is the art of the bodge!

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00:17:01.360 --> 00:17:03.360
One take!

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00:17:04.450 --> 00:17:06.839
Thank you, Matt!

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