The voices (and tech) used in Amazon Alexa, are available for anyone to play with, free of charge - search for Amazon Polly. Update: Here’s the voice of “Brian” (British English) reading Lewis Carroll with the “Neural” engine setting eanbled. Jabberwocky Poem. Try Polly yourself here.

I seem to have collected a few old BBC Micros - approx 1983 vintage, so coming up to 40 years old. Before powering them up, I took the advice of Retroclinic and replaced the power supply X2 capacitors that are known to fail (damaging the power supply in the process). Retroclinic can also be found on eBay. Rather than use an old-style CRT, a Samsung LCD TV provides a much steadier picture, using an RGB to SCART lead such as this.

Swift 3 has a “decimal” number type that can represent values such as 0.3 that are inexactly represented in Double or Float types. According to this article: An instance can represent any number that can be expressed as mantissa x 10^exponent where mantissa is a decimal integer up to 38 digits long, and exponent is an integer from –128 through 127. Note this is not the same as Python’s arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic.