March 18, 2024

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 18th 2024 Edition

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January 15, 2024

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 15th 2024 Edition

  • Finally (hopefully, we'll see) something seems to be happening about the shameful Horizon scandal. Private Eye have made their special report on it free to download. I haven't watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office yet, but this is a great backgrounder on the whole fiasco.
  • How to Fold a Julia Fractal. A fantastic website with great animated visualisations to help explain the beauty of maths. Gave me some new ways to think about and understand imaginary numbers.
  • Let’s make the indie web easier. Giles is right. If (/when?) I had more spare time I'd run some #IndieWeb workshops or hackdays or something (which would also likely give me the nudge to update/migrate this website to Jekyll)
  • How the legal system made it so easy for the Post Office to destroy the lives of the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – and how the legal system then made it so hard for them to obtain justice. Excellent blog post from David Allen Green on the failures of the UK legal system and the professional classes that allowed the Horizon scandal to flourish. "But a saddening thing is that if it were not those particular identifiable individuals who were culpable (and they certainly should be held to account) then it would have been other individuals doing the same things. And this is because of legal and corporate contexts that facilitated this wrongdoing. [...] these were not exceptional individuals – they were individuals doing what they (wrongly) believed to be their job or performing what they (wrongly) believed to be their function or protecting what they (wrongly) saw to be legitimate interests."
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December 26, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 26th 2023 Edition

These posts are all scheduled and so posted by a machine rather than requiring me to actually click "publish" at the exact time, but posting on Christmas Day still seems a bit odd, so this is a Boxing Day sale sort of Interesting Things. Happy holidays!

  • What If by Benjamin Zephaniah. This poem is a quarter of a century old, yet sadly so, so relevant.
  • Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed. "[Tesla] built a simulacrum of a self-driving system, a spectacle for consumers and Wall Street alike, that boosted profits and stock prices at the expense of anyone who happened to be looking at their phone when the system made a mistake." The computer science software ethics modules must be so much easier to teach these days, given the number of examples to draw upon. There were just a couple of aircraft fly-by-wire examples when I did my degree.
  • 17776. A lovely bit of hypertext sci-fi.
  • Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content. "Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I've become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work."
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November 06, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 6th 2023 Edition

  • Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View. Erin Kissane has written an excellent, if disturbing, set of essays (this is the third part, see here for the full series) into how Facebook enabled and wilfully ignored the genocide in Myanmar. They decided they'd rather keep the tens-of-billions of dollars profit than try to tackle the many problems with their platform and apps. They've also been deploying "AI" to try to solve the problem, which manages to flag at best less-than-5% of the hate speech and violent posts. We should bear that in mind when politicians are waving magic AI wands at all manner of problems. We should also shut down or break up Facebook, as they obviously aren't interested in the harm they're causing.
  • Federated Ecovillages & Steps Towards a Modern Cybersyn. I think the Cybersyn angle isn't the right answer, but I think there are useful things we can do with tech to fold into such a solarpunk future.
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October 23, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2023 Edition

  • High speed rail and what Britain can learn from the Baltics. I wonder if the "high speed" bit of HS2 has been part of the problem, focusing attention on how quickly we can get to London. The focus on London definitely has, as ever. I'm not especially bothered about getting to London more quickly; getting around the country, and having more freight travel by rail, would be great, and being able to catch a sleeper from Liverpool Lime St (or even Crewe) to the Continent would be excellent!
  • Green Scared? Some Lessons From the FBI Crackdown on Eco-activists. "Those who consider obeying the law more important than abiding by one’s conscience always try to frame themselves as the responsible ones, but the essence of that attitude is the desire to evade responsibility. Society, as represented—however badly—by its entrenched institutions, is responsible for decreeing right and wrong; all one must do is brainlessly comply, arguing for a change when the results are not to one’s taste but never stepping out of line. That is the creed of cowards, if anything is" I'm not, I think, arguing particularly for breaking the law in choosing that quote—I haven't read How to Blow Up a Pipeline after all—but we do need more challenging of, and refusal to accept, the status quo.
  • Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? There's been lots of talk on Mastodon, and elsewhere, this week about a whiny manifesto from a tech billionaire. I haven't read it. I have read this response to it, and it makes lots of sense. "What makes Andreessen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life. We have spent decades clapping for Andreessen and his buddies. We have put them on magazine covers. We stopped regulating tech monopolies. We cut taxes for the wealthy. We trusted that they had some keen insight into what the oncoming future would look like. We assumed that the tech barons ultimately had our best interests at heart. [...] The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much."
  • How to Be a Better Reactionary: Time and Knowledge in Technology Regulation. Less worrying about imagined possible futures; more worrying about the existing problems we can see happening now.
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September 18, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 18th 2023 Edition

  • Start With Creation. I'm still learning to just start working on things, to overcome the inertia, but this is a good reminder/encouragement. It helps to be working in a place surrounded by knowledgeable folk and tools and materials.
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August 07, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 7th 2023 Edition

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July 17, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 17th 2023 Edition

  • A talk: How To Find Things Online. Great essay from v buckenham about the history and possible future of sharing and finding text on the Internet.
  • Permission. An interesting proposal from Jeremy Keith: should we stop Google et al. from indexing our sites? I wonder what a co-operative, opt-in search engine would look like instead; or whether we could build communities of federated search engines where I and friends of friends visit?
  • Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? It seems that Facebook (and others?) might have used a pirated copy of my book (and lots of others) to train its AI. Maybe my publisher consented to that, but I suspect not. I definitely didn't consent to it.
  • On Technology and Degrowth. I think "degrowth" is a poorly-chosen name; I'd incorrectly assumed it was nearer to the hair-shirt environmentalism of the 70s, but it seems that's not the case and it's more sensible. "This brings us to a critically important point. We must be clear about what growth actually is. It is not innovation, or social progress, or improvements in well-being. It is very narrowly defined as an increase in aggregate production, as measured in market prices (GDP). GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of health care. This metric is not intended to measure what is important for people, but rather what is important for capitalism."
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June 26, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 26th 2023 Edition

  • Eton and all the murder. Get rid of private schools, or at least start by getting rid of boarding schools.
  • Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘These are the people who could actually pause AI if they wanted to’. This is all excellent, sensible stuff from Meredith Whittaker. "No. I don’t think they’re good faith. These are the people who could actually pause it if they wanted to. They could unplug the data centres. They could whistleblow. These are some of the most powerful people when it comes to having the levers to actually change this, so it’s a bit like the president issuing a statement saying somebody needs to issue an executive order. It’s disingenuous."
  • Shifting Focus: Organizing for an EcoSocialist Future. Fantastic talk from Kali Akuno, who runs Cooperation Jackson.
  • The cavalry have arrived. But not for long. So much potential for good work in tech in the UK; so little of it given any attention while the politicians and media chase boosterish hype-cycle bollocks.
  • Missing the Point of Everybody. Beautiful writing about the contradictions and complications of life and, intertwined, #metoo.
  • Meta and Mastodon – What’s really on people’s minds? Facebook are, apparently, joining the Fediverse; that's the collection of services like Mastodon—a Twitter-like service; Pixelfed—more Instagram-like; KBin—a Reddit alternative; all of which interoperate so you're no longer walled in and only able to follow folk on the same service. It's good, you should join if you haven't already. There has been much discussion on Mastodon of late about Facebook's actions (or potential actions), and Ian Betteridge does a good job of laying them out. Seems like lots of the other commentators need to read up on Ostrom's work, and how we prevent the so-called tragedy of the commons.
  • Qualities of Life. Erin Kissane (who's writing lots of good stuff recently) laying out how we might make better social and sociable software systems.
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June 12, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 12th 2023 Edition

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April 17, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 17th 2023 Edition

  • Smoke Screen. An essay by Mandy Brown on the narrative power of AI or machine learning.
  • The age-appropriate rubber dinghies of the sunlit uplands. The Online Safety Bill is a mess and already being abused by this Government. It should be thrown out.
  • On Snowballs, Napoleons, and sharks. This matches my experiences. I've never understood the "business networking" events, or the multi-day huge "business" conferences that we seem to have annually in Liverpool, where the folk (tangentially) involved in putting them on exhort me to attend because somehow spending a few days alongside a bunch of other folk trying to sell me things I'm not interested in will somehow help me sell them things they aren't interested in. I similarly lament the loss of the late 2000s tech meetup/unconference scene; and at some point I'll start doing something about it.

And via Alex, a great video of bike culture in London. We often gain groups of scallies on mountain bikes when we're out Joyriding. Maybe we need to start running some video-editing or bike-pimping workshops round here too...

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April 10, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 10th 2023 Edition

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March 27, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 27th 2023 Edition

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March 06, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 6th 2023 Edition

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February 27, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 27th 2023 Edition

  • Smart technologies for disciplining the poor. "Prepayment meters don’t protect customers at all. They protect suppliers and humiliate customers." All of this. The gas meter in my flat is a pre-pay one. I wish I'd kept the leaflet that I got at the start of using it—it was full of patronizing copy explaining how it made my life better and was for my benefit. People with well-paid jobs sat around and wrote that copy. It's written to make them feel better, not the customer who reads it. Thankfully I don't need to worry about how to pay for it, but it's still no end of annoyance: I'll wake up to a cold flat because it's run out; I have to leave the flat and go into the basement (where the meter is) to turn on the "emergency credit"; it can only be topped up at a handful of places, which require a special trip as they're not particularly convenient; you have to top-up in cash, you can't pay by card; the maximum amount you can top-up is £99 (it's gone up since the cost-of-living crisis, it was £49 before then), not £100... It's full of things like that, seemingly designed for the customer's inconvenience.
  • Britain is screwed. "On most measures, the [UK] has the most limited welfare state of any developed country, including the United States"
  • Don't believe ChatGPT - we do NOT offer a "phone lookup" service. You best hope that you don't end up the target of ChatGPT's plausible bullshit. Sigh.
  • How Clean is Hydrogen, Actually? Interesting discussion about the challenges of using hydrogen as a fuel.
  • Gas industry paid lobbyists £200,000 to get MPs’ support for ‘blue hydrogen’. The MPs and areas mentioned in this article are around Teeside, but we have similar large petrochemical plants and plans here in the North-West. We need alternative employment options, to let the workforces transition as well as our energy sources.
  • BBC Radio 4 - Seriously…, The Privatisation of British Gas. Not related to the last two links. As Denise notes: "Tell Sid he already owned British Gas." Late on in the podcast they note that big, nationalised industry was good at the start and drifted into bureaucracy; and that privatisation shook things up but then suffered from the same state. They wonder if that's inevitable and just a cycle that will repeat. How about we try finding a way to keep the energy companies smaller and in public ownership? How about we acknowledge the tendency towards stasis and try to design a system that allows for change?
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February 06, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 6th 2023 Edition

  • Yeah but…I don’t really have anything worth sharing. "Follow your passions, your frustrations, your intrigues, and see where they take you. Then share how you see it, in your world and in your own words. You might believe everything has been said by voices more expert than yours but, trust me, your perspective is just as valid as theirs. And, if your context and lived experience is underrepresented in what’s written about your topic, then your contribution to our collective understanding will be more valuable than most. "
  • The sky is falling. Why do groups of well-meaning, nice people make such wrong (and harmful) decisions? This is excellent. And chiming with me particularly as watch the status quo of the regeneration cycle reassert itself. Not that I really expected anything else, I'm just laying down markers and continuing to play the long game. Maybe it's a gyroscope, not a cycle.
  • You wise up. Are we seeing the beginning of the end for the Online Safety Bill? Let's hope so.
  • Why the super rich are inevitable. Fantastic interactive exploration of economic models to show why a meritocracy isn't the best economic approach.
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January 30, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 30th 2023 Edition

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January 09, 2023

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 9th 2023 Edition

  • Optometrists, Octopii, Rubber Ducks & Centaurs: my talk at Design for AI, TU Delft, October 2022. Matt Jones always gives me new things to think about. This time it was more rediscovering the idea that I should be able to train a local "AI" to make my life better, without having to hand over all that data, and learnings, to some tech startup.
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. I'm not giving up on my own email, but this lays out how the big providers are abusing their power.
  • Network effect. "But Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram." This.
  • We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter. "There is no quick fix for the problem—if I offered one, I would be the very kind of bullshitter I strive to avoid being—but we at the very least need to recognize what it is we are trying to change. We are trying to create a culture of thoughtfulness and insight, where people check carefully to see whether what they’re saying is true, and excessively egotistical people are looked upon with deep suspicion."
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December 12, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 12th 2022 Edition

  • The Billionaire and the Anarchists. Choose anarchy, you're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire.
  • What if failure is the plan?. "I highly doubt that Twitter is going to be a 100-year company. For better or worse, I think failure is the end state for Twitter. The question is not if but when, how, and who will be hurt in the process?"
  • The small things Manifesto. The next big thing will be a lot of small things.
  • ooh.directory. An excellent resource from Phil Gyford. As he says: "For years I’ve seen people moan that “nobody blogs any more”, all while my feed reader was overflowing with new blogposts I never had time to read. I want to demonstrate that there are lots and lots of people blogging, about all kinds of subjects!"
  • Becoming Athletic In My 50s. Get a bike. Play out on it.
  • Word Persons and Web Persons. I wonder if I'm more of an Internet person than a web person, but...
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November 14, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 14th 2022 Edition

  • Don’t Read Off The Screen. Good presentation advice, well presented.
  • The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly's "Thousand True Fans" Theory. I think we're (too slowly) getting a bit closer to the good parts of 1000 true fans, but there's a lot to this critique.
  • After Twitter. "The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself."
  • That last link isn't really about Twitter, or Mastodon. However, I should note that the Fediverse (which includes Mastodon, but also Instagram-a-likes such as Pixelfed and more and they all work with each other!) is better. I'm over there as @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk and there's a company instance so you can follow @MCQN_Ltd@social.mcqn.com too if you like.

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

  • Tom Critchlow's blog, although reading more of his posts will just make me want to tinker with making more web tools myself...
  • Heather Burns' blog. Good to keep track of challenges to privacy and how the Government is messing this up.

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October 17, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 17th 2022 Edition

  • It was the Festival of Maintenance last weekend, and the talks are online. Liz Slade's talk about the cultural evolution and decentralized nature of the Unitarian Church stuck many chords with my thoughts on the makerspace and hackspace communities. Hopefully they can grow into similar longevity of the centuries old church.
  • The opening statement by Josep Borrell Fontelles at the EU Ambassadors Conference. video version. A clear-headed and mature explanation of our situation and challenges. "Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia. Russian gas – cheap and supposedly affordable, secure, and stable. It has been proved not [to be] the case. And the access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much better and much more to contain inflation than all the Central Banks together.

    So, our prosperity was based on China and Russia – energy and market. Clearly, today, we have to find new ways for energy from inside the European Union, as much as we can, because we should not change one dependency for another. The best energy is the one that you produce at home. That will produce a strong restructuring of our economy – that is for sure."
  • Developer Landlords Are Trying to Take Over Liverpool. Not sure "trying" is the right word there, sadly.
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October 03, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 3rd 2022 Edition

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August 29, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 29th 2022 Edition

  • Beatlemania, although it's not really about the Beatles. Informational cascades helped the Beatles become (rightly) massively successful. Reputational cascades prop up so much mediocre or terrible projects in Liverpool. I'm here hoping that my work is high enough quality and that I can surf the right levels of luck and external interest in order to wind up in the first camp.
  • Britain’s Fastest Self-Powered Human: Mike Burrows. Fantastic article on a super interesting bicycle designer, who sadly died recently.
  • Practice the future. I love this concept of practising the future. I think it's a large part of what we do at DoES Liverpool.
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August 15, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 15th 2022 Edition

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July 25, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 25th 2022 Edition

  • What would “Retrofitting your town/city” courses and workshops be like in practice? Excellent thoughts on how cities should be getting on with the work we need to do to tackle the climate emergency.
  • NYC x MFG. As in New York, also in Liverpool.
  • Restoring American Competitiveness. Again, not just America, rebuilding our industrial commons is important. We need to stop giving decisions about manufacturing policy to people who don't realise you can't separate supposed "high value" manufacturing from the rest of manufacturing, and stop thinking that property folk running facilities that house certain types of businesses can productively speak on behalf of those businesses.
    "In general, government has been effective in its support for innovation when it has acted as a customer seeking a solution to a concrete, compelling need or when it has been a patron of basic or applied research that has the potential for broad application. Conversely, its support of innovation has generally failed when it has not had a user’s stake in the outcome or when it has bet on unproven technical solutions that required extensive knowledge of commercial applications or market realities that it lacked."
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July 18, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 18th 2022 Edition

  • Equipment Supply Shocks. DoES Liverpool is a good, albeit small, example of this — we've made laser-cutting and much more available to lots of folk in Liverpool. We don't measure or care (at a filling-in-forms level) about how that impact spreads and achieve more impact as a result. I like the applying-in-public ideas in that article too, that might help make all the innovation and regeneration funding do something useful.
  • It's worse than you think. But that might not be a bad thing.
  • The week the open web won. More of us should be writing our truth into the public record, on sites that we control. I want to read more of them.
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July 04, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 4th 2022 Edition

  • Manufacturing an Ecosystem. You can replace the US with Liverpool in this article and get most of my thoughts after doing the Indie Manufacturing project. The "high value manufacturing" jobs won't exist in a vacuum, they'll be mixed with supposed-"low value" manufacturing processes, and will need such capabilities locally.
  • Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? (aside: I love the fact that the jauntily-angled text for the header on that site is just text, so i can highlight and copy it) The IndieWeb is great, but it needs to be easier for non-web-developers to get started with.
  • ‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out. A depressing but entirely predictable article about the "regeneration" of East London. It would be good if the media asked more questions and were less credulous when these things are proposed. At least we're starting to see alternatives coming along with councils such as Liverpool taking Community Land Trusts (CLTs) seriously.
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April 04, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 4th 2022 Edition

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March 14, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 14th 2022 Edition

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February 21, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 21st 2022 Edition

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January 31, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 31st 2022 Edition

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January 03, 2022

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 3rd 2022 Edition

  • last-month Notes: voting, health and tech, ruggedising. An excellent (as ever) set of links from Laura. I'm hoping (as in, I've stopped reading it because in an ideal world I'd find tine to blog about it, but don't quite have the appetite for the work right now) that at least one of the links will make it into something bigger, but there are a whole bunch just on the edge of that...
  • Same Old. This is superb. "Such recycled futures masquerade as innovation to suck the life out of other possibilities. Space colonies and voice-controlled kitchens take on an air of inevitability despite their many postponements and disappointments, while critical refusal of these futures, or truly alternative visions, are cast as implausible." I'm not interested in tech for how it can give us the same old, I'm interested in how we can use it to take power from those who currently have it and spread it more equally to everyone else.
  • Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism. "‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person."
  • The speculative fiction novel I want to read this year. An excellent post on open-source governance.
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December 27, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 27th 2021 Edition

  • Too Big to Sail: How a Legal Revolution Clogged Our Ports "The ability to extract extra revenue, especially when demand is high, means that we’re not in an all-hands on deck situation, but a situation which is working quite well for some, and terribly for much of the industry and the public." Reading this and wondering how much of my money has been given to Peel to let them continue playing this game: "The game in the business is to acquire market power and then use mega-ships to offload costs onto others and block new entrants."
  • Winter Solstice. Chris Locke, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, died recently. Doc Searls, one of the other authors, pointed to this lovely bit of writing in his obituary of Chris.
  • The End of Rationalism: An Interview with John Ralston Saul. Trump and Johnson are showing that reason has its limits; you can see this every day on Twitter, et al, as people wonder why their cold facts don't win out. It's not that we don't need facts, it's that we need more than just facts. Maybe we should provide his idea of structured civic participation in exchange for your UBI payment? I realise itt's no longer as universal, but maybe a Universal Citizens Income would be a better thing anyway?
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December 20, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 20th 2021 Edition

  • The creator economy. If there's going to be a "creator economy", I too want it to be about moving the world in a better direction, and not just a few rock star youTubers.
  • Open Source Software Virtual Incubator. Nice to see someone trying an open proposals process to help fund open source. It'd be good if that led to a more collaborative process between entrants.
  • Webrise. Written before the recent log4j crisis, but good thoughts the need for more and more diverse funding for the web. I'd like there to be an organisation that funded and supported Internet-native approaches to the world. It's been over a decade since I wrote about my disappointments with the British Computer Society. I've given them over a grand in subscription fees in that time, it would've been nice to give it to a better organisation instead.
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November 08, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 8th 2021 Edition

  • What Facebook Knew All Along. "But this much is clear: Facebook knew all along. Their own employees were desperately trying to get anyone inside the company to listen as their products radicalized their own friends and family members." Get an RSS reader and start building a newsfeed you control; come and hang-out with me and others on Mastodon—or Pixelfed if you're leaving Instagram and prefer the photo-friendly approach. That interoperates with Mastodon too. And leave Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp...
  • Managerial blah.
  • Does someone deserve to die for this?. "As Genevieve Gunther says, climate change isn't something we're doing, it's something we're being prevented from undoing. [...] In the UK, politicians held off on announcing a lockdown because they assumed that people wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice. But it turns out we're willing to go to extraordinary lengths to protect our community and each other. [...] I'm not an activist in any way, and I've never considered myself to be someone who'd risk my own comfort in order to save the world. But I have. All of us have. Now we know how far we're willing to go, and it's further than many of us imagined."
  • A Beginner's Guide to Social Media Verification. Good primer (and links to more) on detecting fake images online. As Laurie Anderson says, "get a good bullshit detector and learn how to use it."
  • COP26: Taking on the takes. COP26 won't solve all the problems but it will move us in the right direction.
  • High Streets for All? We need communities to own more of their buildings.
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October 25, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 25th 2021 Edition

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October 11, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 11th 2021 Edition

  • Catharsis. Good of Tim Bray to follow up on the story of Amazon firing people for speaking out about how it treats its warehouse staff, now that they've settled out of court, so "that particular firing spree was not only unethical and stupid, it was probably illegal."
  • The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.. "Besides, it is realistic: things could be better. [...] Obviously there are complications, but these are just complications. They are not physical limitations we can’t overcome. So, granting the complications and difficulties, the task at hand is to imagine ways forward to that better place.
    Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time."
  • How to blog. If you can all just start blogging then I can stop posting these "you should be blogging" links every year or so...
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September 27, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 27th 2021 Edition

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August 30, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 30th 2021 Edition

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August 16, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 16th 2021 Edition

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August 09, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 9th 2021 Edition

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July 12, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 12th 2021 Edition

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May 31, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 31st 2021 Edition

  • Ideas on a lower-carbon internet through scheduled downloads and Quality of Service requests. Interesting thoughts on time-shifting Internet usage, from Sam Foster. I think the big challenge is working out the user interface—that's not quite the right term, but how the concept is communicated to people, and how they schedule things or indicate preferences. There have been an assortment of QoS attempts at the network layer in the past, but none have made things stick because the just-add-more-bandwidth simplicity wins out. That said, I do just time-shift my BBC 6Music listening, so could quite easily schedule that to download in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe there could be an extension/replacement for cron that picks a low-carbon-intensity time to run its tasks?
  • Giving consent. A useful description of sociocracy, which is (very broadly) governing by consensus. I don't think we're too far from this sort of approach with DoES Liverpool, so maybe worth a closer look.
  • The Great Online Game. Lots of this rings true, and at times I hope there's a way we can weave a collective, social story through this, in place of the individualistic, personal-wealth-as-end-goal, burn-the-world-for-crypto alternative.

And this short video is excellent. If worrying.

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May 17, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 17th 2021 Edition

  • What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy? An excellent set of what-ifs, or hopefully, a set of "look, let's head in this direction" stories about how to help open source communities, from Sumana Harihareswara. I aspire to being able to craft things like this.
  • The cage. A great piece from Jeremy Keith about algorithms and tech. "It’s fucking bullshit. I don’t want to live in that cage and I don’t want anyone else to have to live in it either. I’m going to do everything I can to tear it down." Me too, me too.
  • The Memex Method. Cory Doctorow on how his blog helps his other work. That's so true.
  • The Real Development was the Friends We Made Along the Way. A profile of Albert Hirschman and his ideas on economic development. Although he was thinking of countries in the Global South, there's lots to like and apply in smaller scales in the North.

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

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May 03, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 3rd 2021 Edition

  • Remote to who? "we have to ask—remote to who? Perhaps you are remote to your colleagues, but you can be deeply embedded in your local community at the same time. Whereas in a co-located environment, you are embedded in your workplace and remote to your neighbors."
  • LA Mall Purchase Would Be the Biggest Victory Yet for Community-Driven Development. Good to see the community ownership approaches growing in scale.
  • Butterflies and drones. 'I used to joke about having an agreement for potential clients to sign that said “Do you care? Do you really care? Do you really, really care?”'
  • The counterparty puzzle: the curious case of the Miami jewellery designer, the government's PPE scandal and the lawyer on its trail…. As an electronics manufacturer who pivoted into designing and manufacturing visors during the PPE scandal, albeit at zero cost to the NHS and taxpayers, the story of the jeweller mostly rings true. The shocking thing exposed by the pandemic was the complete lack of any understanding of what's involved in making things, from so much of the "people in charge". Decades of Eton-educated people in the positions of power, and the worship of finance above all else are what caused the problems. The fact that those people then had a "priority lane" for getting their mates' made a difficult situation even worse. The Good Law Project are doing good work.
  • Appropriate Measures. An interesting essay about the Appropriate Technology movement of the 70s, and its shortcomings and what we should pay attention to in order to do better this time round.
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March 22, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 22nd 2021 Edition

  • Why Generation X will save the web. Those of us who lived through the early days of the web—the late 90s and the early 2000s—need to explain what we failed to bring into being with the open, decentralized, empowering Internet, and help fold those ideas in to strengthen new movements for a better web.
  • Not All Men: Dismantling The Pyramid. Like the "as a white man with a degree, you're playing the game of life on the easiest setting" analogy of a few years ago, Max Morgan's pyramid gave me new ways of thinking about how I can help bring down the patriarchy.
  • Indies are Everywhere. We are. We're more interesting than those chasing VC.
  • Why I Still Use RSS. Your periodic reminder that you should, like I do extensively, get an RSS reader and start subscribing to blogs with RSS. I use Thunderbird for mine, because I also use it as my email client; AboutFeeds.com has more background and some other recommendations.
  • More of a Talker. I am—in general, and slowly, and it's a bumpy road of ups and downs—getting better at spotting when I'm procrastinating and nudging myself into doing. Reading of the tricks others use to do the same is great. Us over-thinkers and talkers all need the rituals and tics to overcome that bump. Speaking of which, this tidying through tabs and making a start on this blog post is partly to overcome my procrastination in siting down to write the blog post that I've been not-making-enough-headway-with for the past few weekends. So, hopefully there'll have been something else published since the last Interesting Things... and this one.
  • The Urban Manufacturing Edition. A wonderfully-written vignette of the local manufacturing and making spread through Emeryville. This is what Liverpool could look like, if we want it.
  • The road to electric is filled with tiny cars. And this could be a way that we get around that Liverpool of the future, along with the bikes I was pitching last week. Given the near-constant concern over Vauxhall or Jaguar Land Rover deciding to close their plants here, how do we encourage more electric bike coachbuilders (Aglie Liverpool are already doing that...)
  • Delinquent Telephone Activity. Rachel Coldicutt reminds us that the street finding its own use for things also applies to tech, and encourages us to do more of that.

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

  • Adactio. I've oft ended up on Jeremy Keith's blog over the years. Finally decided I should just subscribe. I need to work out how he's styling his RSS feed so it's more human-friendly if you open it in a browser and steal that idea sometime!
  • Jackie Pease Zone. Jackie has started blogging her experiments into biomaterials and three-dimensional algorithmic embroidery.
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March 08, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 8th 2021 Edition

  • Why The IndieWeb? "Using social media you do and say everything you would in real life but you're constantly being watched and listened to in case you say something enthusiastic about barbecues." Host your own content and "you won't inadvertently lure people into the clutches of nazi propagandists sharing the same contaminated space". That last bit is a revelation. Facebook continues to make it harder to get out into the real web because "there be dragons", when actually, you're more likely to encounter dragons on Facebook because they'll promote them at you.
  • Weeknotes: populism of equal cheating, warranties, language. Too many good links in Laura's latest weeknotes, so linking to it all.
  • They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo.
  • Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science. The text (or video) of a talk from Donald Knuth (one of the forerunners of Computer Science) lamenting the lack of technical histories of computing. I'd like to read more of those sort of histories. It made me realise that while I'm enjoying reading Making Art Work (a history of the art-and-technology field from the 60s; will be appearing as a blog-all-dog-eared-pages soon...), it's all about the people and there's very little on the technology beyond brief descriptions. Understandably, but I'd get a lot out of the more technical side too. It also makes me think about the prototype first-web-browser-on-a-mobile-phone that's sat in my flat, and how that needs writing up sometime, beyond this brief write-up I did ten years ago(!?!).
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February 15, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 15th 2021 Edition

And this video is glorious.

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February 01, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 1st 2021 Edition

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January 18, 2021

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 18th 2021 Edition

  • Dancing With Systems. A lovely set of thoughts on ways to approach, and dance with, and influence, systems.
  • Arthur Dooley, One Pair of Eyes. Wonderful video (with the end missing, sadly) of a 1972 film by working class Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley. Lots of this that i agree with, but not all. Would've loved to hang out and chat to him about the city now.
  • If it isn’t autonomous, and it isn’t a metro system, then what exactly is the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro? Really interesting analysis of a Cambridge mass transit proposal, showing its workings. Filing away for the next step in the Knowledge Quarter's process of walking us back from "new station on Merseyrail" through "trackless trams" to "maybe there'll be a bus"... "Have you heard the word “gadgetbahn” before? It is a portmanteau coined to describe transport proposals that, to all intents and purposes, ought to be delivered using proven railway technology and yet go out of their way to be anything but a railway. Typically, such systems are intended to distract from or be at the expense of investment in proper, functional public transport."
  • Weeknotes: Security/safety/economics, accountability, empathy. There were more than half-a-dozen new tabs open in my browser at the end of reading Laura's weeknotes this week.
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December 28, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 28th 2020 Edition

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December 14, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 14th 2020 Edition

  • A Student-Debt Researcher Fucks Me Up With America’s Broken Promises "We’ve made it, like, “Oh, we don’t have to increase your wages, ever; we don’t have to let you unionize; we don’t have to make more jobs, or any of that. We can just tell you to go to college. Oh, and if it didn’t work out for you, you did it wrong. And, you should’ve also managed to not pay for it. You should’ve taken a different major, you need a different degree, you need an additional degree.” And then you do that, and then you’re a sucker." "I think that’s where debt cancellation becomes real dangerous, because it shows that this is pretend! Like, how much else is pretend, if the debt isn’t real? That’s where they freak out about moral hazard, but it’s not really about the debt, it’s like, what if people realize what we’re telling them isn’t true, about their lives? And that they could actually do what they want and deserve to be happy and be paid a decent wage no matter what work they do?"
  • Windows to the Soul. "Smiling so politely into our collective faces. Finding new places to stick the knife." So sadly true. We need better and deserve better.
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December 07, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 7th 2020 Edition

  • JRF, weeknotes 6. SO. MUCH. THIS: "The problem is that, to a non-specialist who needs help, people who are good at getting things done are indistinguishable from everyone else." Not just in digital transformation, it's across all sorts of "digital", and "innovation" and "makerspaces" (and those are just the areas where I trip over it all the time). So much mediocrity masquerading (profitably, and successfully for the mediocre if not for those in need of the expertise) as expertise. It feels like part of the wider societal trend of ever more bluster and PR and a lack of consequences for that being exposed. It's too tiring for those of us with the actual expertise to wade through all the bullshit that we give up and find more interesting games to play.
  • David Graeber - Culture is not your friend. The working class makes all culture.
  • The Mind of an Engineer, an excellent essay by Tim Hunkin.
  • I thought about that a lot. I'm enjoying each day's new essay from this site.
  • Detailed Forensic Reconstruction of the Beirut Port Explosions. Amazing work in analysing a catastrophe.
  • The further you are from power, the more you see: Gary Younge "I remember making a lot of people angry writing about Brexit and saying you can’t just say that people are being tricked because they don’t vote for their material interests, they have other interests. I may not like those interests. I am relatively well off and whenever I vote for a Left-wing party, I vote against my material interest because it’s something else that I want. We shouldn’t think that working-class people are any different. And then, we have to unpick what those interests are." There's lots more than that quote implies. It's a great read.
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November 30, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 30th 2020 Edition

  • David Graeber on the Extreme 'Centre'.
  • Prosthetic Village. "The Great War left “more than 750,000 ex-servicemen permanently disabled” in Britain alone, and specialized institutions arose to accommodate them. If, as historian Annette Becker concludes, the Great War was “a laboratory for the twentieth century: a field experiment or test site where violence could be carried out,” this war laboratory also produced architectural experiments when the battle was supposedly over. Architecture was enlisted in Britain’s post-war reconstruction effort. Mawson’s plans became part of this collective endeavor. One year after the publication of Imperial Obligation, the residents of Lancashire county acknowledged their “obligation” (as the architect termed it) and undertook the creation of two memorials: one conceived to be a commemorative stone monument, and the other an entire village." Really interesting. Although it didn't really build a village, the area is a few minutes' walk from Lancaster station. Maybe that was on the edge of the city in 1918, but it's not what village brings to mind and is more integrated into the city. It doesn't seem very visible these days, sadly—I spent three years in Lancaster at Uni, and had friends who lived in that area and had no idea about it until today.
  • Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway "We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction." A good companion piece to the David Graeber link.
  • Nina Simon: OFBYFOR ALL. A great talk about improving and encouraging diversity in your organisation.
  • Ecological Politics for the Working Class "For the environmental movement to expand beyond the professional class and establish a working-class base for itself, it cannot rely on austerity, shaming, and individualistic solutions as its pillars. It also cannot place so much emphasis on knowledge of the science (belief or denial). It has to mobilize around environmentally beneficial policies that appeal to the material interests of the vast majority of the working class mired in stagnant wages, debt, and job insecurity." Skip over the "Part 1" and "Part 2" section, nobody needs 7000+ words of preamble, but "Part 3" is good. On a related note, are there any good proposals for alternatives to a State monopoly for the option when taking things into public ownership? State monopolies are lots better than capitalist monopolies, but there's still a risk of them stagnating. How do we let alternative and more progressive solutions emerge in those situations?
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November 16, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 16th 2020 Edition

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

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November 09, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 9th 2020 Edition

  • A Total Fiasco. George Monbiot lays out how little interest there is from anyone in charge in making the Test and Trace programme work. "£12bn is more than the entire general practice budget. The total NHS capital spending budget for buildings and equipment is just £7bn. To provide all the children in need with free meals during school holidays between now and next summer term, which the government has dismissed as too expensive, is likely to cost about £120m: in other words, just 1% of the test and trace budget.". We should be working out how to migrate to a system that works, senior people—at least Dido Harding, probably also Matt Hancock—should resign, we should be enacting whatever clauses there are in the contract to retrieve the £12bn from Serco and preferably fine them more. We need to move away from the culture of plausible deniability and blame avoidance and giving people the benefit of the doubt because they've designed a system to make it unclear who is really at fault. We need to start holding people responsible for their failings. Maybe Hancock and Harding and Serco are just unlucky to be the ones left standing when the music stops, but even the worst making-an-example of them won't be as bad as the multitude of deaths that their inability to do their job properly has cost.
  • 30 things I’ve learned in 30 years.
  • LRB: Dark Emotions. An interesting history of the Women's Liberation Movement. Reminds me of some of the experienced and energising activists I met at Activism By the Numbers, and made me think about the work and factions and solidarity in the Maker Movement. So much experience and knowledge in previous forward steps? How do we find and pick up the batons and lessons? How do we help the next generation expand the beachhead in the directions that interest them?
  • I revisited Brian Eno's John Peel Lecture. Fantastic thoughts on art, culture, UBI and open source.
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October 26, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 26th 2020 Edition

[I happened to notice that this Interesting Things on the Internet... series has been running since February 2014! And they were called Editions back then, which is much better than the plain date I've been using for who-knows-how-long. So I'm going back to that from this edition]

  • Why Didn’t Anyone Go to Prison for the Financial Crisis? Entertainingly depressing podcast about elite deviance and how the powerful abuse their position. "if what we want less of is, y'know, lead in children's toys and giant financial crises"
  • Comradery. A co-operative alternative to Patreon.
  • How to Build Your Own Living Structures by Ken Isaacs. WikiHouse but from 1974. The fact that there aren't loads of these sort of houses around shows how much impact our modern equivalents will have, unless we can do something differently to make them more mainstream. An idea and a nice website of instructions isn't enough.
  • Helsinki Design Lab Ten Years Later. Good to see histories being written of contemporary efforts too. This quote dovetails nicely with my last comment: "studying Fuller’s stream of inventions, most of which are compelling technically and intellectually but socially implausible. For example, Fuller’s concept for the Dymaxion house was brilliant as a shelter, but challenging as a home. It asked occupants to live outside of comfortable domestic norms and it never caught on.".
  • Bootprints in butter and failures of imagination- an update on the Food bank. A great blog post, as in, that blend of lifting the curtain and sharing both the day-to-day and the wider reasons, that made blogs such a great medium. Mutual aid, not charity. "no, you don’t have to open a food bank. But you do have to do something."
  • Tackling climate change seemed expensive. Then COVID happened. "If just 12 percent of currently pledged COVID-19 stimulus funding were spent every year through 2024 on low-carbon energy investments and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, the researchers said, that would be enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious climate target. At present, countries’ voluntary commitments put the world on track to warm 3.2 degrees C (5.8 degrees F) or more by the end of the century."

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

  • Ella Fitzsimmons' blog. I've been a fan of Ella for ages, but for some reason didn't have her in my blogroll. She's just started #weeknoting her new job at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

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October 12, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 12th 2020

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September 28, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 28th 2020

  • When open source design is vital: critical making of DIY healthcare equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. A good summary of the collaborative, slightly-messy, international, open source critical making approach that we, along with the rest of the UK #maker community, took in the early days of the COVID19 crisis.
  • The anthropologist in an economist world.A lovely tribute to David Graeber, which also manages to illuminate some of the water-we-swim-in with our existing economic systems. "We find ourselves stuck in these systems, and they pose constant contradictions. I, for example, have had a long and difficult relationship with the idea of… well… monetising my work on alternative money, asking people to transfer to me digital bank deposits in exchange for my thoughts on alternative economic systems. In my first encounters with David I sensed the same struggles. He, like me, believed in solidarity networks, and wasn’t there measuring his time and putting a monetary price on it. [...] He told me how tough it was trying to help out all the groups that needed support, but he nevertheless kept at it. This is why David was an anthropological hero to me, because he explicitly politicised and lived his anthropological knowledge." I feel seen (apart from the being an anthropologist bit...)
  • How to Climate Change in a (different kind of) crisis. Alex providing some good things-to-think-about for designers and technologists. I was going to add "who are thinking about the Climate Emergency", but all designers and technologists should be thinking about that.
  • Amina Atiq. Excellent interview of Amina Atiq by Laura Brown, covering art and business and identity and culture.
  • 👁🚁 Oh, this wont be hacked immediately!. In his latest newsletter, Bryan Boyer explores some of the wider effects of the Amazon video "security" drone. "Closed technologies are only a means to an end, but open technologies are a starting point for indeterminate future economic, social, and political happenings. Closed technologies are extensions of power. Open technologies are empowerment." True, but the past two decades have taught us that we also need to be careful who we're empowering.
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September 21, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 21st 2020

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September 14, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 14th 2020

  • Answers on a postcard: how would you do technology differently? "Historical experience reinforces Mike’s point that there is rarely “one best way” for technology. Spaces for critical making and participatory technology occupy different vantage points and see the lie of the land differently, compared to the unreflective views of dominant institutions. Whereas dominant institutions tend to produce what Mike calls ‘present tense technology’ – technologies that perpetuate the status quo – other, more critical viewpoints inform prototypes that radically anticipate different future institutions."
  • Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy "The tracking industry is correct that iOS 14 users are going to overwhelmingly deny permission to track them. That’s not because Apple’s permission dialog is unnecessarily scaring them — it’s because Apple’s permission dialog is accurately explaining what is going on in plain language, and it is repulsive."
  • The Apocalyptic Red Western Skies Caused by Climate Change-Fueled Wildfires. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
  • My Climate Journey: Episode 93: Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. The perfect antidote to the previous link. There's lots to do, we need to stop letting the few (admittedly loud and powerful) voices distract us.
  • Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit. Everyone has been linking to this, but for good reason. I'm particularly taken with the concept of poetic technologies. "Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers that spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody wars over who would replace Britain as a dominant world power—wars that culminated, appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is significant, then, that our current technological stagnation seems to have begun after 1945, when the United States replaced Britain as organizer of the world economy."
  • Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins on QAnon and disinformation and A baseless US conspiracy theory found a foothold in Europe. New research shows how for more background. There was a second QAnon/Anti-Vaxx/Anti-mask march in Liverpool the other day. Luckily there seems to be a growing awareness of it and local proponent "Sine Missione".
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September 07, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 7th 2020

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August 24, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 24th 2020

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

  • Electric Flapjack build blog. I realised that I'd only been keeping up with my mate Michael's blog posts about his guitar building by spotting the links on his Mastodon feed, and so had missed some. Rectified that by adding it to my RSS reader.
  • … My heart’s in Accra. Ethan Zuckerman seems to be working in an interesting public interest tech areas.
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August 17, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 17th 2020

  • Paul Peter Piech in 2020. I hadn't come across Paul Peter Piech before, but I'm really liking his work. There are lots of examples in the "Eye on Design" article linked from Matt Jones'.
  • UN Sustainable Development Goals – Let’s Not Sleepwalk to Disaster. A critique of the UN's SDGs, which sadly rings true.
  • Why is This Idiot Running My Engineering Org?. I think, I hope, I'm the sort of leader who embraces death.
  • Impact Measurement: A Cautionary Tale. "too often impact measurement is middle class people demonstrating to rich people the worthiness of poor people to receive some small portion of the funds expropriated from them". Good to see this sort of self-reflection happening. All the measurement seems logical, but ends up excluding so much good work and often just privileges a different set of chancers. This quote rings true too: "No one in this field enters it or stays in it to perpetrate harm. Quite the opposite. Every single person I have met in impact measurement is passionately committed to making the world a better place. That is the reason they decided to do this work in the first place. But intentions are not enough." I don't have a better idea for how to set up the system, which is why I continue working outside it, in the hope of replacing it, or at least (and most realistically) showing that other ways are possible.
  • "when might production *be* the product?" Interesting framing of how Patreon, etc. could be people paying for the future process, rather than an expected product. I have similar conflicting thoughts around my work and the topic of getting paid for it; so far I partly dodge the issue by being able to do well-paid (and mostly interesting) work that subsidises the rest, but that doesn't scale as well to a collective/group (I think...)
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August 03, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 3rd 2020

  • The New Stability. "Before I become your doctor, you have been intubated for weeks. I am a point in time, unattached to the greater narrative." Life as a doctor in a pandemic. Sad. Powerful.
  • Lab Notebooks. Doesn't need to be a physical notebook, but this captures why my github/gitlab issues and README.md files have lists of the things I tried.
  • Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope "I try to expect nothing and hope that everything is possible. I want the courage to need very little and demand a lot."
  • Not an Amazon Problem. "There’s lots more to complain about but little of it is specific to Amazon, it’s all about 21st-century-capitalism". Tim Bray refusing to sit neatly in the clickbait headline pigeonhole that people want to sit him in. More of this please, from more of us.
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July 20, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 20th 2020

  • Why does DARPA work? Interesting look at one of the few research "innovation agencies" that has worked. This should be something that anyone setting up things like Innovate UK.
  • When data is messy. AI thinks a tench looks like human fingers against a green background. This is why we need to be able to explain why machine learning has made the choices it has, and why we need regulation to cover unexpected cases and consequences.
  • Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser.
  • History Will Judge the Complicit. You could write a similar article to this replacing Trump et al with Johnson, Commings etc. The country needs more of the Tories outside the inner cabal to find their decency and speak out.
  • Just Too Efficient. More efficiency is the sort of maxim that at first glance seems sensible, but really it's one that should be "as efficient as necessary, but not more".
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June 29, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 29th 2020

  • The Sweetgreen-ification of Society. "We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where." This is one of the things I miss from Turin. There was more diversity of age groups and social classes living in the city centre (where I did), and good food at all levels of fanciness of restaurant and trattorie.
  • Research In The Wild. An important challenge for our times, and part of why I want more people to understand the realities of tech, and more of them to be in all roles across society. "Suppose Cambridge is going to have regulations about what science of DNA-level technology can be done. Who’s going to make the decisions? You’re not going to let the scientists make the decisions, even though they said, “You can trust us, after all we’re.. .” So you say okay, well, we have to let the public make the decision. So we have to form an outside group. Who are you going to put on the committee? Are you going to walk down to the central square and point at people at random and say, “You’re on the committee”? You can’t do that because people have to be highly educated in this material before they can make decisions. So therefore you take academics or biologists, but they already have a vested interest. And this is a long-standing legal problem in the United States or anywhere. When you want to have a regulation of something, who do you make the regulators? You have to make the regulators people who understand the technology. Who are the people who understand che technology? People who already have a vested interest in it."
  • David Olusoga talk at The Bluecoat. Recorded two years ago, an excellent jaunt through how global so many of the "quintessentially British" things we hold dear really are, and how much we omit from our history. He makes an interesting point during the Q&A that history is somewhere that the British go for comfort. I think there's a lot of truth in that.
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June 22, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 22nd 2020

  • Anti-Monopoly Thinking. Good thinking about breaking up the big tech companies, from Tim Bray (who's worked at a few of them).
  • Democracy as a Platform: Learning from Taiwan. Alistair Parvin asks why "we have tended to frame digital technology and the Web as an exclusively private sector phenomenon". I think the default assumption that we should build everything to scale is another aspect of tech that we should be scrutinising too.
  • You have reached the next level. "This is big-time news, and I think probably the biggest and most important part of the book. Why? Because if Uber is doing it, then all the other comapnies are likely doing it too.

    And what this means is that, not only are our private communications not safe from the CIA, NSA, and advertisers, they’re also not safe from companies coming in to impersonate people we trust, if those people are tied to sketchy companies.

    Ok, granted, all of this this is a little tinfoil-hat-y, even for me. But if Uber did it, where else is it happening [...]?"
  • Russ in Cheshire's the [half] week in Tory for this week. These Twitter threads (it's a regular, sadly, series) are well written, and good summaries of just how much shit this Government is doing. A couple of them jumped out in particular this time: "9. Meanwhile, the Housing Minister admitted he knew he was breaking the law when he saved a billionaire Tory donor dodge £50m tax, - half the cost of feeding 1.3m children" and 13. In March, student nurses nearing the end of training were asked to forego exams and volunteer to fight Covid19 on the front line; 14. This week their contracts were dropped, so from July they have no work, no pay and no qualification; 15. And their July wage won’t be paid". I appreciate these collections of the deplorable actions of the Tories, but also feel that this bringing them to light isn't enough. Harking back to this other Twitter thread from another recent "Interesting Things..." post. How do we find the pressure points to hold these politicians to account? Do we need to help and encourage our journalists? Do we ask the many more backbench and junior Tory MPs why they're happy to enable this behaviour? Do we take to the streets? Build a queue of issues and a solidarity movement where we keep the focus on the first one till it's resolved and only then move onto the next outrage? Something else? What else?
  • Datasette: A Developer, a Shower and a Data-Inspired Moment. "Willison maintains 73 open source projects, and he says the only way you can maintain 73 projects is if you treat every single one of them as if you’re not a core maintainer. Each must have a ReadMe and tests and detailed issue threads discussing what he was working on." This is a big part of my habits too.

Netflix have put a bunch of their documentaries on YouTube for free, including this beautifully shot worrying look at how small changes in global temperatures are disrupting our ocean ecosystems

The cameras they use in this are awesome assemblages of 3D printing, Arduino and Raspberry Pi too.

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June 08, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 8th 2020

  • 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University. On AI and automation and machine learning, ostensibly in education, but applicable everywhere. It's long been easy to make a good living in tech helping to further the "inevitable" drive for "efficiency" for those with power. It's only been inevitable because we have enabled it, and the current pandemic has shown efficiency to be the false god it always was. Many of us got into technology because of the power that it gave us, we need to share that with the less powerful, not pile more of it onto the plates of the already powerful in the hope that we'll catch the crumbs.

Nineteen years ago next month, there was rioting outside (what's now) my front door as the over-zealous policing of the black community in Toxteth reached breaking point. This is a really interesting collection of interviews with some of those involved...

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Interesting Things on the Internet: June 8th 2020

  • 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University. On AI and automation and machine learning, ostensibly in education, but applicable everywhere. It's long been easy to make a good living in tech helping to further the "inevitable" drive for "efficiency" for those with power. It's only been inevitable because we have enabled it, and the current pandemic has shown efficiency to be the false god it always was. Many of us got into technology because of the power that it gave us, we need to share that with the less powerful, not pile more of it onto the plates of the already powerful in the hope that we'll catch the crumbs.

Nineteen years ago next month, there was rioting outside (what's now) my front door as the over-zealous policing of the black community in Toxteth reached breaking point. This is a really interesting collection of interviews with some of those involved...

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June 01, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 1st 2020

  • Solving the “The Miracle Sudoku”. As Kottke quotes: "You’re about to spend the next 25 minutes watching a guy solve a Sudoku. Not only that, but it’s going to be the highlight of your day.". It's true. I was not expecting to watch 25 minutes of someone solving a Sudoku, but I did, and it was great!
  • #DemandANewNormal. A campaign to find hopes and answers to how we build a better life after the Before.
  • Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon. Not just a problem during the Pandemic, but the triumph of glossy renders of may-or-may-not-be-actually-possible-to-make-but-who-cares over the harder to build, possibly compromised because it has to obey the laws of physics of real things. Falls squarely into what my mate Jo calls PRollocks
  • It’s Time to Build for Good. "Building means founding new companies and forging new industry, but it also means building state capacity and creating functional mediating institutions for labor. Reconstructing the better part of an industrial society will take decades; and with our present white-collar workforce left utterly directionless, inflated by elite overproduction, and medicated at world-historic levels, sending a million students to Harvard will not, as Andreessen suggests, help spur technological progress. Rather, it is the regeneration of practically grounded trade schools and state-backed coordination that is needed to retrain a productive workforce." In the UK (and I expect also the US, but my research was here) we have more industry than we think, but not as much as we need.
  • Facebook reportedly ignored its own research showing algorithms divided users. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” one slide from the presentation read. The group found that if this core element of its recommendation engine were left unchecked, it would continue to serve Facebook users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” A separate internal report, crafted in 2016, said 64 percent of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook only did so because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. Apparently although we couldn't trust them to do the right thing back in 2016, we can definitely trust them now they've been found out...
  • Ask Why: Sara Little Turnbull. Interesting bio on Sarah Little Turnbull, who was behind the design of the now-much-known N95 face masks.
  • You're seeing all the necessary tools, for us to shrug off this crisis, go unused while people argue over who should get the credit and profit. Even worse, you're seeing vital help withheld because recipients might not, "deserve it...". Short, depressing but excellent Facebook post about America's response to the crisis. It mostly applies to the UK too. Sigh.
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May 18, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 18th 2020

  • It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t think Johnson and his team are malevolent; rather, I think they simply cannot see the way things could be. They see themselves as “Us” and the people as “Them”. Politicians are there to command in the Subject story, to serve in the Consumer story; but they are always separate from the people.

    The Citizen story rejects this separation. We are all of us citizens, and some of us for various amounts of time take on the tasks of politics. It is a spectrum, not a binary distinction.
    Lots of good ideas and useful ways of talking about the sort of ideas I've already got.
  • How Boris Johnson refused to fight the virus. A depressing reminder of why we need the new approach in the previous link.
  • Nightingale Chronicles #2 – failure. A more specific account of the Government's failure with their pop-up pandemic hospitals, from one of the worker's in the London one.
  • A twitter thread from Jay Rosen showing how "exposing" the lies of politicians isn't the right task we need our media to do. We need to get better at holding our unscrupulous politicians (i.e. the politicians who lie and cheat, not all politicians are unscrupulous) to account.
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May 04, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 4th 2020

As with everyone, the pandemic has upended and confounded all ideas about how it would pan out. At the start of the lockdown I was expecting lots of time holed up at home, and so figured I'd have time for reading, reflecting and even maybe some writing here.

As lockdown loomed, I sat in on an online video seminar where Adam Greenfield talked about his experience of mutual aid efforts during Occupy Sandy in New York. In the Q&A someone asked if the movement had thought about any agitating or organising towards having more impact after the crisis. Adam replied that there wasn't any time for such luxuries as there was too much work to be done in responding to the immediate crisis at hand. I remember thinking at the time "ah, that's a shame, but that's not what's going to happen here".

How wrong I was.

A couple of days after that, I found myself fully immersed in DoES Liverpool's response to the shortages of PPE for NHS staff and other care workers. That's still in full flow as I type, closing in on 10,000 visors produced and shipped to hospitals, GPs, care homes, and the like across the North West. I'm just now finding some bits of headspace for sharing some of the things I've been finding of interest...

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March 02, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 2nd 2020

  • How to help someone use a computer. Words of wisdom. Worth applying to other related teaching avenues too, it reminds me of the good examples of fixing I see at the DoES Liverpool Repair Cafes: where the person with the broken item fixes it themselves, with help from the expert, rather than stood to one side watching the expert fix it for them.
  • In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His Ideas. "Carillion consisted, essentially, of a sales and contract management organisation that hunted public-sector service contracts and then hired subcontractors to carry them out." Metcalfe's law is great when you apply it to the number of people with phones in your phone network, or how many computers are connected to the Internet; it's terrible when you're counting the number of entities contracting between each other to deliver something. This is why we need to rid so many areas of our life of marketisiation and financialisation - not (just) because it's not a humane way of arranging affairs, but because it doesn't work!
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February 24, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 24th 2020

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February 10, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 10th 2020

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January 20, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 20th 2020

  • The Future is Grim. A scary look at all the ways the climate is changing. However, there are also plenty of them that show how it is us who are causing things and so, although an immense challenge, lots of ways that we can move to making amends.
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January 06, 2020

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 6th 2020

  • Grenfell – Are firefighters to blame? Understanding human error. Excellent article on the difference between blame and accountability, and how we need more of the latter (for Grenfell, but also elsewhere).
  • One nation, tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry. Sobering reading from the New York Times, investigating how our location is tracked and not-actually-anonymised by tech firms and apps on our smartphones.
  • IGP's Social Prosperity Network publishes the UK's first report on Universal Basic Services. Arguably a better option than a Universal Basic Income, particularly for the transport and information options - I'm less convinced on the shelter or food options: I can see how giving people cash for their rent could just let rents rise to absorb it, but we'd need to overcome the stigma of "council housing". But maybe we've already managed that with right-to-buy mixing up the ownership on estates (my house in Cambridge for example, is ex-council and others in the street are still council- (or housing association-) owned), so as long as new council-builds are a mixture of rent and own across all the sizes and types, we can avoid the problem?
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December 23, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 23rd 2019

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December 10, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 10th 2019

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November 18, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 18th 2019

  • Before there was recycling, there was the rag trade. Interesting article about the literal rag trade.
  • Sweet Moderation, Heart of this Nation. "Will this matter, when it comes to the Mayoral election? Not a jot. Rory Stewart’s actual record as a politician will be a minor talking point for a media culture that draws its commentators from such a limited group of people. For them, what will matter is not policy but tone. His public image is part adventurer, part intellectual, all-round nice chap." Not just about Rory Stewart, but a great analysis of class, politics and the media here in the UK. Sadly.
  • Against Economics. A fantastic article, reviewing the book Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics, and running through how the intersection of economists and politics has failed us.

And an interesting talk on trust, (not) scaling, and decentralized tech from Darius Kazemi:

Eyeo 2019 - Darius Kazemi from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

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November 11, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 11th 2019

  • "Very few white-collar workers at P&G really do anything..." There is so much of this around. It's one of the reasons that Julian refers to DoES Liverpool as a home for corporate refugees, because we are (mostly) "set free to tinker and explore."
  • Clare, Kelman, and Working-Class Art with Professor Simon Kövesi. "The UK establishment seems to accept poverty as the British respond to rain: with a shrug and a closing of the door."
  • Politics is for Power, Not Consumption "If you feel unfulfilled, melancholy, paralyzed by the sadness of the news and depth of our political problems, there is an alternative: actually doing politics." A good reminder that retweeting and getting annoyed with social media and the news isn't being political
  • Maintainers III: Infrastructure and climate. Great write up of the Maintainers conference from Laura, particularly for the section on Chuck Marohn's keynote: "Chuck moved on to an example of two adjacent blocks which were jumped over by post-war growth. One block was still basically small shacks; another tore down what were considered slums, and built a taco drive-through. This looks like growth, a positive thing. However, over time the small businesses change, but there's still a range of small operations. The taco joint is now neglected, and on a journey to become - as this is America - probably a used car lot, and then eventually a derelict site (which a developer will request a tax subsidy to build on). And yet the taco block is worth only $600k now, despite all the public infrastructure which enables it; the 'blighted' block of run-down businesses has a total value of $1.1m. The old stuff, after a century of neglect, is outperforming the recent shiny new building. "
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October 28, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 28th 2019

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September 30, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 30th 2019

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September 23, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 23rd 2019

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September 02, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 2nd 2019

  • The Case for Climate Rage. This is excellent. when women like my colleagues point the finger, it is not at one company or even one industry. The oil, coal, and automotive industries all play a role, the utilities, too, the PR flacks and lobbyists who carry out their vision, the politicians who cave. It’s a lot of people, but it’s not all people, it’s not “humanity.”
  • WeWTF. The only innovation WeWork has managed is the one persuading investors that it's a tech company rather than a property company.
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August 19, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 19th 2019

  • Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle. A good article from Cory Doctorow about Facebook and its monopolistic walled-garden tendencies. This (and similar messaging systems like WhatsApp or Signal or...) reminds me of the mess of interoperability we had with mobile phone networks in the 90s, when you could only text people on the same network as you. It needed fixing then, we'll need to fix it now.
  • A Walk In Hong Kong. First-hand report of what the Hong Kong protests are like, from Maciej Cegłowski. We had a group of visitors from Hong Kong to DoES Liverpool the other day, and talking to them most would have been in the protests had they still been at home and some considered not coming on the trip.
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August 05, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 5th 2019

  • London says FCK U BORIS. I passed this as I happened to be in London that evening, but sadly was en route to an event so couldn't join in.
  • Why the Open Data Movement Has Not Delivered as Expected. Maybe we should be talking about digital commons rather than open data, and having more conversations about safeguarding them. Maybe digital actually inverts the idea of economies of scale - coping with the bandwidth and server overheads of another twenty people using a resource for their side-project is basically free, but when a thousand users show up consistently that has a noticeable cost. How do we charge for the digital commons in ways that allow (and encourage) experimentation and small-scale projects, while ensuring that those which unlock massive value from the commons also contribute to its upkeep?
  • The Doteveryone definition of done: how we make complex ideas travel. Excellent advice on how to share/encourage people to take up your ideas.
  • U.S. Sanctions Impact on the Git Community. A reminder that "cyberspace" is still governed by laws in countries, and that centralised infrastructure is a single-point-of-failure.
  • Boris Johnson: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. This would be enjoyable watching if it wasn't twenty minutes of how terrible our country's new Prime Minister is.
  • England’s new rentier alliance. The lie that the Tories are the party of business becomes ever clearer as they show they don't care about anybody running a business if they can give preferential treatment to finance and landlords.
  • Anatomy of an AI System. Fantastic long-read unpacking the iceberg hidden behind the plastic puck of an Amazon Echo.
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July 15, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 15th 2019

This week's RSS additions:

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July 01, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 1st 2019

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June 17, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 17th 2019

  • Uber’s Path of Destruction. In-depth dismantling of Uber as a company of any value. I disagree that they haven't managed any useful innovation, they did bring a nice user-experience to smartphone-owners-who-want-a-cab, but some service design for a cab firm would've found that sooner or later. Sadly their big innovation is in persuading VCs and the press that they're a tech firm rather than a taxi firm that gets digital; WeWork is doing the same for real estate, and we'll have similar problems to cope with when it becomes apparent that they aren't going to generate the same multiple returns for its investors.
  • Stock and flow. Just a lovely explanation of how to manage step 1 (stock) and step 2 (flow). I also think about opportunity cost a lot, but hadn't made the connection back to my D-grade A-level economics until just now.
  • Sidewalk Toronto: The Recklessness of Novelty. The recklessness of novelty is a wonderful phrase, and sadly it's everywhere. 'There is a local approach to Quayside supportive of global innovation and respectful of Toronto knowledge. And, most importantly, as Shannon Mattern writes, about maintenance over disruption, the work of already here places and people. In her words, “What we really need to study is how the world gets put back together.”'
  • Five Lessons from History. An interesting oblique look at some history that we all know.

Inspired by Giles' recent promotion of RSS and the fact that I've just added two new RSS feeds to my RSS reader, I figured it might be interesting to surface that information here. It's kind of like when Twitter start showing you tweets that your friend's next-door neighbour's cat's distant uncle liked. Only hopefully not quite as annoying. And it's at the end of the blog post, so it's easy to skip. I don't know if it'll become a regular fixture, I guess we'll see.

This week's RSS additions:

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June 03, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 3rd 2019

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May 27, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 27th 2019

  • Putting the Soul in Console. "maybe things like our gaming devices or the websites we visit should be created by people we know and like, instead of giant faceless companies, seems more essential than ever. We would never settle for replacing all of our made-with-love, locally-grown, mom's recipe home cooking with factory-farmed fast food, even if sometimes convenience demands we consume the latter."
  • Council Estate Academics: Take Pride in Your Roots. Not just academics. I didn't grow up on a council estate, but lots of this rings true. The class system in this country has been finely honed over centuries to ensure there's always another level into which you don't fit. Sod that for a game of soldiers.
  • “Like millions of others, I was fed the myth…It’s bollocks, mate.”. A good exploration of another perspective on the last link.
  • Kolyma - Birthplace of Our Fear. Long, but really interesting documentary about the Russian Gulag, that era of Stalinist Russia and its legacy.
  • Russell Keith-Magee - Keynote - PyCon 2019. Interesting arguments about how and why we should be funding open source projects (focused on Python, but it all applies elsewhere too). The section about Ostrom's work in how we successfully manage a commons and how that conflicts with open source licensing was especially interesting. Given that a commons, or a community, needs ways to protect itself from bad actors; how do we reconcile that with the four freedoms? Maybe we need to change the four freedoms.
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May 20, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 20th 2019

  • Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry. Yep. Pretty much all of this. I do think that some of this is a response to the geeks gaining power. Some of us remember what it was like to be the outsider, and want to help others up onto our platform; others remember what it was like to be the outsider, and enjoy getting to be the school bully. So much work to do.
  • Lets talk about Extinction Rebellion. I wanted to write more about Extinction Rebellion here, particularly when I visited the protests on Waterloo Bridge when I was down in London. Given that hasn't happened, this good write-up will have to suffice for now.
  • Senate testimony on privacy and surveillance capitalism. Not as entertaining as his usual talks against the big tech companies, but important, considered arguments about the risks and how we should regulate tech from Maciej. Happy that I pay him for my pinboard.in account. "For sixty years, we have called the threat of totalitarian surveillance ‘Orwellian’, but the word no longer fits the threat. The better word now may be ‘Californian’."
  • Freezing Executive Salaries to Pay Entry-Level Workers a Better Wage. "The conversation with our executives was straightforward. We were in the midst of a turnaround. We were demanding much from every corner of the company. Small financial sacrifices from those at the top could be life changing for those at the bottom of our wage scale."
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May 13, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 13th 2019

  • Tukey, Design Thinking, and Better Questions. Excellent thoughts on data science (I need to read the original paper too, written in 1962!). "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."
  • Finance for non-accountants. Excellent primer on how to read a company's accounts, for non-accountants like myself (and most people).
  • Radically Open Security: Non-profit Ventures. Interesting set of rules for setting up non-profit businesses. Good to see more examples like this knocking around.
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April 29, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 29th 2019

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April 15, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 15th 2019

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March 17, 2019

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: The Devil's Device by Edwyn Gray

Hardly any dog-eared pages for this book, The Devil's Device, but that belies how interesting a read it was. It's the story of Robert Whitehead and his invention, the torpedo.

Page 18

In addition [Robert Whitehead] had no social background and, even worse, he was a common engineer—and everyone knew that engineers were not exactly persona grata in polite circles. In fact, very sensibly, the Navy's own commissioned engineers had to mess separately and were not admitted to the wardrooms lest, so it was whispered, their oil- and coal-grimed hands should besmirch the spotless table linen. It was an attitude exemplified in its extreme by the remark of a young midshipman to an Engineer Lieutenant who had reminded him of the seniorities of rank: 'You may be senior to me, Brown—but my mother wouldn't invite your mother to tea!'

Page 67

Robert had been in business long enough to realize that sheer skill was not enough if one lacked access to the right ears and, even though his torpedo was not yet completely satisfactory, he snatched the opportunity to ensure that news of his weapon reached the most influential people.

Page 228

The German G-7e required only 1,255 man-hours for completion using semi-skilled labour. The equivalent thermal-engined weapon needed 1.707 man-hours with highly skilled operators. In terms of modern warfare the mathematics of production schedules can be as important as the tactical skill of the admirals.

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February 25, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 25th 2019

  • Leeway. An excellent exploration of why we need systems which don't blindly apply a rigid set of rules. (That's the same argument for why most home automation will just annoy us with unexpected edge cases).
  • How Austerity, and a Cowardly Ruling Class, Brought About Brexit. "I want my country back too, as it happens. But I'm not kidding myself about who stole it. The Tories sold out the British people and then made the mistake of giving them one real chance to make their feelings known—and, well, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like David Cameron's face."
  • Known Assailants. A well-written account of failed social mobility in the US. Social mobility seems almost dead these days. Given the mess the upper class is currently making of the UK, it's in everyone else's (the upper class will be insulated regardless, and some are likely to profit from it...) interest to be finding ways to bring it back.
  • Building the Barbican. Fascinating report into the workers who built the Barbican. Includes such scandalous behaviour as one of the contractor companies engineering strikes to try to get out of (or renegotiate) a contract they'd under-priced in their bids, and stories of the establishment siding with management over the workers despite their valid (and relatively minor) demands.
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February 11, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 11th 2019

  • Death Sentence: The Words That Bulldoze Our Cities. How bullshit aspirational marketing copy blights our city, and what it says about society.
  • An oral history of “Silicon” Roundabout. An excellent look at the development of London's tech scene and how the community came first, then the flashy offices and money showed up. Should be required reading for all the "regeneration" types, but they wouldn't want to hear what it told them.
  • A letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates, for that matter) about global poverty. A robust debunking (with plenty of citations) of the "things might look bad but actually we're doing a good job of improving the lives of the global poor" claims/narrative. We're not doing well, and we could do much better, but the rich wouldn't like that (even though there's lots we could do before they'd notice any difference in their lifestyles)
  • Cambridge University deserves to sink below the rising seas. Julian on scathing form about how Oxbridge are failing and how we are failing to hold them to account. It reminds me of an excellent comment on a Metafilter thread on a similar top - "I am surprised that Oxford and Cambridge, but Oxford in particular, haven't attempted to disown so many of their alumni who went into politics and are directly related - both Labour *and* Tory, to the current useless state of British politics.

    There is no greater illustration of how empty the meaning of an Oxbridge education is than of Dominic Rabb, a man according to wikipedia who has a degree from Cambridge and a masters from Oxford, yet is so fucking stupid that he can't work out - for himself - the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing to the UK economy."

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January 28, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 28th 2019

  • How To Pay Attention. Lots of good techniques to steal here. My #inthesaddle bike photos practice is pretty much the "spot something new every day" strategy.
  • The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives. A wonderfully-written article by Robert A. Caro about his research in writing the biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. I really enjoyed his biography of Robert Moses—The Power Broker. At some point there'll be a blog all dog-eared pages post for that, once I've written up the many notes from the 1100+ pages...
  • Co-ops Need Leaders, Too. Useful reminder that co-operatives aren't completely different from other organisations.
  • Brexit and Singapore-on-Thames. A reminder that Britain is being run for the benefit of finance, and the rest of us are just seen as unfortunate baggage.
  • Refusal after Refusal. An essay rejecting the current social view of work. Ostensibly about architecture, I think it applies just as well to the rest of life (definitely tech, at least).
  • When Automation Bites Back.
  • Money laundering 101. A good look through money laundering and how it winds up distorting the property market.
  • Building Acid Communism. Some food for thought, particularly the workshop questions in the latter half.
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January 07, 2019

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 7th 2019

  • Librariness. Lovely exploration of what an investment/reimagining of New York's libraries could look like. A more architectural companion to my Making Digital Libraries talk from a few years back.
  • Open Source Company Gives Us A Peek At Financial Innards. As this article points out, open hardware isn't just about allowing people to build and remix your product, it also allows better traceability of supply chains and sharing knowledge of the normally hidden parts of manufacturing.
  • Made in Britain. I've often lamented how we don't celebrate, or even know about!, the middle-scale manufacturers in this country. So it's great to see ITV making a series that does just that, showing behind-the-scenes at a bunch of manufacturers.
  • The Philosopher Redefining Equality. "we shouldn’t commit ourselves to an ideal system of any sort, whether socialist or libertarian, because a model set in motion like a Swiss watch will become a trap as soon as circumstances change. Instead, we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find."
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December 17, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 17th 2018

  • Weeknotes — diffusion, corporate culture, email. A good set of links and thinking from Laura. The idea about how email smooshes together different speeds or types of communication - things we'd have been able to differentiate before by the medium: scraps of paper for notes; postcards; letters...I think there's huge scope for finding ways to improve email, but I don't think we'll unlock it until the geeks start building it for themselves - it won't come out of startups. And that nods towards Laura's comments on IoT devices. The "industrial foundations run by trustees" would be a nice idea to try too.
  • Innovation’s fairylands. I often feel that the word "innovation" is only useful as a warning that whatever it's applied to is not worth further investigation. the mere declaration of “innovativeness,” which Godin identifies as a “magic word,” is often enough to satisfy observers, be they policy makers, granters, clients, or media, regardless of outcome.
  • Data From Millions Of Smartphone Journeys Proves Cyclists Faster In Cities Than Cars And Motorbikes. The headline has most of the useful information in it, but it's good to see someone reasonably impartial running the data. Presumably the area where bikes win will tend to increase as electric-assist bikes become even more common (quite a few Deliveroo riders I see already have them). It'd be nice to see routing algorithms start to include multi-modal for cyclists too, to combine train and riding.
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December 10, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 10th 2018

  • How to Be an Artist 33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively). Words of wisdom.
  • The Digital Maginot Line. Interesting long read about the risks for a "cyber war". It's not just about securing the PLCs in power stations, it's much more about propaganda and the people.
  • NUMMI. Really interesting interviews about NUMMI, a joint-venture factory between GM and Toyota, and its trials and tribulations with trying to infect GM with the Toyota Production System. Insightful looks at trying to overcome the 70s management-vs-workers-and-unions battle, with mixed results.
  • Being bolder – reflections 18 months into my work at NHS Digital. It's a joy to watch from afar as Matt gets to grips with helping the NHS get better. His comment about the need for some slack in the system for people to work out how to improve things reminds me of the similar approach in the NUMMI story about Toyota's culture of production line workers working alongside the designers and engineers to improve the production process, make new tools, etc. It's easily overlooked, but this quote at the end of Matt's post is one of the most exciting points for me: "I always said this was a multi-year commitment". Change in organisations as large as the NHS is always going to be difficult, so this recognition of that and commitment to the cause is vital (and sadly often lacking elsewhere).
  • The Future of Capitalism, by Paul Collier. Good to see people arguing that we need a more ethical approach in other places than just technology.
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November 26, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 26th 2018

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October 29, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 29th 2018

And a great talk from Anand Giridharadas (as featured in last week's Interesting Things...) challenging us to make actual progress on society, rather than looking for not-really-effective-but-inoffensive-to-propose "win-win" solutions...

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October 20, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2018

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October 08, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 8th 2018

  • Launching the Trust & Technology Initiative. A good primer on the dangers of not caring about how we trust technology
  • If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism? I'm not sure, but in our finer moments you can see glimpses of this post-capitalist world in the DoES Liverpool community, in the pursuit of ideas rather than money. And I suppose a lot of it comes down to a community managing the commons for the good of its members.
  • Second System Syndrome. Nice. A name for something I've long noticed (and perpetually resisted) in software teams: the desire to throw everything away and start from scratch. Actually, it occurs to me that's a similar urge to the pattern for grand masterplanning in the built environment. It's the wrong answer there too.
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October 01, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 1st 2018

  • The Myth of the Ethical Shopper. Turns out our ethics and principles might need us to do more than just buy things.
  • If Software Is Eating the World, What Will Come Out the Other End? "The world is still real. Software hasn’t eaten it as much as bound it in a spell, temporarily I hope, while we figure out what comes next."
  • Preparing a conference talk. Good explanation of how to prep a talk. I don't follow this completely, blurring the work out the narrative and the write the slides parts, but the general principles are all sound.
  • Corbyn Now. "Corbyn’s critics[...], not the electorate, are unwilling to tolerate any serious challenge to a political status quo which is extreme when judged by the same comparisons – to history, to other nations, to public opinion – that show how moderate Corbynism is. The neoliberal character of the status quo doesn’t reflect a public consensus, and it hasn’t for a long time: for example, no opinion poll since the mid-1980s has shown popular support for public sector privatisation."
  • Reading Adam's latest essay on smart cities, Shaping Cities contribution, “Of Systems and Purposes: Emergent technology for the skeptical urbanist”, I realised that my mantra of "judge us (and others) on what we do, not what we say" is a people equivalent of Stafford Beer's "the purpose of a system is what it does"
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September 17, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 17th 2018

And I've enthused about this to a bunch of people now, so I should definitely share it here...

Eyeo 2018 - Nathaniel Raymond from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

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September 03, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 3rd 2018

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August 20, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 20th 2018

  • “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from. Not just writers.
  • Institutional memory and reverse smuggling. Tales about how companies (fail to) capture knowledge.
  • See No Evil. How do we make supply chains more transparent when they're deliberately making their constituent parts into black boxes? Slowly and deliberately.
  • The bluffocracy: how Britain ended up being run by eloquent chancers. We need to start holding people to account, and to judge people on what they do rather than what they say. It's hard, but something I've been trying to do for a decade now. As the saying goes round here, "we're called do epic shit, not talk about epic shit".
  • My Favorite Sayings. Programmer-focused, but good. "Sooner or later people learn the truth and figure out that the person never admits when they don't know. When this happens the person loses all credibility: no-one can tell whether the person is speaking from authority or making something up, so it isn't safe to trust anything they say. " And we should heed the "Coherent systems are inherently unstable" when we try to build governance systems that span the globe. Space for experiments and new-ways-of-doing-things to bubble up are vital.
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July 30, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 30th 2018

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July 23, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 23rd 2018

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July 09, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 9th 2018

  • The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens. Hopefully we can start to recognise that there's value in tactile, no-need-to-look interfaces.
  • After the Fall. John Lanchester on fine form about the decade since the financial crash and how life has gotten worse for not the people who caused it. "How it’s been working out here in the UK is the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history. ‘Recorded economic history’ means as far back as current techniques can reach, which is back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Worse than the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars, worse than the crises that followed them, worse than the financial crises that inspired Marx, worse than the Depression, worse than both world wars."
  • James Hansen’s 1988 climate predictions have proved to be remarkably accurate. We need to be ramping up our efforts to tackle climate change.
  • 5 July 1948: A chance and a challenge. Matt lays out a vision for the NHS that I heartily endorse. Turns out it's roughly the same one it started with.
  • Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
  • Complicating the Narratives. Complexity and nuance in our writing could provide some of the answer to how we can de-polarise the national debate. That's why I like blogging over Twitter (et al) - it encourages longer, more thought-through pieces (when they're not snippets like most of my blogging here of late...)
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July 02, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 2nd 2018

For some scrolling text over the sound of morse code, I wasn't expecting this recreation of the Titanic's comms to be so haunting (and harrowing)

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June 25, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 25th 2018

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May 28, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 28th 2018

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May 21, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 21st 2018

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March 26, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 26th 2018

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March 05, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 5th 2018

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February 26, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 26th 2018

  • The march of the technocrats. Interesting to see the technocratic movement isn't anything new.
  • Using Story to Change Systems. I wonder what would happen if someone funded Ross and Jen to get/help the city write stories about its future? Between them they could pull in the libraries, Writing on the Wall, the tech and maker communities... It'd be like the It's Liverpool 2020 project, but good!
  • Connecting the tech sector to civil society and social innovation. More of this please.
  • Design’s Lost Generation. Mike Monteiro makes a good case for the professionalisation of tech. I'm still not sure how we avoid scaring off the good people and giving those who enjoy paperwork more prestige, but it's something we need to work out how to solve.
  • The Center for Humane Technology Doesn’t Want Your Attention. It is possible to use tech without it strip-mining you for data to sell on.
  • Wirral Wonders. "This joint venture – to be known as the Wirral Growth Company – is ambitious, and I wish the enterprise well, for the good of Wirral and its residents. Yet an investment figure of £1 billion has been mooted, and this is where doubts begin to creep in.[...]Look at Wirral Waters – ten years into a thirty year time frame promoted by Peel, and aided by the council. What is there to show for it? Very little, to the casual observer. Part of Wirral Community College and Tower Wharf, looking out on a waste land." It's hard to see how anyone ever believes the regeneration hype. Maybe we're not supposed to, just to keep disengaged while the powerful get on with consolidating their wealth.
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February 12, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 12th 2018

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January 22, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 22nd 2018

  • Google Memory Loss. Seems Google's mission to organise the world's information should have the caveat "where information is defined as things we can monetize". Who could've guessed. Still, a decent argument for joining me in switching to Duck Duck Go as your search engine.
  • The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed. Lowering the barriers to global supply chains is good, but also makes it easier for a billion get-rich-quick chancers to join in too.
  • Beyond the Rhetoric of Algorithmic Solutionism. "in a zero-sum context, that means that the resources to do something about the information that is learned is siphoned off to the technology. And, worse, because the technology is supposed to save money, there is no budget for using that data to actually help people. Instead, technology becomes a mirage. Not because the technology is inherently bad, but because of how it is deployed and used."
  • The Last Chance Saloon. Good, if concerning, questions about whether Liverpool City Council should be involving itself so much in Everton's potential new stadium.
  • The Social Workings of Contract. There are many times when it benefits both parties to a contract to not strictly enforce all the terms. "Smart" contracts, which pour all those terms into code, don't allow that, which makes them less useful. The sooner us computer geeks realise that messy and imprecise can be a feature, not a bug, the better.
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January 15, 2018

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 15th 2018

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December 27, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 27th 2017

  • The Dangers of Elite Projection. The needs of the many are not the same as the needs of the few.
  • What Do You Call a World That Can’t Learn From Itself?. "So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes."
  • Why is Southern Rail like an aircraft carrier? I think this captures some of the reason behind the last link - this focus on the appearance of things going well, rather than the work of making things go well.
  • Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear "I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations."
  • No hack needed: Anonymisation beaten with a dash of SQL. Anonymising data is near impossible.
  • Computer latency: 1977-2017. In terms of speed-at-responding-to-us, modern computers are lots worse than those of the 80s. My first computer takes 2nd place, and my third computer is 5th. I expect the one I'm typing this on is far down the list.
  • My Internet Mea Culpa. I'm not sure where I sat on believing the elders of the Web, but my critical faculties have taken too long to develop and have had too little impact thus far. There is much work to do if we're to realise the promise of computers and the Internet. This Twitter thread from @seldo has some good thoughts on the topic.
  • Bernard Stiegler: “The time saved through automation must be granted to the people” [translation]. "The work of tomorrow will be discontinuous [intermittent]. Periods of employment will alternate with periods of acquiring, developing and sharing knowledge. The right to the contributory income will be “rechargeable”, based upon the number of hours of employment. In case of problems, the system will be accompanied by a minimum living wage [revenu minimum d’existence] – as a social protection system accompanying the scheme."
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December 11, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 11th 2017

And a fantastic talk about tech leadership, principles and ethics from Bryan Cantrill at Monktoberfest...

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December 04, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 4th 2017

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November 13, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 13th 2017

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November 06, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 6th 2017

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October 30, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 30th 2017

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October 23, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2017

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October 02, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 2nd 2017


Cennydd Bowles: Ethics in the AI Age from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

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September 25, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 25th 2017

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September 18, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 18th 2017

  • Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch. The end-game of advertising-as-business-model. I see it more from Instagram than Facebook, although that's also owned by Facebook. Twitter does this too, but at least you can turn (most of) it off.
  • Unemployment in the UK is now so low it's in danger of exposing the lie used to create the numbers. The graph of job rates by gender is particularly illuminating. The trend of both men/women to converge on the combined-genders line bodes well for equality, although the fact that it's at the cost of rising unemployment levels for men maybe explains some of the problems we're seeing in society. Either way, actually reducing the overall unemployment level is what we should be aiming for (universal basic services notwithstanding)
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September 11, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 11th 2017

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September 04, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 4th 2017

  • Large Companies Considered Harmful. Lots to like here, and probably not just companies, I wonder if you can argue that part of the reason the unions were emasculated in the 80s was because they'd become too big and powerful. Still, today I think it's easy to see that it's companies who are the bigger threat.
  • Grenfell Tower - How did it happen?. "Just before filing this article, I visited Grenfell Tower. [...] There, huge and devastated, is the physical presence, the physical consequence, of a thousand decisions made to get things done a bit more cheaply, to make a bit more money, to clinch that deal." I remember feeling as though this might bring down the Government when it happened, such was the level of shock and anger and dismay. Yet now, barely a few months on, it already feels as though it's slipping into history rather than galvanising us into making the country a better, safer place for us all. As if the only thing that matters is that everyone can pass the buck onto someone else and say "we did what we were supposed to" and omit pointing out how, if they'd bothered to look at the situation a bit more broadly and if other people's lives were allowed to—every now and then—come before money, they played a part in the death's of eighty people.
  • Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network. Good interview with the founders of social.coop about that co-operative version of Twitter. The Mastodon (which is what social.coop runs) instance that I use - mastodon.me.uk is set up in similar fashion. (I'm @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk if you're a Mastodon user...)
  • RFCs not IPOs (i.e. open standards not venture-capital funding). Amen to that.
  • What should you think about when using Facebook?. Detailed yet readable dive into the lots of the information Facebook gathers about you.
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August 28, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 28th 2017

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August 21, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 21st 2017

  • Eliminating the Human. Perfectly capturing something that's bothered me for a while now. Although I totally understand the desire to design human interactions out of everything (given that I'm not great in social/unfamiliar situations myself), I also think that we shouldn't do it. Some of the friction and discomfort is useful for us.
  • Study of the Week: Of Course Virtual K-12 Schools Don’t Work. See last point...
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July 31, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 31st 2017

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July 24, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 24th 2017

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June 26, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 26th 2017

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June 05, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 5th 2017

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May 22, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 22nd 2017

  • The Engineer/Manager Pendulum. Great post on the differences between management and being an engineer. Also describes pretty well how my career has gone - especially earlier on. At STNC, I went from engineer to project manager to software manager (probably the equivalent of VP of Engineering now), then dropped back to engineer with sole responsibility for a key product around the time we were acquired by Microsoft, then became team lead as we built up the networking team around that, and was in line to step up the management chain again but the higher management decided to close down the entire product group instead. Hopping between the two has definitely given me better development practices as well as helping my management skills.
  • Notes from an emergency, the latest talk from Maciej Ceglowski and it's as on the money about tech, its influence on the world, and what we should be doing, as ever.
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May 15, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 15th 2017

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May 01, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 1st 2017

I tend not to be quite so overtly political with my postings here, or maybe it's not so partisan, but the recent Tories in particular are responsible for making such a mess of the country that it's important to get rid of them at the looming general election.

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April 17, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 17th 2017

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April 03, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 3rd 2017

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March 27, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 27th 2017

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March 20, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 20th 2017

  • Putting strings into databases and then taking them back out again. Lovely post about why we need to make tech and coding less scary. In my experience, people using big words and jargon are generally those with less ability to deliver on what they're talking about. My equivalent of "putting strings..." is that I connect strange things to the Internet. I've found that a much more productive answer to "what do you do?" than talking about the Internet of Things.
  • Wealth, risk, and power. There is hope.
  • The Economic Policy Delusion. Country economies aren't like household economies, and the Tories aren't fiscally responsible.
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March 06, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 6th 2017

  • Tech and the Fake Market tactic. Anil Dash doing a good job of laying out how the big, fawned-over tech companies tend towards monopolistic behaviour. Obviously we'll break them up, as we have with all the monopolies in the past, the question is how long do we wait before doing so?
  • Lovren: My Life as a Refugee. Although as a Red I might be a bit biased, I think it's good to see a football club putting out a video like this which gives a good perspective on the life and background of a refugee (who then went on to be a top footballer...)
  • Exponential growth devours and corrupts. Compound expectations are as corrosive as compound interest is beneficial.
  • Failing to See, Fueling Hatred. A sensible call to empathy from Danah Boyd. We need more making common cause and less division and infighting, the latter only benefits those already in charge (who are making no progress on making the world better).

And an excellent video from Danish TV...


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January 30, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 30th 2017

  • Money Talk. Open and honest blog post talking about the costs involved in manufacturing, and the challenges and issues when you try to do things better.
  • Exiting the Vampire Castle. Fantastic writing from the sadly late Mark Fisher.
  • Software Is Politics. Excellent article version of Richard Pope's excellent OSCON 2016 talk.
  • How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps. "it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside. And not for a speech, or a rally, but for game of dominoes or to dance salsa – to show they were Venezuelans too, that they had tumbao and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show they were real."
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January 16, 2017

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 16th 2017

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December 19, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 19th 2016

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November 28, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 28th 2016

  • The Politics of Optimism. It's hard to remain open and optimistic when things aren't going well, but it's an important thing to work at.
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November 21, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 21st 2016

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November 14, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 14th 2016

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October 31, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 31st 2016

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October 24, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 24th 2016

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October 17, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 17th 2016

  • The hazards of a world where mediocrity rules. Maybe not quite to the degree outlined in that article, but you can see a lot of those tendencies in the "innovation" and "regeneration" industries in this country. Sadly.
  • Technology is a wooden leg. Leila on great form pointing out that all this technology stuff is just a set of tools to use to do something more interesting.
  • Augmenting journalism. Jon Udell, arguing for an alternate approach to Basic Income to use tech to enhance—not replace—our abilities. I think we can, and should, do both.
  • GB1900.org. The OS maps for the whole UK from around 1900. Really interesting to see how the country has evolved in the past century, plus you get to help researchers create a gazetteer of all the text on the map.
  • Draw your city. Another mapping research project, this time looking at how far people think different cities extend. Some interesting contrasts between the different parts of the UK.
  • Betting on snowballs. I like this idea from Doc Searls, roll snowballs rather than push rocks uphill!
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August 29, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 29th 2016

  • The Continuing Journey Of A Media Lab: I Went To A Media/Art Lab And All I Got Was This Lousy Tote Bag. "This is the dark matter of a successful lab; its not making it look like a lab, it’s having a diverse mix of people, supporters, technicians, mentors and cooks; it’s having a sensibility of people doing interesting work who can get on with others or disrupt things." Great analysis from Ross. I'm now thinking "the background radiation of the culture" could be my new favourite term. What Ross talks about is something I got from the recent exhibition I did with him in Oslo, and also some of what Laptops and Looms provides.
  • Recovery From Privilege. Useful ways to think about privilege.
  • The War on Cash. Paying by cards is easy, but I don't think we should abandon the anonymity and utility of cash.
  • hackertyper.net. Now you can feel as awesome at coding as I am ;-)
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August 22, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 22nd 2016

  • Django Ditto and archiving your stuff. Interesting work (as ever!) from Phil Gyford. I think my bus is travelling in the same direction as his.
  • I Have A Little List. Russell's list of how big, integrated, seamless systems are generally just good ways to waste money and provide a big seamless way to achieve very little. Do less of this, governments, councils and big corps, and more of the sort of approach Phil Gyford is taking in the first case.
  • Why Teach Business to Artists? Not just useful for artists, I really like Whitaker's hierarchy of business concept in there. It feels like DoES Liverpool is running roughly at level 2.0, and looking at ways to poke into level 3. I can see me referring to this in future :-)
  • Hot Wheels road trip. Another superb example of how technology isn't just about efficiency and return-on-investment. Definitely worth watching all of it.
  • The Rozz-Tox Manifesto. "Item 12: Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit."
  • Yes, There Is Such a Thing as an ‘Introvert’ Hangover. I don't get the physical symptoms listed here, but can definitely recognise the phenomenon.
  • The sound of Blairite silence. I've not been paying much attention of late to Labour's thrashing, but Paul Mason's analysis is interesting to read.
  • Indy Johar - Democratizing cities. Really good talk from Indy about systems thinking and the challenges facing society.
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August 08, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 8th 2016

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July 25, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 25th 2016

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July 18, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 18th 2016

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July 11, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 11th 2016

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July 04, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 4th 2016

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June 06, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 6th 2016

  • On Failure. "failure is not good. But failure is okay. And to that point, we need to make failure okay."
  • The CIO Problem, Part 1 (and then Part 2). Lots of wisdom on bringing local council, etc. services into the modern age. One highlight: "[you need to understand that] That’s not innovation. That’s just how tech works today."
  • About the GDS Women’s group. "The Women’s group is for everyone, irrespective of gender, who cares about having an equal and diverse workplace – but that’s not a snappy and concise name for a group. So we're calling it the Women's group." Good to see initiatives like this share what they've tried, and how that's helped.
  • On the Left. Like Tim Bray, I'm not a political expert, but I agree with pretty much all he lays out in that blog post. "I think the “conventional wisdom” which sustains the current finance-centric rentier economy is thought wise by fewer and fewer. I think the path from here to something saner will have messy and ugly parts. But I’m increasingly sure that our current path, as a society and species, is unsustainable."
  • "Lighthouses... just stand there shining." Astounding, touching, harrowing to read letter from a rape victim that she read to her rapist. I long for a culture where this didn't need to exist.
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May 23, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 23rd 2016

  • Recipe for disaster. Some background to the creation of the BBC's online recipe database and thoughts about how/why the BBC is failing to help society debate/frame such non-commercial endeavours.
  • Redefining capitalism. Some interesting thoughts on how better to define growth and new directions for something better than capitalism.
  • ANA. Lovely, if rather dystopic, short film about the robot future.
  • Jane Jacobs: City Limits. (Link to) An interesting film of urbanist Jane Jacobs and accompanying thoughts on how it translates to modern day. (Jane Jacobs previously on this blog)
  • Jane Jacobs: Godmother of the American City. And another, great interview with Jane Jacobs. "There is a sameness—this is one of the things that is boring people, this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don’t get new products and services out of sameness. Now, the Americans haven’t gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn’t opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore."
  • How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist. Beware the dark patterns of design.
  • Guide to Computing. Computers used to be so colourful! Did the designers stop offering us anything adventurous or did we all start only buying what-are-perceive-as-inoffensive options and bring this upon ourselves?
  • Thoughts about decoupling PGP and email clients. Good to see someone fixing existing systems rather than deciding the only way is to build yet-another-competing-silo because it's easier. Looking forward to being a user of the system Paul builds.
  • Eye Spy, a Year of Tracking. Great to see the BBC work on privacy, etc. "No-one in the UK should be speculatively accumulating raw data, particularly without notifying people they are doing it."
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May 02, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 2nd 2016

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April 18, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 18th 2016

  • Paying Your Own Way (Or Not). Tom Steinberg talks about whether money is the only useful measuring stick. For tech, in this case, but see also all of the assorted "ROI" justifications for the arts, city investment, etc. When do we start demanding that the bankers and accountants justify their existence in terms that the rest of us feel are important (hint: those terms won't be ones that can be reduced to a single number either...)
  • The divide. Looks interesting... and is playing at FACT at the end of May...
  • Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto. In-depth look at the issues surrounding spam email and how to counter it. And how to balance that with the scope for privacy invasion that be-able-to-read-email-to-check-for-spam introduces...
  • Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia? Good exploration of what's wrong with big out-of-town company campuses.
  • Story of cities #21: Olivetti tries to build the ideal 'human city' for its workers. In contrast with the previous link, a look at the work Olivetti did to situate their company in Ivrea mid-C20th. It was arguably moulding the city to suit the company, but I remember a really interesting exhibition I visited when I lived in Turin (but never got round to blogging, sadly) that explained lots of the social/improving-society thinking tied up with those experiments and work. Arguably the main problem was that Olivetti dominated Ivrea (from a percentage of people working there perspective) and so the fortunes of the town and the company ended up too closely intertwined (which is fine as long as the company is doing well...).
  • Hacking Rambert. Leila Johnston doing an excellent job of documenting what she got up to as a technologist-in-residence, and more importantly asking questions about technology and its relationship with/to the arts.
  • When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages. Or a warning from history about blind belief in "big data"
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April 11, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 11th 2016

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March 28, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 28th 2016

  • Hardening my Development Machine. A secure system is like the horizon - always further away when you think you've got there. But there's lots of value in chasing after it, so it's good to see Paul sharing how he's moved on with it.
  • what Thomas Hardy taught me. An excellent piece on education reform or efforts to "fix" education, and how they miss the point.
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March 21, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 21st 2016

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March 14, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 14th 2016

  • Corbynism and Its Futures. Long interesting explanation and exploration of the state of the political left in the UK. If it's right in its assertion that "elections are almost entirely decided by the votes of a few hundred thousand swing voters in marginal constituencies", then is that an opportunity to focus attention for civic tech and/or new Internet-age institutions to help improve democracy?
  • In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Charging so much for access to academic publishing in the modern age is ridiculous.
  • Design as Participation. Excellent proposal for how design should evolve, from Kevin Slavin.
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February 29, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 29th 2016

  • Framing. An interest post (with interesting comments too!) on company values and culture.
  • South Florida and Sea Level: The Case of Miami Beach. "Who’s going to be the Robert Moses of sea level rise?" Thought-provoking stuff from Eric Rodenbeck.
  • Sex & Startups. Lots of good ideas here - I expect “the tyranny of the quantifiable” and "mundane businesses" to be entering my lexicon.
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February 22, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 22nd 2016

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February 15, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 15th 2016

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February 08, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 8th 2016

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February 01, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 1st 2016

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January 11, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 11th 2016

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January 04, 2016

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 4th 2016

  • The Resistance. Voices dissenting the techno-utopians.
  • Tell me who you are. Excellent (but long) essay about identity. How do you change your password when your password is your fingerprint?
  • The Website Obesity Crisis. Another Maciej talk, another must read/watch.
  • “If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.” Copyright extension is just rent extraction.
  • 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. Must feed the news cycle... (n.b. I haven't checked the sources in this article, so it's possible it's just a massive troll...)
  • Hacking the City. A new model for urban renewal. A good overview of the work Renew Newcastle (that's the Australian one, not one of the UK Newcastles) is doing.
  • Machining of brass again. A write up from Julian, a friend of mine who's been working on a new CNC mill here at DoES Liverpool. Mostly included here for this paragraph: "Recall that, after 20 years writing the software that generates CNC toolpaths, I’d not ever operated a machine or worked with someone operating a machine in that time period. I’m not unusual among my programming peers. This is an outrageous state of affairs, and tells you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of all those layers of businessmen, managerial staff, supervisors, and resellers who have inserted themselves like slabs of toffee between those who write the software and those who use the software. Even if I wasn’t interested in operating a machine, someone should have forced me to spend some time making at least one thing to a standard of quality at some point in my career as it would have paid off enormously. "
  • Shields Down. On digging into the real reason people quit jobs.
  • Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten. Maybe the reason startups get paid so well by VCs is that it's the only way to persuade them not to work on something more valuable to society...
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December 28, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 28th 2015

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December 21, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 21st 2015

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December 14, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 14th 2015

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November 30, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 30th 2015

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November 23, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 23rd 2015

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November 16, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 16th 2015

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November 09, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 9th 2015

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October 26, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 26th 2015

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October 19, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 19th 2015

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October 12, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 12th 2015

  • Haunted by Data. All of Maciej's talks are worth watching/reading and this is no exception. "[Data.] Don't collect it! [...] If you have to collect it, don't store it! [...] If you have to store it, don't keep it!"
  • as though everyone had value. "This competitive ideology seeps into and ruins everything. It makes every good contingent on that good being enjoyed by a small and shrinking few. As a guy, this competitive urge is a contagion, it gets in everywhere. I love guitars but hate guitar stores; I like lifting weights but I hate the weight room. Those places are poisoned by male competition and the male insecurity that attends it, almost inevitably.". Amen to that.
  • Turn off your f**king phone and talk to me! Sherry Turkle on why “I’m not the Darth Vader of social media”.
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October 05, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 5th 2015

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September 28, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 28th 2015

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September 21, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 21st 2015

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September 14, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 14th 2015

  • Do Artifacts Have Ethics? Had this lurking in a tab for too long. A good set of questions to ask ourselves when we create any technology.
  • Close at Hand. An interesting history of which objects we've kept about our person, and how.
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September 07, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 7th 2015

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August 31, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 31st 2015

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August 17, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 17th 2015

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August 10, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 10th 2015

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August 03, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 3rd 2015

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July 27, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 27th 2015

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July 20, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 20th 2015

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July 06, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 6th 2015

  • Some notes on funding 65 just received. Fantastic skewering of the economic-development-business-speak that pervades our lives. "But even if ‘economic growth’ is the primary mandate for the future responsibilities of music, then this isn’t the way to do it. Stop closing community centres. Stop destroying the welfare state. Stop making it impossible for poorer people to have any opportunity to do anything other than constantly struggle for survival, leaving holes in culture that will inevitably be filled by rich kids with nothing to write about."
  • Innovation out of context. Leila Johnston on fine form talking about innovation.
  • The curious frontier of red. Experimental research through graffiti, or a graffiti artists 18-month playful battle with the council.
  • Sit down, shut up and pass it on. If you do just one thing for equality in tech...
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June 22, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 22nd 2015

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June 15, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 15th 2015

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June 01, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 1st 2015

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May 25, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 25th 2015

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May 18, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 18th 2015

  • The only way is down: 18 notes on the UK election. I'm glad I got to spend last weekend holed up in Hebden Bridge busy with load of interesting people at a fun-yet-full-on hack weekend. With a few days perspective, this is the best of the analysis I've read on the election result.
  • New Clues, from Doc Searls and David Weinberger. Commandments, rules... a manifesto for the Internet. And if you haven't read their original Cluetrain Manifesto, go read that too.
  • ‘Community Led’ – Moving beyond victims and heroes. A good reminder - borne of the lovely news about Granby being nominated for the Turner Prize - that the truth is more complicated than the narratives we hear from the media (and each other).
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May 11, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 11th 2015

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May 04, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 4th 2015

  • The Internet Mapmakers Helping Nepal. Good write-up of the great work the HOTOSM team are doing.
  • Why are you still here?. As in Grimsby, so the rest of the country. Tales of decline, regeneration, politics and globalisation.
  • Jamie Oliver: how to chop an onion. Fantastic re-working of Jamie Oliver footage.
  • Our better selves are bold and inclusive. It feels to me like this is the crux of choice for our politics. I definitely feel myself get protective, cautious and zero-sum game in my outlook when I'm stressed and fearful for how things might map out, and as a result miss out on opportunities and the possibilities of an optimistic outlook. It's something that I've lost in the past decade, and sorely hope I can get back - that something-will-come-up unassailability that was a core of my character when I was younger (and I don't think it's an age thing, it's something I caught from an ex-girlfriend). An optimistic UK is far better than a fearful, pessimistic one. It's such a shame that our politicians think the latter makes us easier to manipulate for their gain.
  • The Limits of Utopia. A simultaneously depressing and galvanising read. "The Earth is not being blistered because the despoilers are stupid or irrational or making a mistake or have insufficient data."
  • #lowerthanvermin. An interesting look through the career of Nye Bevan. I particularly liked that "he was apparently disappointed by the fact that the miners’ leader Will Lawther considered the NUM’s role to be the defence of workers against management, not pursuit of the possibility of its being the management." That feels like the problem the unions have always suffered from in my lifetime.
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April 27, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 27th 2015

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April 20, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 20th 2015

  • Internet.org is a failed exercise in misdirection. Just because you call something "Internet.org" doesn't mean that it's access to the Internet. Doc Searls provides a perfect critique of Facebook's free-mobile-data-for-Facebook-access programme.
  • Don't know who to vote for? Then learn who to vote against. "The suffragettes understood that. They understood that democracy does not end at the ballot box. If we are lucky, it starts there. It starts with choosing your enemy. [...] Vote today and change the world tomorrow. We are not as powerless as they would have us believe. Choose your enemy and choose wisely. Good luck."
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April 13, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 13th 2015

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April 06, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 6th 2015

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March 30, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 30th 2015

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March 23, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 23rd 2015

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March 16, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 16th 2015

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March 09, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 9th 2015

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March 02, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 2nd 2015

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February 23, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 23rd 2015

  • The Sharing Economy-Poverty of Ambition. The problem with the "sharing economy" is that it's all about adding the economy to sharing, rather than adding sharing to the economy.
  • Startup advice, briefly. Good, honest advice about how and why to start a startup.
  • Product Land (Part 2). Interesting post about how to explore "a hypervolume of potential products". Much more actionable than that phrase makes it sound.
  • Becoming Homebaked. A suitably human write-up of the history of Homebaked Anfield, a lovely success story of people, art and placemaking.
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February 16, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 16th 2015

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February 09, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 9th 2015

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February 02, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 2nd 2015

  • Computer, remember this… An anecdote for whoever is claiming we're all going to start talking to our computers/phones/IoT devices to *hand wave* solve all our user interaction problems.
  • Maybe wallets can’t be apps. Doc Searls points out an important feature of physical wallets that doesn't seem to be replicated by supposed digital replacements.
  • Whitewood under Siege. Interesting look behind the scenes of some of the global supply chain.
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January 26, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 26th 2015

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January 19, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 19th 2015

  • The Toxoplasma Of Rage. Divisiveness and trolling on the Internet is nobody's fault, it's just an emergent effect of the systems we've built. An illuminating angle on why social (and traditional) media can become so polarized. I wonder how we break the cycle?
  • Towards the sociocratic museum. What should our modern museums and cultural institutions look like? How should they work? What should we be preserving? Some interesting food for thought.
  • The Cathedral of Computation. Here’s an exercise: The next time you see someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with “God” and ask yourself if the sense changes any.
  • The Data Sublime. Maybe the risk of our increasingly computer-directed future isn't that some big corporation will be in control, but rather that they will just look like they are.
  • Among the Disrupted "Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy."
  • A Basic Income Guarantee. I think this is a good idea. It would definitely let lots more people pursue their business ideas.
  • To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This "It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time."
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January 12, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 12th 2015

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January 05, 2015

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 5th 2015

  • Governing through unhappiness. Audit, targets and managerialism as tools to control and emasculate. We need to start setting different parameters for success, ones that can't easily be quantified.
  • On Nerd Entitlement. Such a shame that the alternate response to the geeks inheriting the earth hasn't won out, that we remember what it's like and help those less powerful.
  • Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty and then Eric's follow-up post Well, That Escalated Quickly. A sobering warning that algorithms can easily go wrong. More diversity in our teams will help mitigate, although not eliminate, this sort of thing. "Move fast and break things" is just a fun quote until you realise the things being broken are people. (Like Eric, I don't think this is just a problem with Facebook, it's just unfortunate for them that their famous quote explains the problem so aptly).
  • City link, co-determination, and destiny. Interesting thoughts from Matt Webb about the new forms of firm that it turns out aren't quite so new (I don't know how long City Link have been going, but they pre-date Uber by quite some time...). It often feels like unions and the traditional left/right politics are fighting an old, long-gone battle, and this sort of thing shows that to be true. It's not about workers vs. bosses any more, but still about asymmetry of power, and finding ways to challenge that.
  • In 2015, we’ll need different words to talk about the future. Words are important.
  • How To Pay Attention: 20 Ways To Win The War Against Seeing. Some good exercises to do in that. It reminds me a bit of Noticings.
  • Really Bad Powerpoint. Good presentation tips from Seth Godin.
  • How My Mom Got Hacked. Welcome to the new normal. We need more geeks working out how to combat this.

And this week, an excellent video of Eric Rodenbeck talking about running his data-viz agency Stamen:

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December 29, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 29th 2014

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December 22, 2014

December 15, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 15th 2014

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December 01, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 1st 2014

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November 24, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 24th 2014

  • 44 engineering management lessons. Lot of good advice, some of which I manage to follow...
  • It’s hard to build a good web. It's good to see some of the people building decent web "properties" exploring ways to thrive. Go support them.
  • Metafoundry 15: Scribbled Leatherjackets. A good critique of Making. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, although I agree with some of it. It is always about the people, not the things. Maybe if more people answered "a difference", or "a community", or "I make do (and mend)" to the question "What do you make?" then we'd be moving in the right direction. But she's right, the celebration of Making is really just railing against the busywork and churn of making things of no (real) value in order to further line the pockets of the rich. Making isn't really the right term to latch onto, as many people make the world a worse place. It's tricky to find a better alternative though.
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November 17, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 17th 2014

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November 10, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 10th 2014

  • Getting the digital autonomy we pay for. "I just want people to understand what’s possible in a world of connected, standards-based software components, to recognize when those possibilities aren’t being realized, to expect and demand that they will be, and to pay something for that outcome."
  • Are cities ready for open and creative citizenship? A call for more interesting community centres, with more diverse and active facilities - not just meeting rooms and event space.
  • Peak Google. An interesting take on succession in the position of King/Queen of Tech
  • Paul Downey is in the middle of an excellent series of blog posts exploring (and showing his workings, so you can play along) an open dataset on house prices and sales in the UK. This one looking at postcode data produces a lovely, detailed map of England and Wales from just properties which have been sold over the years.
  • Against Productivity. Meaty thinking from Quinn Norton. And alongside "productivity" I'd add "efficiency" in the grab-bag of sounds-worthy-and-innocuous-but-isn't memes of the modern age. Of course, the irony of the fact that I'm reading that and writing this while sat on a train that a few years ago would have given me just time to think and idly stare out of the window isn't lost on me.
  • Intellectual Property, Jewish Ethics, and Aaron Swartz. "Intellectual Property" is in dire need of reform.
  • Identity as a weapon. And not the aggressors identity.
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November 03, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 3rd 2014

  • Ten hours of walking in NYC as a woman. The Internet, real life, both just the same. Linking to this doesn't feel like helping much, but I guess pointing out that it's wrong to more people is a start.
  • Security Problems. Similarly highlighting the problem more than a solution, but we [geeks] need to get better at fixing security and privacy on the Internet for everyone, rather than just knowing the little back roads and tricks that we only use ourselves.
  • Shut Up and Eat. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale. Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal."
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October 27, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 27th 2014

  • The quarryman's symphony. It doesn't sound like much, but this video of a quarryman orchestrating the moving of hugs blocks of marble like a conductor does an orchestra is captivating.
  • Yes We Can. But Should We? We need more critical thinking around the maker movement, IoT, and probably life in general :-)
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October 20, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2014

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October 13, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 13th 2014

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September 29, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 29th 2014

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September 22, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 22nd 2014

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September 15, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 15th 2014

  • Labour Pains, Labour of Love. For selfish reasons, mostly because the North (of England) can't easily join Scotland, I'd rather the Scots vote no to Independence. However, this article shows how, were I living in the home of my surname (I think it's great- or great-great-grandfather you need to return to for this branch of McEwen to be in Scotland) I'd be seriously considering voting yes. Whichever way, let's hope it shakes some of the torpor from the political debate here in England.
  • The Death of Adulthood in American Culture. Maybe we all need to grow up a bit.
  • With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce. Humans are messy, lives are complicated, people keep secrets. While there's quite possibly a similar story with a marvellously happy ending, we should design our systems to acknowledge the possible downsides.
  • Here today, gone tomorrow. Being productive is difficult. If there was one insight I gleaned from spending a year or two failing to build a successful to-do list startup, it's that it isn't about making lists, it's about crossing things off.
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September 08, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 8th 2014

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September 01, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 1st 2014

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August 25, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 25th 2014

  • The broken Promise of the Mobile Web. It is depressing at times how long some of this stuff takes to make it into the mainstream. We were working on tight integration between the phone and the browser for Microsoft Mobile Explorer back in 2000, but the handset manufacturers were (understandably but disappointingly) afraid of ceding their UI to the browser. The WAP specs made a nod towards it in the WTAI stuff, but it was pretty clear when we tried to implement the spec that no-one else would succeed with it in its WAP1.0 form. Then in 2007 I co-founded a startup that was going to provide an alternative to iPhone UI, all browser-based, but rumours of Android nixed us finding any funding. Hopefully the FireFox phone or Indie Phone will finally realise the promise...
  • What does “Agile” mean? Nick Pelling gives a good buzzword-free explanation of Agile - "Really, to make a good practical contribution to the majority of the projects I see happening these days, you need to have the skills both of traditional software engineering and of contemporary Agile practices. (It’s not an either-or choice, you almost always need the two simultaneously.)"
  • What’s Neutral about the Net. The sage Doc Searl's takes a good stab at explaining why "net neutrality" is an important concept, and one we should fight for.
  • Social media is humanising – it’s how we use it that can dehumanise and this excerpt (pdf) about trolls from Jamie Bartlett's new book (also via Alison) work well as a pair of articles on the dark side of ourselves, and how we need strive to contain it.
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August 18, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 18th 2014

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August 11, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 11th 2014

  • The Public Service Internet. This predates Adrian Hon's TEDxLiverpool talk, but it's not far off a write-up of what he was advocating.
  • PSI Force. And once you've read that first link, then read this and think about how you can help. I know it's hard if you've only ever known the commercial Internet, but those of us who experienced it before commerce came to dominate know that it could be all the wonderful things it is now and so much more!
  • Snow on the Water. Hmm, seems to be a web-we-lost theme emerging to this week's links, although maybe a better term is the web-we-haven't-built-yet...
  • Seeing Like a Network. Turns out you already learned how to safely use the Internet, by passing notes in high school.
  • A good state would give each of us the chance to thrive. "the state should engage independent civil society not for profit but in the experimental and competitive provision of public serves without ever endangering the universal minimum."
  • What It's Like Raising Money As A Woman In Silicon Valley. We've a long way to go, but I guess at least we're starting to acknowledge the problem.
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August 04, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 4th 2014

And a video, Numbers, by Robert Hloz imagining a world where some people see numbers above everyone else's heads:

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July 28, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 28th 2014 Edition

  • What is public? Anil Dash doing a great job of setting out how public/private isn't a black and white issue. "Ultimately, we rely on a set of unspoken social agreements to make it possible to live in public and semi-public spaces."
  • ‘Hello there’: eight lessons from Microsoft’s awful job loss memo "An experience is something that leaves an impression on you; everyday activities ought to do no such thing, or we would all be exhausted within minutes of waking up. Using your phone, except perhaps when it’s brand new, should not be an experience."

And a video of Bruce Sterling's talk at FAB10:

"I'm a smart city but my brain is run in California"

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July 21, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 21st 2014 Edition

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July 13, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 13th 2014 Edition

This week's "Interesting Things" brought to you a day earlier than normal, as there's still a small window of opportunity for UK citizens to contact their MP about tomorrow's vote on the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill. It's easy to send them an email, just head to www.writetothem.com. My letter looked like this.

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July 07, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 7th 2014 Edition

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June 30, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 30th Edition

And a video to watch this week. Vinay Gupta setting out some plausible utopias:

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June 23, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 23rd Edition

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June 16, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 16th Edition

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June 09, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 9th Edition

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June 02, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 2nd Edition

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May 26, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 26th Edition

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May 19, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 19th Edition

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May 12, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 12th Edition

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May 05, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 5th 2014 Edition

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April 28, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 28th 2014 Edition

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April 22, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 22nd 2014 Edition

  • Years of Living Dangerously. I must admit, I'd watched the Years of Living Dangerously documentary the other day, but was rather underwhelmed by it. Maybe that's because I've joined Francis and gone all Dark Mountain on it. I'm not sure. However, Robert Llewellyn does a good job of reminding me that there's another option.
  • Shell Shorts. A lovely look at the manufacturing process behind the Eames Shell chair
  • Michael Bloomberg: You can’t teach a coal miner to code. This is a point that's often lost in the arguments about progress. The important thing isn't to prop up old, failing industries, but we do need to acknowledge that the transition has a human impact. We should look for ways to alleviate any downsides to that.
  • Reflections on Glass An excellent piece about Google Glass from Jan Chipchase. "The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership falls on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven out."
  • Why we need first person technologies on the Net. A nice idea, not sure if it's quite the right term for it, but good to see people trying to name it.
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April 14, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 14th 2014 Edition

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April 10, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 10th 2014 Edition

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March 24, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 24th 2014 Edition

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March 16, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 16th 2014 Edition

  • A great, if depressing, look at how Silicon Roundabout is slowly being killed by the council and property developers. I should get this printed and circulated to the Liverpool council as a warning, although we've already got the student housing bubble...
  • More good startup-activity blogging - Rowan Simpson explains how government funding, accelerators, incubators, etc. are all startup derivatives
  • What Your Activity Tracker Sees and Doesn't See - a wonderfully illuminating way to look at how accelerometers, the actual sensor in things like Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, interpret the world.
  • The Future of Jobs: The onrushing wave. Long, interesting article from the Economist, looking at whether computers/robots/etc. will replace all our jobs, and whether or not we'll find different jobs to do instead.
  • How to Think - grit, curiosity, self-control, optimism and being challenged to step up to the plate; sounds like a good recipe to me.
  • Stupid Smart Stuff "Whenever you see something labeled "smart" or "intelligent," be assured that it is actually rather stupid."
  • The Good Master. Interesting thoughts on a new old model for apprentices and careers from John Willshire
  • I learn from this Tim O'Reilly post that we've been inadvertently practising "Lean Urbanism" for the past couple of years at DoES Liverpool. It just seemed common sense and part of an age-old tradition of reusing old, interesting, perfectly serviceable buildings for new uses that focused on people and activity over polish and superficial appearance. Still, given the continually repeated attempts at regeneration-through-glossy, maybe it does need a new term. If you look beyond the neologism, there are some good points and links in the article. I just need to find the landlords in Liverpool with imagination and willingness to try something different.
  • HS2: more people back northern rail improvements than north-south project. Nice to have some (slightly more scientific) research to back up what I was chatting about with a furniture designer in Sheffield the other night - shaving more time off our trips to London will reduce how much work I can get done on the train, better transport links across the UK Maker Belt would be more useful than HS2.
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March 10, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 10th 2014 Edition

Another dose of interesting things I've encountered of late...

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March 02, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 2nd 2014 Edition

Some really good things in this edition (not that they aren't all good, but, you know...):

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February 24, 2014

Interesting Things on the Internet: Feb 24th 2014 Edition

  • Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? A good counterpoint to the gloom about Snowden, etc. Not that things don't need to change - it outlines plenty of reasons that they should, and also suggests ways that they could - but outlines plenty of reasons for optimism.
  • Open data, a vision from Leeds. Nice to see Leeds looking to experiment with how open data might improve their city. More importantly, there's an open data community, which is what led to this initiative. Will be watching it with interest.
  • The Government has just postponed the care.data scheme, which was looking to make all our medical records available to buy for medical research. Ben Goldacre has written a measured look at the issue, laying out the many problems and concerns, along with how it could benefit humanity (although Ross Anderson's comment is also worth reading). It's a good example of how the default motive of profit, and the Government's lack of credibility ruin something that could be of great benefit. There's an opportunity, if the NHS could manage to approach the issue from the perspective of its patients, to define new and better ways for us to share data about ourselves without sharing what we don't want. To build something that would act as a best practice for corporations to adopt to protect more of our privacy rather than erode it. It would be harder to achieve (although probably at a similar cost), but would properly move the UK up a notch in open data rankings.
  • This blog is 12 years old. The reason it's still here will surprise you. A good summary of many of the reasons I still write things here. My blog isn't quite as old, but will turn eleven in April, which means it's been around for longer than both Twitter and Facebook.
  • care.data and the community. Before I've even hit publish on this set of links, there's been further developments in the Government's care.data scheme. Outside of that scheme, strictly speaking, but they've sold all our hospital records to insurance companies. And they wonder why people are worried. Paul Bernal does a good job of laying out the concerns. I am heartened though by the effect he outlines in the section "Underestimating the community" - he's right that the response is a great example of the now-networked citizenship being able to out-perform those in charge in assessing the risks and amassing a collection of experts in the many different disciplines that it cuts across. And also in how it shows that people aren't just motivated by the market and profit. I'm looking forward to more of this as (the members of) society works out how to organise things in this way.
Posted by Adrian at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2014

Links: A Little Bit of Politics

The recent interesting links have a bit of a politics theme to them it seems...

  • An excellent piece from Matter about Occupy, surveillance, politics and mass movements - Is the Internet good or bad? Yes.
  • A good, if a little gloomy in outlook, interview with Adam Curtis. Hopefully his perceived lack of anything new to challenge the status quo is because he's looking for the wrong signals. Fighting the last war, as it were. I hope so, if only because the alternative is a bit depressing.
  • A piece from the Guardian yesterday about David Cameron's response to the floods. Living in the NW, where we've luckily avoided the worst of the terrible weather battering the rest of the country, and not tracking the mainstream media much, I only have a peripheral awareness of how bad things are. My knowledge is coming from tweets about rail cancellations, pictures shared on Twitter of the mainline railway hanging in mid-air, and mostly from Lucy Bricheno's talk about flooding at Ignite Liverpool on Thursday. It's rather nice to have that route of information, where an event I help run has speakers who monitor sea levels, flood risk, etc. for a living. Anyway, this link included more to capture this quote from David Cameron - "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent.". I don't disagree with us spending money on the relief effort, but it's interesting to see that while the Government has spent its entire term claiming that there is no money, they've now discovered a bottomless supply of it...
  • Work Makes Works, an interesting collection of artists mapping things they've done (sometimes for free) and how that's led to other opportunities or artworks.
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February 15, 2014

The Secret Life of Infrastructure

I came across this lovely short film when one of its creators started following DoES Liverpool on Twitter.

push button and wait from Alastair Cassell on Vimeo.

I like how it makes the everyday urban infrastructure that most people don't notice the subject of the film. It reminds me of somewhat of the Walkshops that Adam Greenfield runs.

One of my projects-I'd-like-to-organise-this-year is some sort of Walkshop around the centre of Liverpool. Maybe this would help introduce what we'd be seeking out...

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February 12, 2014

Links: Tech and a Talk

Two interesting links that have crossed my path recently...

And while I'm here, I might as well let you know about Internet Icons, an event linking up the British Library with a number of other libraries around the country, including Central Library here in Liverpool. Before the London talks are streamed, there's a local speaker at each location and they've asked me to talk at the Liverpool one.

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January 21, 2014

January Link Roundup

Another round of dumping collected tabs here... random things but all interesting and worth a read...

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December 30, 2013

Interesting Things on the Internet in Q4 of 2013

This year the run up to Christmas seemed especially manic, so I seem to have accumulated an impressive list of open-tabs-to-blog-about-later, even by my standards. As usual, the original this-should-be-a-carefully-thought-out-blog-post moment has gone, but if they made it as far as a left-open tab they're definitely worth sharing...

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September 25, 2013

Links... to Me... to You...

Jon Udell once said that a blog post can just be an email that you share with many people. This wouldn't quite be an email, it would've been a draft email (that's my default way of taking notes, as my email client is usually open, and it's shared to everywhere I might need it) to me so I could copy them from one operating system to another. So, a collection of random things that piqued my interest while I've been editing Designing the Internet of Things (and so hanging out in Windows rather than Ubuntu...)

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July 22, 2013

Recent Reading

An assortment of links that I've read recently, which seemed good enough that there's a lingering tab open containing them, but not good enough that I've gotten round to turning that into a full blog post. So in lieu of that, I thought I'd just share them in a good old linkdump...

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March 24, 2013

An Assortment of (relatively) Old But Interesting Links

These tabs have been cluttering up my browser for months now... nagging reminders that I'm not blogging as much as I'd like (one of many things I'm not finding as much time to do as I like, but what's new...)

Anyway, rather than just close them, I'll share them here. Feel free to read them and then imagine what the blog post they would've inspired would look like, or write one of your own instead :-)

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January 23, 2013

Links: Design, the Internet of Things, legalities and work

Things are rather busy at the minute, and I'd amassed a few open tabs in Firefox of assorted things I thought "ooh, I should share that" when I encountered them in my RSS reading. Normally they'd just go out as a tweet, with a brief bit of background but as (a) I'm not on twitter as much at the minute (see earlier point about being busy...) and (b) when I am, I'm already sharing plenty of links (partly because we're in promo mode for the Good Night Lamp kickstarter campaign and partly because I've been blogging quite a lot - for me of late - recently) I figured I'd continue the blogging-kick and post an old school link post.

  • Hack Design An online course trying to teach developers how to be better designers. I've signed up, and so far it's been quite interesting. We'll see how long I last...
  • A few thoughts on design and the internet of things. A fairly long piece from Tim Burrell-Saward, which suggests some design principles for connected devices. It's nice to see other people starting to talk about these sorts of things. I liked "make it Poppins"
  • Tom Coates - An Animating Spark: Mundane Computing and the Web of Data. More principles for the Internet of Things, this time from Tom Coates. Principle #3 is excellent, although I'm not sure I agree with principle #7, I can see why he's included it but I'm much more a fan of keeping intelligence at the edge of the network where possible.
  • A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz. Bunnie Huang sharing his experiences of challenging tech behemoths and how the legal system can be used against someone doing things on the edges of the ordinary. A great post, such a shame it was written in the tragic circumstances of Aaron Schwartz's suicide.
  • Hiut Denim - Do the work. Now you're (hopefully) fired up about doing important work and changing the world, a great reminder from Hiut Denim that all we need to do now is the hard work it takes.

Which is a good note for me to end on - part of the reason I've been blogging (a bit) more of late is that it works as a good way to get my writing muscle-memory going, so I can get on with finishing the next chapter of my book (another thing I'm long overdue explaining here, but that will have to wait for another day...)

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January 05, 2013

Blog All Documentary Quotes: I Love This Dirty Town

"We could actually live in cities, if we still believed in cities".

Another of the BBC Four Collections videos, I Love This Dirty Town is part of the "London" collection. However, it's not really about London specifically, and shows a bit of Cambridge and Coventry among other places as it provides what is effectively a good primer on Jane Jacobs' now classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There'll be a "blog all dog-eared pages" post for that here too when I finish reading it - lots of good stuff in it.

"If you don't look closely you think it works"

As ever, nothing is new - along with the mis-guided large-scale regeneration that I've often covered it's nice to see a guy from a design studio back then reusing the slightly-tired-but-full-of-character properties in the same way that we do today...

"They're packed with handy characters that you can find. Somebody to cut things for you, or make jigs or bolts or blow a little bit of plastic. There's always something, some little firm, some little chap around the corner who has exactly the particular craft you happen to want. You can grow almost any kind of photographic, light-engineering, design industry in these old buildings. And I would've thought that's a social gain."

On businesses in the city...

"There's nothing wrong with the big getting bigger, as long as the small get more numerous"

I do wonder if this is the nub of the problem - an eternal struggle between people who want to bring order to our cities, when the inhabitants are busy optimising for many more smaller and conflicting plans of their own...

"Planners are so paternalistic, don't they know that a lot of people have plans of their own? [...] Streets go up and they go down in the world, it has something to do with people who actually live there"

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December 30, 2012

Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding

What's the video equivalent of dog-earing? Whilst finding details about the recent Golden Age of Steam documentaries, I stumbled across the BBC Four Collection on Steam.

The BBC Four Collections are a fantastic way to start opening up the archives, and it's lovely to be able to watch old documentaries again. I have a feeling I'll be leafing through some more of them in future, this Panorama documentary from 1966, for instance, looks interesting - predicting what the tech industry in California will look like in the year 2000... There's also The Great Railway Cavalcade: Rocket 150 at Rainhill, looking at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Rainhill Trials, which I remember attending as a boy.

Anyway. I've just watched the Tuesday Documentary: Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding. First broadcast in November 1969, it's a look at the railway network and men who worked on it, particularly the area around Sheffield and Manchester but also touching on London.

It's from a time when steam was on the wane and the electric and diesel engines were taking over. Commenting after a section showing old railwaymen sharing stories and banter in the railwayman's club, the narrator says:

"when they argue the superiority of steam, they don't mean at all that it was more efficient - because they know it wasn't - but steam to them is better because it was a more demanding thing. It was a difficult thing to do well, and they take pleasure in remembering how they did it."

Lovely.

It also shows some of the forward-looking thinking of the day - shots coming up the escalator from the tube into a gleaming new Euston station; mentions of containerisation and how it simplifies the freight interchanges; and shots of a new "electronic marshalling yard", where trackside sensors allow the movement of the wagons to be controlled by "computer tape". Apart from the punched tapes, it doesn't sound all that far from some of the Internet of Things projects being proposed now.

I'll finish with a quote from one of the drivers, who describes a cafe that I'll bet hasn't featured in eggbaconchipsandbeans, probably because it will have died with the passing of the steam engines...

"you can't get a better feed than bacon and eggs fried in a shovel"

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September 17, 2011

links for 2011-09-17

  • "HOW could it possibly cost more for a government agency to hire a private consulting company with its own headquarters, executives, support staff, shareholders and so forth to prepare a bid for a project, compete for the contract, execute the project, compile reams of data proving what a great job it did on the project, and then spend the next six months lobbying the government to do a follow-on project and hire it again, than it would for the government agency to just do the dang job itself?"
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September 13, 2011

links for 2011-09-13

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September 08, 2011

links for 2011-09-08

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August 31, 2011

links for 2011-08-31

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August 27, 2011

links for 2011-08-27

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August 23, 2011

links for 2011-08-23

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August 22, 2011

links for 2011-08-22

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August 07, 2011

July 29, 2011

links for 2011-07-29

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July 28, 2011

links for 2011-07-28

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July 27, 2011

links for 2011-07-27

  • Interesting-looking open-source Pachube competitor, although it seems a little abandoned (and I've not looked into how robust the database, etc. is - which is the big problem when you start throwing lots of data around)
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July 24, 2011

links for 2011-07-24

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June 30, 2011

links for 2011-06-30

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June 22, 2011

links for 2011-06-22

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June 16, 2011

links for 2011-06-16

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June 14, 2011

links for 2011-06-14

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June 05, 2011

links for 2011-06-05

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May 15, 2011

links for 2011-05-15

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May 11, 2011

links for 2011-05-11

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May 09, 2011

links for 2011-05-09

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May 08, 2011

links for 2011-05-08

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April 26, 2011

links for 2011-04-26

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April 20, 2011

links for 2011-04-20

  • Will come in handy if/when I get round to expanding on the AudienceBot to allow it to better gauge what people thought of a particular song/performance
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April 14, 2011

links for 2011-04-14

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April 05, 2011

links for 2011-04-05

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March 24, 2011

links for 2011-03-24

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March 22, 2011

links for 2011-03-22

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March 19, 2011

links for 2011-03-19

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March 11, 2011

links for 2011-03-11

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February 24, 2011

links for 2011-02-24

  • Good to read an explanation of how someone uses git and branches to manage releases. This is the sort of workflow I'd run with, particularly if I was working in a bigger team. It's basically what we ran at STNC/Microsoft, but it's good to see how it relates to git (I'm still getting my head around the distributed version control thing)
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February 18, 2011

links for 2011-02-18

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December 27, 2010

links for 2010-12-27

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December 24, 2010

links for 2010-12-24

  • A lovely idea - an informal liability waiver form for people to use if they're doing something (e.g. clearing snow/ice, clearing waste ground) where the person who owns the ground is concerned that the volunteer might sue them if things go wrong. Basically saying that the volunteer is happy to engage in the work, and takes responsibility for their own actions.
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December 19, 2010

links for 2010-12-19

  • Excellent project to boost engagement in local issues. Wonder if we could run something like this in Liverpool and even provide some low-tech feedback (in addition to the high-tech website side of things) with regularly printed and updated posters - pick places to advertise the questions, but then have a network of volunteers to print out updates and paste them over the adverts on a daily or every-few-days basis
  • A good overview of the Open Space method of conference/meeting organisation. I like the "chairs are all set out in a circle" format - dressing the venue will be an important part of working out how the long-conference proceeds.
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December 17, 2010

links for 2010-12-17

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December 11, 2010

links for 2010-12-11

  • Circuit showing how to use a capacitor to store energy from a solar panel until there's enough to power something.
  • Boulderdash, built with just an AVR microcontroller chip, crystal and a few capacitors and resistors. It's not one of the AVRs that the Arduino uses, but that might make it a good "playing with other AVRs" project for a hackspace evening...
    (tags: avr game)
  • "We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders."
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December 07, 2010

links for 2010-12-07

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November 10, 2010

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November 09, 2010

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November 06, 2010

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November 04, 2010

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October 20, 2010

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October 19, 2010

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October 03, 2010

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September 24, 2010

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September 02, 2010

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August 16, 2010

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August 09, 2010

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August 04, 2010

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August 03, 2010

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July 31, 2010

links for 2010-07-31

  • I think this article makes a good case that Detroit should be the city that Liverpool is looking to as a kindred spirit, rather than chasing Shanghai tower blocks.

    "Detroit will re-invent itself and prosper through the help of makers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs who thrive while operating on a lean budget, without the bloat that has caused the demise of many of our once-venerated large corporations. True, lasting change cannot happen overnight, but with a little patience, room to operate, and a lot of sweat, we can entice both our young people to stay in the area and help in this reinvention while enticing other artists and makers — who may be claustrophobic operating in other cities — to stretch out and make Detroit their home."



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July 29, 2010

links for 2010-07-29

  • "The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren't, and that we're so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.

    Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it."

    Ostensibly a look at the Transition Town movement and postulating that it's targetting the wrong problems, but in addition to the green agenda this could almost be a manifesto for civic renewal.





  • Another cheatsheet for git. One of these days I'll use it enough to get my head round it and not need to look through these things whenever I'm doing anything with it.




  • Handy wiki to track what sort of SIM to get when you're visiting a different country


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July 10, 2010

links for 2010-07-10

  • Interesting software to provide a mobile-phone cell hooked up to broadband. Not clear what hardware you'd need to pair it with to get it working.
  • An interesting (as they so often are) essay from Adam Greenfield wondering what the future of the city might look from a technological and ubicomp perspective. I wonder what Liverpool would be like if there was such a bug-tracking-system for the city... Some good comments too, which pull at the fact not visible in the main text - that Adam is thinking about this not just from a techno-utopian viewpoint, but from a realist someone-will-build-this-sooner-or-later perspective where it's better to be engaged and involved in it and helping shape it in better (egalitarian, secure, civic-rather-than-purely-commercial) ways.
  • "A paving slab that says “20 Tonne Crane” is not the same as a 20 tonne crane."

    A lovely piece looking at the difference in approach to regeneration of two dock areas of Leeds.

    "When a building is first made it belongs to the builder, the architect and their paymasters. They alone can tell stories about why and how it came into being in its pristine form. But over time, the balance tips in favour of the place’s users, its neighbours and even to passers-by. Their stories become the building’s stories and the building’s stories become inspirations, symbolic of the city’s authentic character."



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July 07, 2010

links for 2010-07-07

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July 05, 2010

links for 2010-07-05

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July 04, 2010

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June 25, 2010

links for 2010-06-25

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June 19, 2010

links for 2010-06-19

  • American presidents have been promising to wean America off oil for thirty-six years. Jon Stewart's explanation is hilarious and sobering in equal measure.
  • "Right, the creative class. Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral."
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May 16, 2010

links for 2010-05-16

  • A really interesting interview with Adam Greenfield. I particularly like his take on the sorts of offices we should be working in, and how the Google-style "free food, sports facilities, etc. all on campus" offices are more of a ploy to keep you at work for as long as possible. I much prefer my current work experience which is nearer to this:

    "My idea of a good workspace is a little different: a small office, with windows that open and lots of natural light, in a dense and well-served neighborhood in the central city."



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April 26, 2010

links for 2010-04-26

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April 17, 2010

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April 09, 2010

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March 20, 2010

links for 2010-03-20

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March 13, 2010

links for 2010-03-13

  • Found via Mel Starrs' delicious links, this isn't really a "mistakes I've made and how to avoid them" but more of a confession of continued failings. I'm bookmarking it not because I've learnt any new tips to help my work, but because I share a lot of these problems and it's good to know that others suffer from the same problems.
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March 01, 2010

links for 2010-03-01

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February 26, 2010

links for 2010-02-26

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February 24, 2010

links for 2010-02-24

  • A lovely approach to life.
  • A good way of thinking about the increasing enroachment onto our privacy of firms like Facebook and Google... "What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages. [...] The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service."
    (tags: privacy ethics)
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February 15, 2010

links for 2010-02-15

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February 10, 2010

links for 2010-02-10

  • Lots of interesting little projects a guy is making for his and his kids' enjoyment.
  • "Britain has plenty of things to worry about; it would be absurd to suggest the contrary. But the big ones are not sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. There is a statistically small class of people, including a number of underskilled young whites and Caribbeans, who are being left behind in a general march toward the light. Many of those who were already at the bottom of the pile are finding it impossible to get out from under and join in. And this is serious." The Economist takes a detailed and thorough look at whether we do live in a "broken society" and finds that on the whole, we don't.
    (tags: crime society uk)
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February 06, 2010

"New Southampton looks much the same as New Everywhere Else"

I was just going to add this link to my delicious stream, but I wanted to pull just that bit too much in the way of quotes out of it, and so figured a blog post was more suitable.

In From the Mill to the Mall, Owen Hatherley provides a lovely essay on lots of the problems with the retail park and shopping mall architecture and planning of the modern city. It's nominally about Southampton, but I was pointed to it by someone spotting the similarities with Birmingham, and obviously I can draw the comparisons with Liverpool (even down to the hugely busy but invisible container port and the civic architectural legacy from the White Star and Cunard lines)

"Jobs For Local People are no doubt the eventual result, and the alibi for the extremely profitable land deals. The result is a city devoid of any real civic pride, with a series of chain pubs where shops used to be, competing for cheap pints."

"(Southampton is lucky enough to have only one 'Quarter', though a Cultural Quarter has been promised for some time)" Indeed. Liverpool isn't so lucky, we have the Knowledge Quarter, which seems to overlap quite a lot with the Georgian Quarter, and in the centre of town is the Met Quarter (although maybe the council isn't responsible for that, as it's basically a shopping mall... At least the redevelopment around the Baltic Fleet pub is the Baltic Triangle.

At least our big city-centre shopping temple, Liverpool One, does a reasonable job of interfacing to the surrounding city - its walkways are covered rather than enclosed, so there's plenty of natural light and some exposure to the elements; there's some variety in the architectural styles; and the preservation (or recreation) of the original street pattern gives it some ebb and flow with the existing city. It's still a big shopping mall, full of chains that could be anywhere else and has privatised a huge chunk of the city centre, but it's in the centre and about as well done as you could hope for.

Anyway, my ranting aside, it's a good read.

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January 25, 2010

links for 2010-01-25

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January 20, 2010

Gordon is Right

Gordon McLean has written an excellent post on his blog, entitled Why blogging is good, pointing to some of the conversation around the recent blog post from Clay Shirky claiming arrogance and lying can be useful traits. There are links to the discussion over on Gordon's post, so you should go and read them first because (1) they're good, and (2) I'm going to assume that you have for the rest of this post :-)

I was just going to comment on Gordon's post, but decided I should celebrate the fact that I've got a blog (even if I don't post to it as often as I'd like) and write my comment here.

Gordon says: "As for the issue being discussed in these posts I have to agree with Tom, particularly when he talks about how arrogance and confidence have a place in your “personality toolbox?, but the person who only has those tools is all the poorer for it. Unfortunately society, and certainly the workplace, still seem to favour people with confidence when what we should be doing is cutting through the noise to see what substance lies underneath."

I agree, but I also think that we should all strive to reach into our "personality toolboxes" for our arrogance and confidence in order to call "Bullshit" to dampen the "noise" when we can.

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January 14, 2010

links for 2010-01-14

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January 06, 2010

links for 2010-01-06

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December 25, 2009

links for 2009-12-25

  • Really interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the possible ethical and moral problems that services like Mechanical Turk might create. Not all doom-and-gloom, and with good examples of problems beyond the obvious "it's really poorly paid, so is like a sweatshop" concern.

    We (the tech community in particular, along with wider society) need to have more of these sorts of discussions, and at least with this it's happening fairly early on in the adoption of the new technologies.



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December 16, 2009

links for 2009-12-16

  • As well as being a detailed look at how a Porsche car was built back in the 60s, I love the insight you get into the production techniques - the specialised tools and jigs produced to make things easier (I have some similar but lower-tech versions for Bubblini) and the attention to measuring and documenting the car as it's built - the exact CC of each cylinder being marked on it for example.
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November 26, 2009

links for 2009-11-26

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November 20, 2009

links for 2009-11-20

  • A good summary of the different types of RFID technology about and what they can and can't do. Very good at helping you to understand the difference between the vague ideas about what could be possible, and what the limitations of the different solutions are.
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November 13, 2009

links for 2009-11-13

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October 15, 2009

links for 2009-10-15

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October 09, 2009

links for 2009-10-09

  • I didn't make it over for TEDx Leeds as sadly it was on the same day as the Art of Digital Learning Lab in Ulverston. This is a good write-up of the event, complete with links to each of the talks on YouTube. Think I'll be watching them when I get a spare twenty minutes.
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October 08, 2009

links for 2009-10-08

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October 05, 2009

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September 29, 2009

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September 20, 2009

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September 18, 2009

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August 13, 2009

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August 08, 2009

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July 25, 2009

links for 2009-07-25

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July 14, 2009

links for 2009-07-14

  • A bit late, but always good to brush up on il mio Italiano.
  • Cross-platform software to rip DVDs to AVI (or similar). Recommended on GeekUp, so keeping a note of it in case I want to use something like this in future (maybe if I get round to moving all my DVDs onto the media server)
    (tags: dvd avi software)
  • Interesting-looking website gathering information about local councils (in this case Liverpool). The committee meetings calendar seems particularly useful stuff to surface. Of course, it could be that all this is already on the Liverpool City Council's own website somewhere...
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July 13, 2009

links for 2009-07-13

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July 07, 2009

links for 2009-07-07

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June 30, 2009

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June 23, 2009

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June 20, 2009

links for 2009-06-20

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June 17, 2009

links for 2009-06-17

  • Nice project by Landon Rohatensky, who's modified my Alertuino perl script to trigger his Arduino controlled teasmaid. It picks up the type of tea from a tweet, and that sets the time that the tea steeps before it is dispensed into the cup, ready to drink.
    (tags: arduino tea robot)
  • It turns out that a bike left unlocked in the centre of Liverpool lasted longer (nearly four hours) before being stolen than any of the other locations they tried, including London and Norwich
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June 07, 2009

links for 2009-06-07

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May 31, 2009

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May 28, 2009

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May 26, 2009

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May 25, 2009

links for 2009-05-25

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May 11, 2009

links for 2009-05-11

  • A brief explanation of how Scott Bader Co Ltd became the Scott Bader Commonwealth.

    "What that did was change a traditional firm, accountable to its shareholders, into one that could balance doing well with doing good."

    Interesting approach with a laudable set of rules to govern how the business is run.



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May 09, 2009

links for 2009-05-09

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May 01, 2009

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April 28, 2009

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April 24, 2009

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April 21, 2009

links for 2009-04-21

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April 20, 2009

links for 2009-04-20

  • Interesting firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G WiFi router. Would be useful if I get round to getting one to use to make Bubblino easier to hook up to a WiFi network (i.e. I could use this rather than a laptop as the Ethernet <-> WiFi bridge)
    (tags: wifi firmware)
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April 18, 2009

links for 2009-04-17

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April 14, 2009

links for 2009-04-14

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April 04, 2009

links for 2009-04-04

  • Great use of the Open Street Map data to overlay all sorts of useful info about Sutton (part of London). Click on the "+" on the right and you can bring up things like recent planning applications, "fix my street" issues, local gyms...
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March 20, 2009

links for 2009-03-20

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March 19, 2009

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March 06, 2009

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February 27, 2009

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February 25, 2009

links for 2009-02-25

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February 12, 2009

links for 2009-02-12

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January 30, 2009

links for 2009-01-30

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January 24, 2009

links for 2009-01-24

  • A bit of a rant, but a great summary of the potential problems of "cloud computing".

    "this idea that ... a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand."



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January 19, 2009

links for 2009-01-19

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January 14, 2009

links for 2009-01-14

  • Delightful - an instructable detailing all the steps taken in boxing up an Arduino robot kit, from laser cutting components to weighing the bags of bolts to ensure there are enough in there. It also shows the fun you can have building custom machines with a laser cutter - all those clear plastic constructions remind me of Fraggle Rock!
  • A great collection of photos taken in Liverpool in the 80s. A real trip down memory lane for me - there's even one of the Albert Dock before it was done up, complete with the missing corner from where a bomb hit it in WW2
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January 13, 2009

links for 2009-01-13

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January 07, 2009

links for 2009-01-07

  • Suw has just launched "Ada Lovlace Day" - a movement to celebrate and promote women in technology. I've signed up to the pledge, and you should too.
  • One of the dilemmas of modern technology: the cost of storage makes it easier for more and more data to be collected and kept, and remembering things for us is a useful feature of computers - but should they remember everything for ever?

    I think more people should be worrying about the answer to that. This paper proposes a good solution, where all data is given an expiry date and is deleted at that point.

    I think there's scope for a more nuanced solution though, where data gets fuzzier over time. For a while it could be useful to know that I made a phonecall at 10:34am this morning, but in 10 years if I need to know at all then surely something like "early Jan 2009" would be close enough?

    Tricky to implement, because remembering is such a hard task that deliberately forgetting feels very wrong, but I think we should be exploring what we do and don't want to keep for ever.



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January 06, 2009

links for 2009-01-06

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December 28, 2008

links for 2008-12-28

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December 22, 2008

links for 2008-12-22

  • Useful-looking charting library for web apps. Has a couple of features (like saving charts as images) that my current choice doesn't.
    (tags: charts webdev)
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December 20, 2008

links for 2008-12-20

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December 12, 2008

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December 11, 2008

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December 09, 2008

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December 08, 2008

links for 2008-12-08

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December 04, 2008

links for 2008-12-04

  • "a subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month."

    Great to see Merlin back on form. I'm glad I didn't unsubscribe during his dip. Go read it.


    (tags: advice)

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November 22, 2008

links for 2008-11-22

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November 17, 2008

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November 13, 2008

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October 27, 2008

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October 22, 2008

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October 19, 2008

links for 2008-10-19

  • "An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.". It often surprises me that I ended up blogging, given that I spent my A-levels and degree trying to get away from writing essays.
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October 18, 2008

links for 2008-10-18

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October 09, 2008

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September 22, 2008

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Last month the BBC website had a series of articles about the problems with the sorts of numbers and statistics oft bandied about by people and the media. They're well worth a read, even if it just means you'll never trust a number in a news report again...

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August 08, 2008

The Geldart Public House, Reborn

I last went for a drink in the Geldart when it was a slightly seedy local, good if you wanted a game of pool, or to watch the not-quite-legal-Norweigan-satellite-feed Premiership football, but other than that nothing special. It's main claim to fame in those days was the pretty-much-daily lock-ins which meant it was about the only place to get a drink after hours in pre-liberal-licensing Cambridge.

The lock-ins were clamped down upon and stopped well before the late licences were brought in, and the Geldart went back to oft-overlooked and neglected residential pub.

Tomorrow, however, all that is set to change. My mate Elvis (no, really, that is his name) has left his role as manager of the excellent Kingston Arms in order to branch out on his own and will be relaunching The Geldart under a new guise.

The pub has been completely refitted and refurbished and will be serving good beer and good food in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. There'll be the usual Guiness and a couple of lagers on tap, but the main focus will be a good range of ales.

I had a sneak peek round the place a couple of weeks ago, and it's looking very good. Sadly the beers hadn't arrived (mainly because they'd have gone off otherwise), so I didn't get to sample the drinks. Nor did I get to try the food, which I'm intrigued to try because in addition to the usual pub fare there'll be "hot rocks" where you get to cook the food yourself at the table on, guess what, a heated rock.

The grand opening is tomorrow, Saturday 9th August from 6pm 'til late.

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July 22, 2008

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July 19, 2008

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June 16, 2008

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June 13, 2008

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June 06, 2008

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May 27, 2008

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May 23, 2008

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May 15, 2008

links for 2008-05-15

  • On the strength of watching this I'll be buying "In Defence of Food". To be healthy, shop round the edges of the supermarket (or better still, not in a supermarket at all)
    (tags: food video)
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May 07, 2008

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May 04, 2008

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May 03, 2008

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April 30, 2008

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April 29, 2008

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April 22, 2008

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April 19, 2008

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April 12, 2008

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April 08, 2008

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April 06, 2008

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March 21, 2008

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February 13, 2008

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December 18, 2007

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November 29, 2007

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November 03, 2007

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November 01, 2007

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October 31, 2007

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October 27, 2007

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October 17, 2007

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October 16, 2007

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October 12, 2007

links for 2007-10-12

  • Help! The city is being overrun by plasticene bunnies! The latest Sony Bravia advert is out, and it's even better than the bouncing balls.
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October 10, 2007

links for 2007-10-10

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October 05, 2007

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October 04, 2007

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October 02, 2007

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September 26, 2007

links for 2007-09-26

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September 20, 2007

links for 2007-09-20

  • I find it rather ironic that social networking sites, of all things, call part of their protocol for interacting (and presumably proliferating) OFF.
  • Learning a foreign language gets the Web2.0 treatment. I've been trying the Italian course, and it seems pretty good so far - you get to hear and see the phrases, with nice touches like being able to repeat part of a phrase by clicking on it. Good for a
  • Stephen Fry has a blog! Who's going to tell him that the entries aren't supposed to be quite so long? If he carries on like that he'll give the rest of us a bad name...
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September 13, 2007

links for 2007-09-13

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September 12, 2007

links for 2007-09-12

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September 10, 2007

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September 07, 2007

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September 06, 2007

links for 2007-09-06

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August 31, 2007

links for 2007-08-31

  • A list of all the markets (antiques, arts and crafts, organic produce, local produce...) in Torino. Tells you where they are, and on which days they're held. There are quite a few!
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August 27, 2007

Dealing With the Grief of Others

Over on her blog, Zinnia has written a series of excellent articles about what to write or say, or how to act when someone that you know loses a loved one.

Hopefully lots of people will read it and realise that, whilst there isn't a right answer, there are also far less wrong answers. On the whole, when somebody dies the worst things to do are to avoid the people grieving or to avoid the topic of the deceased. Zinnia covers that, but more importantly gives tips and ideas for what you should do.

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August 26, 2007

links for 2007-08-26

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August 24, 2007

links for 2007-08-24

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August 08, 2007

links for 2007-08-08

  • For anyone who wants to see more of the city I've moved to - a very varied selection of shots of Torino with a new one posted every day.
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August 04, 2007

links for 2007-08-04

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July 18, 2007

links for 2007-07-18

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July 16, 2007

links for 2007-07-16

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July 07, 2007

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June 20, 2007

links for 2007-06-20

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June 16, 2007

links for 2007-06-16

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June 15, 2007

links for 2007-06-15

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June 14, 2007

A Correction: Cannes Is Coming To Cambridge Tonight

I should learn to read things more carefully.

When I blogged about the series of short films being shown at the Box Tree last week I said that the event was happening on that Thursday. I was wrong. It's today.

Hopefully anyone who was planning on going looked at the date in the full post, rather than going from my "tomorrow night" description. Still, the organisers have at least benefitted from some more exposure as a result of my mistake, so I don't feel too bad about it...

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links for 2007-06-14

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June 07, 2007

links for 2007-06-07

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June 02, 2007

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May 30, 2007

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May 29, 2007

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April 20, 2007

links for 2007-04-20

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April 09, 2007

Other Blogs, Loosely Grouped

I don't know when I last updated the list of blogs that appear down the left of the main page of McFilter, but it must be a couple of years at least. The background task to make the maintenance easier (using MTBlogroll plugin) itself has taken over a year...

In that time, the mix of blogs that I read regularly has changed a bit, and expanded quite a lot. There have been more blogs that I was tracking, but I went through a purge a while back when it became clear that just reading them all was taking too much of my time.

So have a browse. They're all interesting in their own way. I've tried to group them into rough categories, but that's only to help people choose what they might be interested in - individuals just aren't that easy to pigeon-hole.

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April 06, 2007

links for 2007-04-06

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April 05, 2007

links for 2007-04-05

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April 04, 2007

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March 31, 2007

links for 2007-03-31

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March 23, 2007

links for 2007-03-23

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March 16, 2007

Red Nose Day, And The Book Is On Sale

Front cover

Shaggy Blog Stories by Mike Atkinson (Book) in Humor can now be bought from Lulu.com (who are also donating their profits from it to Comic Relief).

Full details of the contributors and how it all came together over at Mike's blog.

Buy your copy today!

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March 13, 2007

It's All For A Good Cause

As Red Nose Day looms there have been a few calls on my hard-earned cash; but as it's all for a good cause, who am I to refuse?

Firstly, my friend Jo (along with some of her colleagues) will be trekking 100km across the South Downs to raise money for Oxfam - and you can sponsor her here.

Secondly, now that the annual Which Decade Is Top For Pops project is out of the way, Mike has launched an ambitious venture in aid of Comic Relief.

"I have had a Big Idea!!!

Next Friday (March 16) is Comic Relief's Red Nose Day day in the UK. What I’m proposing is to assemble and publish – in the space of just seven days - a paperback anthology of blog writing, that can be sold to raise funds for the charity.

The book will be called Shaggy Blog Stories: a collection of amusing tales from the UK blogosphere."

I don't have any hilarious posts tucked away in the McFilter archives, so haven't submitted anything. What I will be doing though is buying a copy of the book when it goes on sale on Friday.

Head over to Troubled-Diva for full details on the mission.

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March 09, 2007

links for 2007-03-09

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March 06, 2007

links for 2007-03-06

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February 19, 2007

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February 03, 2007

links for 2007-02-03

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January 28, 2007

Your Weekly Dose of Good Writing

Post of the Week

Post of the Week is a newly (re-) launched website aiming to highlight some of the best writing on weblogs, on a weekly basis.

As Mike said when announcing it on his site:

"Absolutely everyone everywhere is heartily recommended to do any or all of the following:

1. Nominate cracking good blog posts for inclusion, via the comments box in the "Call for nominations" section.

2. Volunteer their services as a guest judge, for one weekend only.

3. Publicise the site on their own blogs. Pimp it, kids. Pimp it HARD."

Or at least head over and have a good read.

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links for 2007-01-28

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January 23, 2007

links for 2007-01-23

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January 09, 2007

links for 2007-01-09

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December 21, 2006

links for 2006-12-21

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December 19, 2006

links for 2006-12-19

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December 08, 2006

links for 2006-12-08

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November 17, 2006

links for 2006-11-17

  • Lots of links to companies offering recycling (and such) services in the (south of the) UK. I thought I posted this ages ago, but couldn't see it.
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November 14, 2006

links for 2006-11-14

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November 12, 2006

links for 2006-11-12

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November 04, 2006

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November 02, 2006

links for 2006-11-02

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October 21, 2006

links for 2006-10-21

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October 17, 2006

Divide and Conquer

Collective Genius is a collaborative blog where each month there's a chosen topic for everyone to write about. This month's topic is "Getting Unstuck", and I've written some thoughts about how breaking a task down into smaller chunks can help you start (and finish!) big, nasty tasks in the article Collective Genius!: Cutting Things Down To Size. Of course, keeping track of your newly multiplied tasks is something that tedium is adept at doing...

This has been an announcement from the Where Else Is Adrian's Content Available department.

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October 02, 2006

links for 2006-10-02

  • Plugin for websites that require users to sign-in so that your website can offer single sign-on from services like OpenID. Is this an indication that some of the federated identity services are starting to mature?
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September 23, 2006

links for 2006-09-23

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September 15, 2006

links for 2006-09-15

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September 08, 2006

links for 2006-09-08

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September 07, 2006

links for 2006-09-07

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September 05, 2006

links for 2006-09-05

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August 26, 2006

links for 2006-08-26

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August 17, 2006

links for 2006-08-17

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August 16, 2006

links for 2006-08-16

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August 10, 2006

Black Box - Now Showing at a Cinema Near You*

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August 08, 2006

links for 2006-08-08

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July 27, 2006

Home Energy Check. Create Survey... Check. Make Results Useful... Err...

I've just completed the Energy Saving Trust's online Home Energy Check and I'm rather underwhelmed.

It claims to create a "personalised report listing all the ways you can reduce your energy consumption. You could save up to £250 a year on your energy bills, as well as around two tonnes of CO2 a year."

That all sounds quite useful and interesting so I ran through their short questionnaire filling in my details. My personalised report recommends that I fit more loft insulation, and replace my central heating boiler with a more efficient one. If I do that, I'll save around £86 each year.

Now, I'm sure that I should do both of those things but they aren't particularly challenging suggestions. Where's the recommendation that I switch to a green energy supplier? How much would I save if I installed solar water heating? It seems a wasted opportunity to inform me about some of the less common (but surely becoming more mainstream) options.

Similarly, just telling me how much I could save isn't particularly useful. Given enough investment in solar power and wind turbines, surely I could reduce my energy bill to 0 - but it would cost quite a lot to get there. I'd be more inclined to act upon the survey's recommendations if the results were presented as "fitting a new boiler would cost £700 and save you £86 a year, paying for itself in 9 years". Although writing this blog entry has helped me find out that info, as I've just looked it up to make sure my figures are realistic...

Posted by Adrian at 03:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 18, 2006

links for 2006-07-18

  • Statistics on the capabilities of assorted mobile phone browsers - get stats for specific features such as screen size, or XHMTL version, and limit them by phone manufacturer for finer-grained analysis.
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What Do You Remember?

The Time When, the latest website to come from the BBC's experimental arm, has just been announced by Phil Gyford.

It's a place for people to record their memories, and it looks quite nice so far although there's not a lot of data in there yet.

Some first thoughts on the how it could be even better though, in case they're reading and because part of the announcement seems to be to start gaining feedback...

A minor techie thing to start with - the URLs aren't very hackable. Surely www.thetimewhen.co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/memorynumber would be better and let people explore more easily. Such a URL structure would also encourage the provision of some other very useful pages - ...co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/ would show me all the memories for yesterday, and ...co.uk/memory/2006/07/ would give all the memories for July 2006 and of course ...co.uk/memory/2006/ would give everything for this year. Or maybe just a calendar showing each day with the number of memories for that day shown by making the day's number/background/whatever more eye-catching? Start with pale grey for days with no events, and run through to bright red bold text for those with lots of memories...

It isn't very easy to browse round memories at present. The popular and most recent lists on the home page are a good start, but are heavily skewed to major events like September 11th 2001. If I search for a year I'd like to get the memories from that year, not the memories from today's date in that year. It would also be good if the individual day pages, in addition to their "previous day / next day" links also had "previous day with a memory / next day with a memory" links, so I can just pick a random day somewhere and still find memories to read about around that time.

I also wonder what the earliest memory is. A search for 1066 did seem like it had found some links, but that's only because it's finding things in the Wikipedia data feed. Unfortunately you can't see what memories William the Conqueror had ;-)

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July 12, 2006

links for 2006-07-12

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July 05, 2006

links for 2006-07-05

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June 24, 2006

links for 2006-06-24

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June 20, 2006

links for 2006-06-20

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June 19, 2006

links for 2006-06-19

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June 17, 2006

links for 2006-06-17

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June 07, 2006

links for 2006-06-07

  • Stuart Bell is writing up a lot of his rides in and around Cambridge including the distances. Looks like it's building up into a useful collection.
  • Huge searchable archive of Movietone news reels (as was shown before films at the cinema years ago). Aimed more to let people find clips to licence for use in their own films or TV programmes, once you register you can see a small-sized version of any of
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June 02, 2006

links for 2006-06-02

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May 31, 2006

links for 2006-05-31

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May 30, 2006

links for 2006-05-30

  • Interesting looking idea for charging people to use websites - as a user, once you've joined IndieKarma, whenever you visit a website that's signed up, they'll get a penny (actually one US cent) from your account. Doesn't cost you much, but potentially a
  • Wampad is a new mobile-phone targetted web service. From the review it sounds like the service is actually thinking about what people might want to use their phone for with regard to accessing the Internet. It's making it easy to search google, the imdb
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May 20, 2006

links for 2006-05-20

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May 17, 2006

links for 2006-05-17

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May 04, 2006

links for 2006-05-04

  • Long article about what Al Gore has been up to since losing the presidency battle. You can't help but wonder what the world would be like if he'd won, but maybe his new zeal for solving the climate change problem is more important... maybe it will all wo
    (tags: green al_gore)
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April 30, 2006

links for 2006-04-30

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April 29, 2006

The BBC Open Catalogue

It's interesting to see that the BBC have launched one of the first pieces of their Open Archive project this week.

The BBC Programme Catalogue doesn't have any actual video footage, but does provide a huge amount of meta-information about the programmes in their archive, so you can do things like find out what was on TV on the day I was born, or all the programmes that Floella Benjamin has been in.

All very interesting, and from a web developer point-of-view, nicely done - Atom and FOAF feeds all over the place; nice little sparkline-like graphs showing how the appearances map over time; and clean, easily-guessable URLs.

Posted by Adrian at 09:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

links for 2006-04-26

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April 11, 2006

links for 2006-04-11

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March 27, 2006

links for 2006-03-27

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March 17, 2006

links for 2006-03-17

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March 15, 2006

links for 2006-03-15

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March 07, 2006

links for 2006-03-07

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February 22, 2006

links for 2006-02-22

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February 19, 2006

links for 2006-02-19

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February 17, 2006

links for 2006-02-17

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February 14, 2006

links for 2006-02-14

  • Why do so many creative firms avoid putting prices on their websites? I like this firms approach - offering a set of "design packages" so those of us who assume that getting professional design would be expensive can see that it mightn't be as bad as the
    (tags: logo design)
  • Suggestions on how to choose the names for your CSS IDs and Classes. Basically, choose names that link to the structure of the webpage (like "branding", or "main-navigation") rather than the presentation of the webpage (such as "banner", or "left-hand-me
    (tags: CSS webdev)
  • Online tool to let you test webpages "for quality, accessibility and privacy issues."
  • From this week's Micro-ISV digest, this is an online version of a book about starting your own business by Bruce Judson.
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February 12, 2006

links for 2006-02-12

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February 11, 2006

links for 2006-02-11

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January 20, 2006

links for 2006-01-20

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January 14, 2006

links for 2006-01-14

  • Yet more mashups, this time via Troubled Diva. Lots of good ones here; I particularly like "Free Love Child" and "Loves Torn Theme" (Natalie Imbruglia meets Barry White) is superb.
    (tags: mashups mp3 music)
  • One of the downsides of working from home is that you're more likely to be at home when the tele-marketers call. If British Gas start another of their concerted efforts to get me to switch back to them, I'll keep a copy of this next to the phone and try
Posted by delicious at 08:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 12, 2006

links for 2006-01-12

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January 11, 2006

links for 2006-01-11

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January 10, 2006

links for 2006-01-10

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January 05, 2006

links for 2006-01-05

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January 03, 2006

links for 2006-01-03

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January 02, 2006

Helping You To Resolve

Happy New Year!

It's pretty typical for people to start the year deciding to do a whole raft of things differently from how they've been doing things in the past. It's not something I partake in much, my mind seems to wander onto "should I be doing X differently" or "am I happy with Y" thoughts at random times throughout the year, and I try to let it run through to a "resolution" then. So my resolving is a rolling item rather than a yearly overhaul, although while choosing my Christmas present list I did decide to try to read more books this year.

Anyway, given that some of my friends have been thinking about making New Year Resolutions (and because an assortment of people have been blogging about such matters), here are a couple of links I've encountered recently that might be useful:

  • Momentum 2006 is a PDF file containing a number of questions/exercises to run through to help you better define your goals, and then get started on achieving them. It appears that one of the items in "Step 2" is missing, but that isn't a huge problem...
  • And Curt Rosengren has a short quiz to help you decide whether you're in the right career.

Posted by Adrian at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 24, 2005

links for 2005-12-24

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December 15, 2005

links for 2005-12-15

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December 13, 2005

links for 2005-12-13

  • Not sure how long this has been available, but for a while now I've thought that an RSS feed of news would be a much better way for the alumni to keep up to date with developments than the 6-monthly(?) magazine. (The RSS2.0 feed isn't validating at the m
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December 09, 2005

links for 2005-12-09

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December 08, 2005

links for 2005-12-08

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November 29, 2005

links for 2005-11-29

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November 27, 2005

links for 2005-11-27

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November 24, 2005

links for 2005-11-24

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November 23, 2005

links for 2005-11-23

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November 10, 2005

links for 2005-11-10

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November 03, 2005

links for 2005-11-03

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November 02, 2005

links for 2005-11-02

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October 27, 2005

links for 2005-10-27

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October 17, 2005

links for 2005-10-17

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October 14, 2005

links for 2005-10-14

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October 07, 2005

Who's Blogging In Cambridge?

Fresh from his success with the Our Social World conference, Geoff has just launched Cambridge Blogs - a Wiki directory of bloggers here in Cambridge.

So if you're blogging in or around Cambridge, head over and make sure you're on the list. And maybe put your name down for the embryonic Cambridge blogmeet...

Posted by Adrian at 02:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 06, 2005

links for 2005-10-06

  • Riser cards! So *that's* what they're called. I've been wondering whether you could get something to rotate PCI cards 90 degrees. Will make my hi-fi separates mp3 player a bit lower when I finally build it ;-)
Posted by delicious at 09:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 07, 2005

Claiming My Feed On Feedster

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:6fde87605d6127e5d6bcc6cee55e0921 so that I can add a pretty picture to go with links to my blog on the Feedster links results pages.

Posted by Adrian at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 04, 2005

A Local Conference, But Not Just For Local People

Local blogger Geoff Jones has put together a very interesting looking conference about blogging and business - Our Social World.

The line-up includes a number of speakers I'd really like to see, and it's right on my doorstep.

At the moment, I have no idea whether or not I'm going to attend. The cost is one problem, given that I have zero income at present. The "Why don't British businesses blog?" theme is another issue - there could be useful things to learn, given that I'll be into full-on promoting my business by then, and blogging will be a part of that; but my business is already blogging and my conference-going itch is really the sort of geek melting-pot of Reboot, or Open Tech 2005. Working on my networking skills would also be good, but again there are more cost-effective ways of doing that locally that I've yet to take advantage of.

I might see if I can find out a bit more about it, and maybe even volunteer to help in some way as that'd help prevent my usual wallflower behaviour at such events...

Posted by Adrian at 02:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 07, 2005

A Terrible Day

I didn't get any work done today. Not until this evening at least. I've spent the day watching the terrible events in London unfold.

I did think about blogging about it earlier, but there seemed little point. Anyone reading my blog is bound to have heard about it elsewhere beforehand. And anything I say would just be re-iterating what other have already said. I am surprised at how few fatalities there've been (so far, perhaps). I have been impressed with how well the emergency services have reacted, and generally with how well London seems to be picking itself up and dusting itself down.

It was interesting to discover that most of the people I know in London are bloggers - it was reassuring to tick them off one by one as they posted to let everyone know they were okay.

It's also interesting how much information and communication I have access to. I first heard about the attacks on IRC, and soon after decamped to the front room in front of the TV. The TV was the best source for facts, as they scale better than websites for disseminating information to lots of people. BBC News 24 seemed to do a more responsible job - reporting which facts were officially confirmed, and pretty clearly marking what was rumour - much better than ITN or Sky News.

Instant messenger meant I could discuss events, and exchange facts and rumours with friends up and down the country, and even abroad; and text messaging meant I could find out that my friend in London was okay, although things will no doubt be a bit strange when she got into work this evening at St. Thomas's Hospital (South of the river, so probably not too involved).

And blogs and digital (or even mobile phone) cameras have provided a less filtered, unofficial, but more real view on events. Tom Reynolds has posted about his day, something I'd been waiting for all day, given his job at the London Ambulance Service. I'm sure there'll be interesting posts from him over the coming days. Via Mike, there's a a detailed report from someone caught in one of the tube explosions. And all day there more and more photos have been appearing in two Flickr photo pools for the explosions.

My thoughts are with the victims and their families.

Posted by Adrian at 09:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 28, 2005

No New Ideas

Over a year ago now, I spent some time playing around with some code to scrape the events pages of local venues and build up an RSS feed of what was on. The idea was that I wouldn't keep missing gigs. However, I didn't get it working well enough to release, and haven't had time to play with it further since.

The other day, I discovered Upcoming.org. Admittedly, it doesn't do the scraping of existing websites, it relies on the users entering events; but that's largely to be expected, scraping the websites was the bit I was having most trouble with :-)

The "consuming" events side of things is very cool though - you can see your own events, events being attended by your friends, or events for your area (or Metro, as Upcoming calls them). For example, here's the page with all the events in Cambridge.

Even better (at least, it is once you've gotten into RSS feeds, which you really should...), you can get an RSS feed of events so you don't have to keep checking the website for new stuff. Or there's an iCal feed which you can use on a Mac (I think, not having one myself :-) or with a calendar program like Sunbird to have the events show up in your calendar.

The only problem now is getting enough people to start putting events into the Cambridge bit so I find out what's happening, although I see that Damien has at least been adding the Broken Family Band gigs...

Posted by Adrian at 06:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2005

Another Random Reality Radio Appearance

When Tom Reynolds was last on the radio talking about workplace blogging I created a link to let him direct people directly to the interview, rather than having to tell people how far into the radio show it was.

Although it's relatively easy to do, it requires a bit of geek hacking so I spent some time looking into how easy it would be to knock up a little web service to make it more user-friendly. And added it to my list of projects to do sometime.

Of course, before I get chance to build the web app, Tom gets himself another radio appearance, this time on BBC Five Live.

So, hand-coded again (partly so I could listen to it easily myself), for the next week here's the link to Tom's interview on Five Live.

Posted by Adrian at 05:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 11, 2005

Photography Sale In Aid Of The Tsunami

As Jo noted over here:
"Cambridge photographer Jean Luc Benazet is selling his collection of prints to raise money for the appeal. He will donate 100% of the profits and his company will match his funds raised. There are some nice Cambridge pics."

I've held off blogging about it until today because for the first couple of days the sale was only open to his colleagues at Citrix.

But now the sale is open to all of us! I'm getting one of the Anfield prints, and a few of the others have caught my eye - not sure if I'm going to succumb to temptation though.

So head over to his website to have a look, and get yourself a cool picture whilst helping the victims of the tsunami.

Posted by Adrian at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 04, 2005

Not Just A Song By The Manics

There's not much left to say is there? Especially with the terrible disaster happening when I was away from broadband internet access and so am blogging about it late.

It's my personal connections that've brought it home to me, rather than the blanket news coverage.

The sister of a friend is out travelling in the area, and for a while they didn't know if she was okay - luckily she decided to move on and missed the tsunami by hours.

Evelyn Rodriguez, one of my regular reads, wasn't quite as fortunate but survived (largely) unscathed and has been providing lots of useful information and stories since. Start reading from her post in the immediate aftermath.

There's another personal report here, and the Guardian has a roundup of reports from blogs.

And finally, in case you haven't yet helped out, here's the link to DONATE TO THE EARTHQUAKE APPEAL.

Posted by Adrian at 02:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 17, 2004

Much Linking

Only about a year after all the super-cool-early-adopter geeks signed up, I've finally jumped on the del.icio.us bandwagon.

For those of you who don't know, del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks system". Bookmarks because it's a way of storing your bookmarks or favourites on the web; so you can get at them from any computer anywhere and you can provide a short description so you've some chance of remembering why you bookmarked it. And social because you can see other people's bookmarks.

That last part doesn't sound very interesting, until I tell you about tags. When you create a bookmark you can specify some tags for that bookmark, a bit like keywords or categories. Then you can search for all of your bookmarks with a given tag, or all of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag - for example, http://del.icio.us/tag/liverpool+football gives you all the bookmarks tagged with liverpool and football.

The upshot of all this, for those of you who haven't rushed off and signed up yourself, is that I've set-up del.icio.us to post any new bookmarks to McFilter. So, in an hour or so (if I've set it up right, otherwise real soon now honest...) there should be a new entry containing my bookmarks. Then each day, if I've saved any new bookmarks, there'll be an entry with the new ones in. There may be some changes to the formatting too, depending on what the entries look like.

If you're still reading, and if the idea has piqued your interest, here's a good, user-friendly introduction. Then you might want to look at nutr.itio.us which makes choosing tags a bit easier when you add bookmarks, and the delicious Firefox extension which gives you some handy new items on your right-click menu if you use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer (and you should). Finally, instructions on getting del.icio.us to post bookmarks to your blog (I'm currently working on how to set this up for blogger/blogspot blogs, so I'll post details when I work it out).

Posted by Adrian at 12:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 15, 2004

The Art In Liverpool Weblog

Now that the Biennial is over, Ian Jackson (he of Biennial Blog fame) has launched a new blog - the Art In Liverpool Weblog. More general in scope, although something tells me it'll still pretty much focus on Liverpool. And art.

Be sure to check out the cool Jaguar sculpture.

Posted by Adrian at 03:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 01, 2004

Cambridge In Having Night-life Shocker

Varsity Online reports on interesting developments in Cambridge's night-life

"Over the course of the coming year, all existing licences regarding the sale of alcohol and public entertainments are being replaced by a new licensing system that allows for the possibility of staying open until 5am, as clubs and bars on the continent do. B Bar, Vaults, Bar Ha Ha and Number 1 King%u2019s Parade are all applying for extended licenses."

Coco's club seems set to close and be reborn (again) as "The Soul Tree", which at least sounds promising, and Po Na Na is due for an extension. It doesn't say whether thats an extension of physical space, or an extension of its opening hours - both would be useful...

Posted by Adrian at 09:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 07, 2004

The People Down There Look Like Ants

-- The Museum of Modern Art: Tall Buildings -- is a superb online exhibition about modern skyscrapers. Twenty-five buildings (or proposals for buildings) from the past decade are represented, including a few of the proposals for the World Trade Centre site in New York, the London Bridge Tower, and the Swiss Re "Gherkin".

The Elephant & Castle Eco Towers is a particularly interesting project, incorporating vegetation into its sustainable construction.

(Via Downtown Liverpool)

Posted by Adrian at 05:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2004

Hacked Off

Last year, when Hullabaloo wasn't even a twinkle in her eye, Emily was over on location in France, helping a couple of her friends with a film they were making.

Hacked Off, a slasher horror movie, is now finished and will be available to buy on DVD from tomorrow.

I haven't seen it yet, so offer this synopsis in lieu of a review, or just go watch the trailer (smaller version).

Posted by Adrian at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 29, 2004

Little House On The Pier Head

I never program my video recorder. Ceefax doesn't give the Videoplus numbers, and I can never be bothered to set it manually. I don't record much anyway - generally things I'd miss otherwise from being out - so I usually start it recording manually before I head out; the time display is good enough for me to find the programme later.

This does result in my recording all sorts of bits of TV I don't intend watching. Occasionally I catch something of interest, as happened last week when I recorded Newsnight Review before a Gram Parsons documentary.

Among the subjects for review was recently opened art festival in Liverpool, Biennial 2004. Lots of contemporary art scattered across the city. I'll have to see if I can get across if I end up in the North-West for Halloween this year.

I'm enjoying exploring the festival through the semi-unofficial Liverpool Biennial Blog 2004.

Posted by Adrian at 02:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 28, 2004

Let's Hope He Doesn't Need To Put It Into Action

Much better than the Beeb's Dirty War "mockumentary" and vastly more informative than the discussion afterwards, Tom Reynolds explains the London Ambulance Service's plan for dealing with a major incident.

Posted by Adrian at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 15, 2004

Getting Things Done

43 Folders is an ever expanding collection of tips and tricks to help you be more productive. And it isn't just for geeks, the common thread binding the ideas is a system for organizing your life, called GTD.

GTD stands for Getting Things Done, and 43 Folders includes a handy guide to getting started with GTD.

There are some similarities with how I was already organizing things, but I think I'll be cribbing more ideas as time progresses to hopefully get even more things done.

Posted by Adrian at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Guardian Style Guide

The Chicago Manual Of Style seems to be the most cited reference tome for matters such as whether to capitalize, the difference between "complementary" and "complimentary", and whether it is acceptable to split infinitives.

However, it's a guide to American English and is nearly forty quid, so I was most pleased to discover that the Guardian style guide is freely available online.

Posted by Adrian at 12:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 18, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Ade's rap Postcard Response

Dr. Pockless replied to my letter with a scan of a handwritten letter. As I don't have a scanner, I used my wits to come up with Ade's rap Postcard Response.

Posted by Adrian at 09:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 17, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Kings College Chapel at Sunset

This week's theme is Letters. I managed to restrain myself from just posting Eddie Izzard's letters to the Corinthians, and just replied to one of Dr. Pockless' essays:
Uborka: King's College Chapel at Sunset

Posted by Adrian at 02:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2004

Cumbria - The Art Gallery

Andy Goldsworthy - Sheepfolds is a collection of ephemeral art dotted around Cumbria.

I particularly like this one - is it the screaming mouths of lost souls; or the burrows of a long-lost Lakeland creature? The almost missable qualities of this also appeal: snaking through the reeds like the flightpath of a damsel fly, and the fiery colours of this contrast wonderfully with the muted tones of its surroundings.

Posted by Adrian at 12:48 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 06, 2004

Huge Pictures

The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator. A superb web app that you give an image, and it gives you a multi-page PDF file containing a big black and white newspaper-style (i.e. made up of lots of dots) version of the image.

Then you can print it out and make a massive poster!

Posted by Adrian at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 05, 2004

How To Be Creative

I held off posting this when it first appeared as it was clear it was going to evolve a little. And then it exploded everywhere. Well worth reading, and be sure to explore the links to more.

Hugh MacLeod's how to be creative.

Posted by Adrian at 11:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

[mcqn @ Uborka] Unexpected Music

Poetry week this week at Uborka. I don't think I've written a poem since I was at school. However, inspired by the arrival of my copy of the Uborka Mix CD, whilst in the shower this morning I composed Unexpected Music.

Next poem to be released when I'm 45...

Posted by Adrian at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 04, 2004

Maybe Not Today...

Okay, I'm not sure exactly how it would fit into the lounge, so it might not make an appearance at one of my parties for a while, but I definitely fancy getting some of this one day...

Posted by Adrian at 08:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 30, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Caption Competition: Are You Lost?

Uborka: Are You Lost?

Posted by Adrian at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 29, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Caption Competition: The Alpine Hoover

Uborka: The Alpine Hoover

Posted by Adrian at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 22, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] The Day Of The Ants

Uborka: The Day Of The Ants

Posted by Adrian at 04:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Freedom

Uborka is into its third phase of guest-blogging, where a theme is chosen for each week, and any of the past guest-bloggers can post about that theme.

The first theme is The Uborka Mix CD. Obviously I couldn't pass up the opportunity to choose a track, so go here to read about Freedom.

Posted by Adrian at 06:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 29, 2004

A Diva Less Troubled

Mike has bypassed his server woes, and is newly double-barrelled as troubled HYPHEN diva.

My blogroll will be updated to reflect this (and many other changes that have been building up) when I get a spare five minutes...

Posted by Adrian at 11:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 21, 2004

For All You Healthcare Professionals

Even the none-healthcare-professionals among you might, as I did, enjoy reading Random Acts Of Reality, a blog from an ambulanceman (actually an E.M.T. but given that I don't know what one of those is... Emergency Medical Traveller? Excessively Maroon Tortoise? Enraged Monkey Troubleshooter?)

And from the medical section of his blogroll, I stumbled upon This won't hurt a bit!: Save the last dance, which pointed me at these two lovely poems.

Posted by Adrian at 06:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 18, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] How To... Be A Link-Whore

Well, Uborka gets the scoop. The company now has an official name - MCQN and a website at http://www.mcqn.com/.

The next step is to find out some more about what people want from their backup software, so that PeerBackup is as good as possible, I urge everyone, and their friends, and their friends' dogs to fill in the survey.

Posted by Adrian at 01:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

[mcqn @ Uborka] Cocktails

Lyle (my co-guest for the week) is now taking drinks orders for this afternoon's cocktails. If you rush over and leave a comment then you can attend the party later on.

Posted by Adrian at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2004

Don't Know About Egloos, But Eglus Are Cool!

At first glance, I thought that David Weinberger's post on Egloos was about the cute iMac-esque hen houses available from Omlet. But it isn't, it's about a Korean weblog provider, and the omlet coops are eglus.

Still, it reminded me that I hadn't blogged about them, so now I have.

Posted by Adrian at 05:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[mcqn @ Uborka] The Bumps

Available at: Uborka: The Bumps

Posted by Adrian at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 16, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] May Week (Full Version)

Available at: Uborka: May Week (Full Version)

Posted by Adrian at 11:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 15, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] May Week

Available at: Uborka: May Week

Posted by Adrian at 07:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 14, 2004

[mcqn @ Uborka] Culture

Available at: Uborka: Culture

Posted by Adrian at 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Guest Week @ Uborka

This week, I will mostly be guest blogging over at Uborka. I'll even link to each post from here so you can find them more easily, so go on over and have a peek.

Posted by Adrian at 02:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 08, 2004

Flying Long-haul? Find The Best Seats Here

SeatGuru.com - Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating

(Via ongoing)

Posted by Adrian at 09:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Keep Tabs On Your MP

TheyWorkForYou.com is a great source of information about MPs. You enter your postcode, and it brings up a whole host of information about your MP - such as how likely they are to rebel against the party, or how many votes they attend. Plus, you can get an RSS feed of their comments in the Parliament!

And you can search through everything said in parliament since 2001! For example, weblog has been mentioned twice.

Posted by Adrian at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More Statistics Than You Can Shake A Stick At

From gay domestic violence to foreign economic espionage... a huge array of statistics.

(Via kottke.org)

Posted by Adrian at 09:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 01, 2004

Lots Of Useful Web Design Info

A List Apart, lots of interesting articles and tutorials about web design. Guess who's building a website at the minute...

Posted by Adrian at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2004

Photo Links

If you want an image for some CD artwork, or some web design, then there's a vast selection at Stock.XCHNG (royalty-free and cost free) and www.istockphoto.com (royalty-free, and pretty cheap, plus you can upload your own photos and get paid if anyone uses them).

And then if you're using the Gimp (free image manipulation package) to manipulate them, GIMPguru.org has lots of useful tips and tutorials; something you'll need unfortunately, because the Gimp UI is rather unintuitive.

Posted by Adrian at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 23, 2004

Not Even Best At Being Crazy

It's always good to remind yourself that whatever mad thing it is you've decided to do, there's always someone doing something more insane. And blogging about it more. And just getting on with it.

(Via Ben Hammersley).

Posted by Adrian at 02:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 02, 2004

More Political Blogging

I see that Shaun Woodward, the MP who controversially stood for Labour in St. Helens South, has just launched his own blog.

Posted by Adrian at 01:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 27, 2004

Find Your Googlerank

The height of geekdom, I know, but in case you have a burning desire to find out that you're the 111th McEwen (when you're not even in the top 500 Adrians, oh the shame), then the Googlerank Calculator is the tool for you.

Posted by Adrian at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2004

You Might Not Like Shopping Malls

I don't particularly enjoy shopping malls. I find the controlled environment and climate to be stuffy and a little stifling. However, after reading this interview with the man who perfected the mall, I have a new found understanding of the reasoning behind the design of the mall. The mall is an optimised machine for shopping; a little over-optimised for my liking.

(via Kottke.org)

Posted by Adrian at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 09, 2004

The Cambridge Politics Page

Looks like I won't have any excuse not to vote in the next local elections, as the Politics in the City of Cambridge website gathers links and information about politics and elections in Cambridge.

Posted by Adrian at 05:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 20, 2004

RSS Must Be The Future

If even the BBC are promoting it ;-)
BBC NEWS | Magazine | The really simple future of the web.

Posted by Adrian at 06:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2004

Promoting The North-West

Political activism through blogging. Is it a new force in politics, or just the replacement for micro-scooters?

The Necessary Group are hoping for the former, as they are promoting blogging as a tool for people to get involved, and also linking to Meetup.com. Shame they haven't embraced the format for their own website, surely an RSS feed could keep the campaign fresh in people's minds?

Doing some investigation, I found this report which claims that "[a]wareness of government policy for the English regions was very low, with around 50% across England having heard nothing of government proposals."

I'm not surprised. I can't even find the whitepaper about devolution in England (Your Region, Your Choice) on the government's website - the site it was on seems to no longer exist. Google was a little more fruitful, finding the aforementioned report, along with a white paper explaining the implications for the North-West. Nor have I been able to find any details of the "official Yes Campaign" mentioned on the It's Necessary FAQ or a No Campaign.

From what I've read so far, I'm largely in favour of a regional assembly for the North West. Not that I'll have any say in it, seeing as I don't live there anymore. The entrepreneur in me, however, feels that it would be more beneficial to narrow the North-South divide through innovation and commerce; get back to what the North West did best when it was leading the industrial revolution and succeed, if necessary, despite government help.

Posted by Adrian at 08:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 10, 2004

CDs Ripped? Check. Next Step DVDs...

BYTE has a basic HOWTO for ripping your DVDs and converting them to DivX in the article Building Your Home Video Jukebox (paid subscription to Byte required).

I'm not as into my films as I am my music, so it'll probably be a while before I can stream movies around my home network...

Posted by Adrian at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2004

Joi Ito Promotes Better Blogging

Joi Ito's Web: Writing style and blogging gives some links to articles covering common mistakes made by writers and suggestions for ways to improve.

I have read them, but I can't guarantee a noticeable improvment in the quality of postings on this blog...

Posted by Adrian at 03:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2004

Next-gen Taxi Services

It seems that location-aware services are starting to gain some traction. Zingo is a taxi service in London which will route you through directly to the nearest black cab when you phone for a taxi, so hopefully you'll get a taxi quicker.

I wonder if it'll route you through to the same driver when you phone back half an hour later to find out where they've got to...?

Posted by Adrian at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2003

Explore Words

In case I forget it again, and because it's a really interesting and innovative UI for exploring relationships between words, here's a link to the Visual Thesaurus, a Dictionary of the English Language that uses Visualization.

Posted by Adrian at 02:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2003

NotDating(tm) and Dating(tm)

NotDating(tm), it's the latest programme for twenty-somethings.

Not to be confused with Dating(tm), which seems to be NotDating(tm) for the over-30s.

Hey, I don't make the rules, I just filter them...

Posted by Adrian at 04:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2003

Organising Thoughts And Information

Via Steven's Notebook comes this introduction to mind mapping, a way of exploring thoughts and ideas.

I have a feeling that it might clarify my thoughts on organizing data, that it will maybe tie together my ideas on bayesian categories for organizing my archives, and help clarify why I think Russ is wrong with his hierarchies of data rant.

Unfortunately, I haven't got time to explore this line of thought just at the minute, although the comments on Russ' post are pretty close. Something to revisit at a later date methinks.

Posted by Adrian at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 14, 2003

Pick a Colour...

...any colour, and the 6-Colormatch will give you five more that go nicely with it.

(Via Andrea's Weblog).

Posted by Adrian at 08:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2003

Forward Thinking BBC

I think it's excellent that the BBC has people like Ashley Highfield involved. In his speech TV's Tipping Point: Why The Digital Revolution Is Only Just Beginning: PaidContent.org, he shows the sorts of exciting, out-of-the-box thinking that can carry the BBC forward into the brave new world of PVRs (Personal Video Recorders, like TiVo or Sky+), downloading over broadband, "ambient TV"... The talk is of embracing technology, rather than fighting it as the music industry is.

"We should create more programmes that come with the meta-data, the tags in the programme that allow it to be chopped up and consumed piece meal by the viewer."

The future of TV is going to be fun!

Posted by Adrian at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2003

The Pictorial Blog Explanation

Diamond Geezer has come up with a lovely diagram of how blogs fit into the grand scheme of things and points to a handy explanation of all terms bloggy.

So now all you non-geeks have no excuses really...

Posted by Adrian at 02:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 04, 2003

A gift to the world from Great Britain

I almost posted a link to this defence of the BBC when I was pointed at it by Burnt Toast the other day. And similarly, I almost posted about the BBC opening up their archive to all.

So why post about it now? Well, after finding all these American speeches online, I wanted to redress the balance a little, and post a few British ones. The obvious choice would be some of Churchill's wartime speeches. But they aren't there. You can find transcripts, and the BBC has a few clips but not the full monty. This is a prime example of why we should be taking advantage of the BBC - we've paid for this resource, lets use it, and continue to improve it going into the future.

Who cares if it costs us something in taxes? Think of it as our altruistic donation to the improvement of the world, part of a global welfare state. We can show that we aren't just interested in profit and money, and that we believe in providing everyone with a wonderful and (largely) impartial news, education and entertainment resource.

Posted by Adrian at 01:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2003

Info on the latest phones at phonescoop.com

The Phonescoop phones page is a good source of information on the latest and greatest phones, including those not-quite-yet-released.

Update: Russ has posted some more links to other mobile phone info sites, although the feature lists don't seem to be quite as comprehensive (e.g. it just says "Java" rather than "J2ME MIDP 2.0")

Posted by Adrian at 12:30 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 31, 2003

Detailed explanation of the GSM protocol

Heavily techie, but a good overview of the GSM standard including layout of cells, how calls are brought up, etc. etc. Probably helps if you already have some clue as to what the HLR, MS, BSC, etc. are :-)

Posted by Adrian at 04:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 22, 2003

For those who don't trust British Rail

It's now possible to get "live" departure times for trains from Cambridge.

And for those getting a train to meet someone arriving from the airport, there's also Arrival times for Stansted.

Posted by Adrian at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack