McFilter: Links

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 30th 2021 Edition

• Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary). Nice documentary on Project Cybersyn (as featured on these pages in the past.
• Went homeless. Done Guerrilla Grazing by choice ever since. A shorter video documentary, of a modern-day nomadic shepherd.
• Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway. "You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake." Online advertising, the trench warfare between those of us who point out that the "personalised ads" don't work and think we should stop surveilling everyone; and those who point out that the "personalised ads" don't work and think the answer is more invasive tracking.
• Microfinance and public shaming in Nigeria. "When you hear an optimistic new idea for financial inclusion, imagine the worst way it can be weaponized and work to eliminate it."
• We need to revisit old frameworks to cope with the 2020s.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 16th 2021 Edition

• Care at Scale. Deb Chachra writing about infrastructure and the climate emergency.
• Talk to Low Carbon Design Institute June 2021. Essay version of a talk from Ross Atkin, taking a good, hard, look at sustainable design.
• End of the line for Uber. Not soon enough.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 9th 2021 Edition

• A Careful Industries update. Good to hear what Rachel is up to. "I wasn’t sure exactly what we would do, but I knew I wanted it to be careful, productive, and collective. And I knew I wanted to do it slowly." That chimes with the MCQN Ltd approach.
• A virtuous cycle for analytics. Jon Udell explaining how he's been building tools to help his colleagues. It has many echoes of the DoES Liverpool Ethos that I wrote about a few years back. I'm including it here especially to highlight the term he uses: toolsmith. That's it, more of us need access to toolsmiths.
• Racists must be prosecuted, not moderated.
• Who holds the welding rod? James Meek on wind power, green jobs and global capitalism "Still harder to swallow, in retrospect, are the boosterish, infantilising comments made by politicians, who talked about the Campbeltown factory being an example of Scotland leading the world in green energy technology." A good, long read on the complications and contradictions of globalisation and green jobs.
• Corporations aren’t going to save America. Or the rest of us. "“Of course we want businesses to be responsible,” said Suzanne Kahn, managing director of research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute. But she emphasized that this does not constitute a plan for how to organize society."
• Public Health Policy and Options Erasure. Sensible words about how we should be approaching the polarity and division in handling the pandemic (and the rest of life)

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 12th 2021 Edition

• Keep McKinsey Away from Biden's Infrastructure Push. Substitute the UK for the US, and any of a host of incapable firms, and the same will apply.
• Blairly disappointing. Why you should support universal basic income if you like music. Just think what else we'd have if people didn't have to fabricate some potential "business case" to get it.

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.

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...):

• A Long Covid, or Over the Wall. My mate Andrew Beattie is blogging a diary of notes he made last year, each post exactly a year after he wrote it.

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.

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.

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(!?!).

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 15th 2021 Edition

• You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype "Our students should be bullshit detectors and hype slayers." Not just students. We need more bullshit detectors at all levels.
• Curative candour. A beautiful, sad story about the NHS staff's duty of candour. Something we could all do with more of.
• Tech for good isn't a thing. Great piece from Alix Dunn

And this video is glorious.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 1st 2021 Edition

• A personal rant — the UK and a failure of governance. "There’s also the suggestion of “oh I suppose you could do better could you?” and the answer to that is “yup”. You dear reader, you could do better. In fact a dead cat and a traffic cone could also provide better governance, since they would sit still and not get in the way, and thus make a neutral contribution rather than a negative one."
• Good twitter thread on new municipalism from Matt Thompson. Expect some blog-all-dog-eared-notes to drop soon from his book on collective housing too.
• The meaning of £20: A majority middle-class media rarely reflects the reality of poverty. "As my friend Sweyn noted on Twitter, Radio 4’s PM contextualised the value of the ‘uplift’ well — it accounts for around 13% of the total income of the families affected." I think people would view the Universal Credit discussion differently if the headlines were about a 13% cut, rather than a £20 cut, and we shouldn't be arguing over it anyway.
• The open city. I liked the idea of thinking about the boundaries between areas of the city in this. Something to throw into the mix in my 15-minute city experiments.
• The Three Languages You Need to Take a Project from Dreams to Reality. Come for the excellent explanation of the different audiences that projects need to communicate with; stay for the lovely summing up of why projects like any of my Liverpool Hannah Links are special.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 28th 2020 Edition

• On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics. Excellent work from J. Khadijah Abdurahman arguing that those involved in AI (and the rest of the tech community too) need to do more.
• Turn the Ship Around! Interesting notes on delegation and management.
• The Gap Between Having Good Taste and Doing Good Work. A good reminder from Kottke about thoughts relating to imposter syndrome. On good days I feel like I'm finally closing the gap in my work. On good days.
• ‘Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea…' Reminds me of my recent weeknote ponderings on the MCQN Ltd blog.
• Hunting for Hinzelmann, or: helping towns without magical thinking. From a year ago, but I've been clearing out old tabs over the Festive period. Some interesting ideas for helping to rebalance the UK economy, that feel more useful than the usual levers that central gov reaches for.

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.

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.

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?

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 16th 2020 Edition

• Mutually Assured Construction. A couple of years old now (more on that below), but a good piece from Usman about just enough consensus and how we need to continue building a better future (I initially typed "start building" there, but realised that lots of us have been doing this work for ages now. We need more of us, and to better explain what we're up to, but the weak signals are there.) Interesting to focus on the mutual bit of mutually assured destruction. Even at the height of capitalism vs. communism, mutual efforts were what won out.
• The Craft of Writing Effectively: Essential Lessons from the Longtime Director of UChicago’s Writing Program. Excellent lecture about writing, that talks about how we write in order to think, and how that clashes with how it might change your readers. Now pondering who the readers i'm trying to change are.
• Twitter thread about building small, useful web apps and how tech's obsession with adopting the tools required for huge-scale apps for things that are never going to need that is making us less productive. Via Blaine, whose analysis also stacks up perfectly, IMHO.

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...):

• Usman Haque's blog. I've been friends with Usman for years, but hadn't realised he was writing over on Medium until a link in Bryan Boyer's newsletter this week.

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.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 12th 2020

• Unions, smoke alarms, and lifting the boats. Developer James Smith explains the excellent reasons why he's joined a union.
How Cities Can Make the Most of a Pandemic Winter. "As winter approaches in North America and Europe, cities should be thinking about how to encourage and enable people to spend as much time outdoors as possible to help keep everyone sane and safe from Covid-19." As the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. Despite the weather being foul on Saturday, I had a lovely walk round the city because I could dress for it.
• Making The Case For Small Spaces. Ostensibly about small music venues, but true of the sort of places that all manner of interesting ventures get started. Small, cheap to use/run spaces are vital.
• Real Businesses. "so let’s be clear, if your pitch deck has an “exit strategy” slide you are pitching a lifestyle business." Nice way of thinking about startups from indie.vc's Bryce Roberts.
• Magical thinking and maintenance. Rachel Coldicutt on Serco's Test and Trace use-of-Excel debacle. We need better training of, and tools for, Government (in this case) folk using/relying upon data. And more calling out of the bullshit marketing hype of data "platform" companies like Palantir.
• This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic. It’s not R.. Zeynep Tufekci with a measured look at clustering and how that affects the spread of Covid-19.
• How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again. Grow more trees everywhere, not just in forests!
• Using Government IT to Teach and Build Public Infrastructure. Bianca Wylie making the excellent point that we need to expand everyone's horizons on what sort of technology we could build. "I’m more convinced than ever that the general public is not super aware of the opportunity that exists to build non-consumer or non-commercial technology. Public technology." Reminds me of my blog post trying to pin down a term for that.
• Zuboff’s Cycle of Dispossession. More good writing from Bianca Wylie, this time about how tech corporations capture more of society.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 21st 2020

• “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. We take this very seriously, but doing more to stop these criminals would eat into our immense profits.
• Even sturdy cast iron can wear out after 97 years. Maintenance is important, you don't want your lack of maintenance to be responsible for wiping out huge chunks of California.
• Built to Last. "Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take."

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".

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 7th 2020

• Uber and Lyft’s Business Model May Be Dead. Good. "Lyft and Uber are basically making the case — and making it openly — that their businesses are not viable if they must guarantee their workers minimum wage and basic protections. That the people who make Lyft and Uber possible are so poorly paid and so precariously employed that granting them the benefits of, say, In-N-Out cashiers or Target warehouse workers would bankrupt these mammoth Silicon Valley behemoths. Which makes it a particularly sad fantasy indeed."
• When It Comes to Covid-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward. Interesting ways of thinking about the risks, and how it isn't all-or-nothing.
• A timeline of the maker community response to the pandemic. Great work by Marc Barto to capture as much of the manic early part of the pandemic, from the maker perspective.
• English universities are in peril because of 10 years of calamitous reform "We seem, for example, to be willing to allow wealthy parents to buy educational advantage for their children up to the age of 18, but then we believe that this advantage can somehow be made to have no consequences for their educational trajectory thereafter."
• On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic. Sad. Beautiful.
• ‘Magic pop-up allotment’ at CoFarm offers community food security. Just over the road from where I used to work at Microsoft, good to see a community farm (or market garden, why has that term fallen from popular use?) appear.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 24th 2020

• Scream if you want to go faster! Why government technology needs (much) better governance. Good analysis of the Government's ineptitude and how they're grasping at the wrong bits of the tech world. As ever, we need more (good, diverse, rounded) digital/tech expertise at all levels of government to help counter some of this.
• Conservative anarchism, self-organisation and the future of government "A public servant thinking in this way cannot just be upwardly accountable to politicians: they must also be outwardly and downwardly accountable to their partners and citizens. The new world demands that public servants stop being grey suits with power point presentations, and instead become vibrantly, actively engaged with the people and communities they serve. It prizes relationships and networks above hierarchies and data (while recognising that all of those matter).".
• It's Only Going to Get Weirder. Sensible thoughts on supply-chain capitalism and modern life, from Ingrid Burrington.
• Weeknotes: the home, tech reporting, technocratic government, dependencies. When I got to too many new tabs open to read from Laura's weeknotes, I figured I should just include them rather than picking out highlights...

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.

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...)

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.

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".

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

• From Mutual Aid to Dual Power: how do we build a new world in the shell of the old? DoES Liverpool isn't a political exercise, but I think it echoes some of the thoughts and ideas in here, about the new institutions and ways of working and living that we should (continue to) build after the crisis.
• Dan Hill's Slowdown Papers. Lots of interesting thoughts on how the response to covid-19 might show a way, and be extended, to let us better respond to the Climate Crisis.
• How poor planning left the UK without enough PPE. Favouring PR and spin over honesty and candour, combined with a lack of understanding of how things are actually made, has meant the Government has failed us.
• "Technology is Stupid": How to Choose Tech for Remote Working. Great article and recommendations on better software (from a privacy/ethics perspective) to use online. (via Laura's excellent, as ever, weeknotes)
• Bye, Amazon. Level-headed. Principled. Something we need lots more of. Tim Bray has resigned as an Amazon VP because of its behaviour over climate activism and treatment of warehouse workers.

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!

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 24th 2020

• 2+ years of militancy in universities: What do we know and where do we go? Looking at the UCU strike action and thinking about what else can be done.
• Can the regulation of hazardous substances help us think about regulation of AI? Really nice way to frame how we should be regulating development of AI and machine learning.
• Dark Brexit "Our task is to win the post-Brexit settlement here in Britain. More specifically — to stop the [ERG and hard Brexit-types] from winning." This.
• Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible. Doc Searls' recent Ostrom Memorial Lecture, which lays out how we need to get better at explaining (and protecting) the open source commons to everyone.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 10th 2020

• How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class. We should all heed the mantra of the company who wrote the embedded Javascript engine I once worked with, who called their company Nombas, because they wanted No MBAs working there...
• Decarbonization. Tim Bray doing an excellent blog post on how his family has decarbed.
• The Met police in London are doing more surveillance to reduce crime, despite a study they were in finding that it didn't provide much help.
• Replacing Middle Management with APIs "the worker bees below the software layer have no opportunity for on-the-job training that advances their career, and compassionate social connections don’t pierce the software layer either."

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.

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?

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 23rd 2019

• The retreat of "scientific selfishness," a literature review. A good article with an excellent embedded video of a talk, debunking the idea that we're all rational self-interested actors, and showing that given a framework or default expectation of cooperation, we'll tend to act accordingly. That chimes with my experiences in both open source and, even more so, the DoES Liverpool community.
• Boris Johnson’s sweeping victory is a disaster for the country, but he cannot deliver on his false promises. Here’s how to survive and resist because his nemesis will come. "Change starts at the bottom. It will be a long, cold, hard winter of Tory rule, but under the snow the shoots of a new society are waiting. But only if we do something. If you do something. Boris Johnson’s Government won’t even notice the good you are doing, let alone try to stop it."
• Mass Canvassing as a Political Action. My mate Julian has been out trying to make a difference, when the best I managed was some clicktivism. As he says, we need to get out to meet people in the new swing areas and start to build some understanding between each other.
• “Link In Bio” is a slow knife. A good post from Anil Dash about Instagram/Facebook's attempts to slowly erode the value of the web. Instagram has long been web--hostile but that plus their recent API changes that prevent any new clients from accessing data are making me reconsider using it at all.
• Towards a Radical Brexit. This is the sort of proposal that's been sorely lacking from either side of the Brexit debate - what could be better about the choice rather than how the opposing choice would be terrible. I'd rather we were in the EU trying to improve it, but if we leave then I'd be happy with heading for one or all of these proposals.
• Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog. Yes. Always. Writing things into the public record is important for all of us, and owning our own patch of the Internet is important. Build something that will last, don't just skim stones across the social media seas, even if it is fun every now and then to pitch one that skips a few hops before it sinks without trace.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 10th 2019

• Selvedge: Disobedience, Self-Organising and Working-Class Cultures. The written version of Stephen Pritchard's keynote at the British Textile Biennial.
• Weekend update – Weird scenes inside the graveyard. A snapshot of life in modern times, from my mate Julian. "Everyone I meet seems to be good, so why are we ruled by such bad people?" Why indeed. Let's vote them out.

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.

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. "

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 28th 2019

• Extinction Rebellion: We Need To Talk About The Future. Interesting thoughts on XR's successes but also what it needs to be doing better and/or differently in future.
• Just enough Internet: Why public service Internet should be a model of restraint. Nice thoughts on better approaches to "digital" for anyone-who-isn't-a-startup-or-corporation (and startups and corporations should adopt more of these approaches too, they just have to resist capitalism screaming at them to do otherwise).
• ‘Impostor syndrome’ is a pseudo-medical name for a class problem. This is a good framing of things. There are times when I feel more an outsider than an impostor. Sometimes that's useful, often it's a case of six and two threes.
• British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine. The Government is lying to cover up how inept it is, while it tries to completely ruin the country with its version of Brexit. Too much of the media is too scared of losing access to "No 10" that they're failing the voters.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 30th 2019

• The Peking battles Cape Horn, by Irving Johnson. Amazing footage from 1929 of the square-rigged sailing barque Peking, including the crazy seas swamping the deck as they round the Horn. Great companion to reading The Last Grain Race to get an idea of what life was like for sailors, not that long ago.
• Crash Course How Boeing's managerial revolution created the 737 MAX disaster. How finanace and all-business-can-be-managed-in-the-same-way ruins companies and kills people, aero industry edition. (via Laura's always interesting Fortnightnotes)

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 23rd 2019

• Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On. I don't have much to add to any of the MIT/Epstein and Stallman-being-a-dick discussions, but I have been reflecting upon it and feeling a bit better about the challenges we face at DoES Liverpool and how they don't include "should we take funding from paedophiles?". It's interesting to see the four types of funding laid out in Lessig's defence of Joi Ito/MIT and notice that it misses out two important types: funding by the state (in theory much better than the four, but in practice is gamed and rendered ineffective) and by the community. Those two should be making up the bulk of funding, IMO. In my more optimistic moods, I hope the rise in such terrible reports is actually a sign that progress is being made, but there is a long way yet to go.
• Eyeo 2019 - Catherine D’Ignazio - Feminist Data. Feminist Futures. Great talk about the inclusive hackdays that Catherine D'Ignazio set up to make her workplace (MIT, as it happens) better.
• Observations on Technology Use in Hong Kong Protests. Interesting look at some of the organising tactics and tools being used by the protestors in Hong Kong.
• The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company. Good reminder of what you can achieve with boring, well-understood tech these days.

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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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.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 15th 2019

• Reflections on the CTRLshift gathering – an emergency summit for change. Write-up of what looked like an interesting conference. Might have to get along to next year's.
• All the Privilege, No Fucking Praxis.
• Choose Boring Technology. Spend your innovation tokens wisely.
• Generative Machines with Matt DesLauriers. Great talk about using code to create art.
• Christopher Walken dances to C+C Music Factory. Lovely!
• The joy and weight of responsibility in our working lives - Webstock 2019 talk. Courtney Johnston taking a long hard look at her practice in the museum sector, but there are things in there for us all to reflect on.

This week's RSS additions:

• Anna Shipman JFDI

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 1st 2019

• On Github Sponsors. Actually a good explanation of how OpenCollective supports open source, and let's more of us support open source projects. I pay for my my Mastodon social account through OpenCollective.
• GDPR makes it easier to get your data, but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it. Interesting to see people starting to get the data that companies hold on us. It'd be nice to arrange a hackday sometime so we can play around with those datasets and see if (a) we can better explain to people the risks around this, and (b) see if we can use the data to our advantage.
• How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister (might be trapped behind an FT paywall). An excellent, if dispiriting, explanation about how Eton and Oxford (and related educational institutions) prep the series of chancers who've risen to power here in the UK. We need to work out how to break this cycle.

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:

• Alice Bartlett

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 3rd 2019

• Saul Griffiths' talk on energy accounting and how we can attack the climate crisis. We have the technology we need, we need to get on with it.
• What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns. Interesting look at how to make security better for normal people.
• Open Insulin - New Frontiers for the New Year. I wonder how long before there's a biopharma corner at DoES Liverpool where people can drop in and make their own chemicals too...

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.

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."

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 29th 2019

• IWOC Technology Policy. A decent set of criteria to judge technology against when deciding what to use. Good to see unions making these considerations and sharing their thoughts, process and choices.
• Reaction of the rich to the Notre Dame fire teaches us a lot about the world we live in. We should rebuild Notre Dame, but it also reminds us that austerity, poverty, etc. could be tackled more than they are, and not doing so is a choice that we're making, or allowing to be made by who we elect as leaders.
• Dollars on the Margins. This has been lost among my many open tabs for ages, but was a good read on the difference being able to afford to live makes to people.
• Collective Action and the Commons: What Have We Learned? Interesting lecture from Elinor Ostrom talking about managing #commons and the need for trust and communication between groups (among other things).

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 15th 2019

• Split. "the split that worries the most is this: The people who make the web vs. the people who are excluded from making the web."
• Prototyping in Tokyo. Interesting thoughts on simplicity of form and humans relating to objects.
• Government as a Platform, the hard problems: part 2 — the design of services & public policy. Good stuff on digital government from Richard Pope. I particularly like the point that we shouldn't look for just the most efficient and one-way-to-do-things approach, that there are should/could be multiple paths through the system. All sizes fit one, rather than one size fits all.
• The billionaire's typewriter. Excellent essay about Medium.com, but also applicable to so many of the "content platforms".

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 26th 2018

• 6 core falsehoods about the digital spher. This is good. I don't fully agree with (or maybe I'm too close to being a believer in) number 4, but only because even if it's true, tech means it's much easier, and even just feasible, to invoke such discriminations.
• The Extinction Rebellion – A Tipping Point for the Climate Emergency?. "it is often already cheaper (and getting cheaper every year) to build and operate new renewable power plants than to just operate old (i.e. fully depreciated and paid for) fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. This is without strong policy on climate change – so imagine how fast we could move if we had it!"
• switching.social. Good list of alternatives to all manner of web services.
• Translocal Solidarity and the New Municipalism.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 29th 2018

• Did I Make a Mistake Selling My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo?. Nice look back at the sale of a Web2.0 darling. This bit in particular rings true with my experience - "I think a lot of time that selling is not the victory it seems. It takes away all of your forward momentum."
• Unfeeling Fire. Very readable slides/notes about the threat/risks of AI from Bolster.
• It’s not for you. I like this (which presumably means that it is, in this case, for me.

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...

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2018

• Elites like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos think they’re being philanthropic. But they could do so much more. This is all good. There were too many sections I wanted to quote here, so just go read it all.
• Destroy Bitcoin. Smash the mining rigs "Is this how it will actually end? With the hum of a billion mining rigs ultimately drowned out by the gurgling inrush of the sea?"
• Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto. "If we are to build viable digital cities for the benefit of Canadian citizens, we will need transparency and accountability between the government and its citizens, not a secret deal between an unelected, rogue public corporation and a foreign multinational in the business of mass surveillance."

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.

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"

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 17th 2018

• The future of OSS. I don't agree with all of this, but it's good to be having more discussions and thoughts about how we fund open source software. Especially given that it underpins so much of all the software systems we use, even the ones that we pay for.
• "This is my bag of tricks — loose notes, design patterns, rules-of-thumb, methods of enquiry, tools, cheatsheets, gimmicks, leverage points, descriptions of systems, key questions, risks, and unknowns.". Some gold in that bag of tricks.
• Why Love Generative Art? Nice overview of generative/computational art.
• What do the people do? Excellent primer on making interactive art, from Tom Igoe.
• The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History. Read this and then tell me it's a good idea to move to a fully cmoputerised, cashless society. More diversity in computer systems, more decentralisation and redundancy in infrastructure, less chasing hyper-lean-efficiency-to-wring-ever-last-penny-of-profit and crossing our fingers. Please.
• Decisions on behalf of others: different institutional and disciplinary interpretations of risk. Really liked the framing of how we might approach working as experts, and the musings on whether sensor data and the like could replace rules and regulations in ensuring that the things we build are (and remain) fit for purpose. Feels like we'd still need experts in those scenarios, although their job would involve more explaining and discussing the scenario and risks with the public rather than dictating to. Which is a good thing, to my mind. Also liked the concept of "the skills to deal not just with complex structures in simple contexts but with simple structures in complex contexts."
• Obama’s Lost Army. Politics is changing, but the usual suspects don't want to cede any of their control and power, and so lose all of their control and power.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 3rd 2018

• Mud and Antler Bone. An Interview with Martin Shaw. "During a day, where do you put your time and energy? And who is the deity that stands behind your time and energy? In whose temple do you serve?[...]If you’re over the age of twelve and under the age of ninety and you’re not in some kind of trouble, what the hell are you doing?"
• The IT Not the IOT (Internet Thing not Internet OF Things. I'd argue that the IoT is part of the Internet Thing, but yes, this is good. We need more of society to understand the world we live in now, and that world has the Internet in it. As the old saying goes, we want people who are of the Internet, not on the Internet, never mind those who think that they aren't even on the Internet...
• A group is its own worst enemy.
• Seniority, anxiety and dealing with confidence issues We need to get better at training people up as managers. Pieces like this help.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 30th 2018

• The unbearable lightness of regulation (and enforcement). Ethical leaders of companies argue for regulation to hold future-them to account.
• Technical Intuition: Instincts in a Digital World. I like technical intuition as a term, and a concept. That sums up the sort of awareness that I've been trying to bring into my local community, but now gives me a name for it.
• Who Owns the City? Interesting thoughts on municipalism and commoning.
• Small pieces, loosely joined: A unified theory of the web. David Weinberger's 2002 classic.
The free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis "When Thatcher and Reagan came to power, they promised that the free market would reward individual effort and responsibility, delivering upward mobility and property ownership to those who were willing to work for them. After more than a decade of stagnant real wages and spiralling housing costs, not even conservatives dare suggest that contract survives [...] short of acting as the servants of the super-rich, what is the point of conservatism today?"

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 23rd 2018

• Offscreen Magazine interviews Tom Loosemore. Lots of interesting insight into civic tech and the possibilities of a better digital Government. " if you’re making software, you are actively reshaping power dynamics between citizens, consumers, companies, and governments. Shifting power relationships is politics. If you are in software, you are in politics."
• Towards an Organized Tech Industry—Part One. Interesting tales of tech union organising in the US.
• Open Letter: Culture for Sale. Turns out property developers don't care about culture, artists, or generally the people they're profiting from. Who knew?! We need better tactics than open letters and panel discussions if we're going to find a better alternative to gentrification.
• Gratitude for Invisible Systems.
• Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Neil Postman warned us in 1998. We still need to heed the warnings now (and maybe now that we've evidence of him being right, more people will listen).
• Eclipse of The Sun. A reminder that collective action can combat the tabloid press.

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...)

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 2nd 2018

• The theory of the eccentric billionaire, and why politicians got so awful. The world is such a mess because of huge inequality, which means the rich who are calling the shots have such a different life from the rest of us.

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)

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 25th 2018

• Building the field? Good thoughts from Cassie Robinson on how people and organisations should work more widely to build the size of the pot rather than the size of their share of the existing pot.
• Bike N’ Ride: linking first and last mile bike-share with transit. I've long wanted routing software to help join up cycling with other types of transport.
• The Midlife Unraveling. "It’s time to show up and be seen."
• The Public Stack Summit. Laura James' notes on a summit to ponder a new civic Internet.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 28th 2018

• Corbynomics would change Britain—but not in the way most people think. More co-ops, more distributed state control of utilities, less top-down state (attempts at) control. Lots of interesting ideas in this, which I'd like to see the country trying out.
• Dear makers. An old, but good call to the makers to do more fixing.
• Why we should bulldoze the business school. "If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing."
The Bill Gates Line. Useful and interesting thinking about the dominance of Facebook and Google.
• A manifesto for Data Literacy. Old, but still very relevant.
• We. Are. The. Wolves. Awesome speech from Abby Wambach. That link is the transcript, but the video is worth watching, so I've embedded that below...

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 21st 2018

• After Authenticity. This gave me lots to think about. Need to work out how we blow up more.
• A cycle home along the river. Not far from a photo essay of half of one of my regular #inthesaddle rides.
• The Dirty Dozen 2018. Employers Who Put Workers and Communities at Risk. Amazon and Tesla in the "dirty dozen" dangerous employers. More evidence that tech isn't a guarantee of progress.
• Estonia To Become The World’s First Free Public Transport Nation. Great to see Estonia making it free for citizens to use public transport. Wonder how we move to this in Liverpool and the UK? Could we start with making Merseyrail free?

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 26th 2018

• Back to the Blog. Always be encouraging and reminding people that having your own little bit of the Internet is important, life-affirming, and good (and not as hard as it sounds).
• 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech. Anil Dash lifts the curtain a bit on the world of tech.
• Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It. Paul Ford arguing for a digital version of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 5th 2018

• Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results. "Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs."
• Review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller. "Rather than rely on the informed judgment of people familiar with the situation, we gather meaningless numbers at great cost. We then use them to guide our actions, predictably causing unintended damage."
• Don't Be Evil. Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers
.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 12th 2018

• The Catalog of Missing Devices. The EFF imagines products that might exist if "content" companies weren't such control-freaks.
• Privacy could be the next big thing. Excellent call-to-arms for (good, ethical) companies to work on the we-aren't-hoovering-up-your-data story they tell. George coined the term "data dumb" when we were discussing these sort of issues for Museum in a Box last week.
• A conversation about how public transport really works. "transport, nevertheless, takes place in physical space and physical space obeys laws of geometry and physics and no technology is ever going to change geometry—never has, never will". Really good piece on transport, especially in cities.
• The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence
. Archiving is hard, even when you don't have companies trying to lock you into their solutions so they can profit from the struggle.
• No one’s coming. It’s up to us. A call to arms for society getting more involved in defining the problems we want to fix with technology, rather than defaulting to whatever the technologists want to give us.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 15th 2018

• 15 Years of SparkFun. Great look back at the trials and tribulations of growing one of the biggest names in the maker tech community.
• Considerations On Cost Disease. Thought-provoking article about how everything (fsvo everything, obviously) is more expensive and yet not as good as it used to be. Seems like something that's hard to tackle, but important for us to try.
• ‘Why Am I So Lazy?’ I needed this.
• Human scale technology.
• Stop using Facebook and start using your browser. Although if you're reading this, you probably already know that. Doesn't change the fact that we should be looking for ways to make the real web easier to use.
• Nationalisation, by any other name? An interesting proposal for a new type of company to experiment with different ways of running "natural" monopolies. More of this sort of thinking (and ideally trying out too) please.

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."

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 11th 2017

• the bullet hole misconception. The computing revolution hasn't started yet.
• When is a Dollar not a Dollar? Useful pointers to make you think about sales, pricing, etc. for your business.
• The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns. Given the success of the plastic bag tax, should we be reintroducing returnable deposits on cans, bottles, etc?
• Universal Basic Income explained. Not included for the UBI side of things, but for the passage about what companies are for from Ludicorp's about page.
• The tech that does or doesn’t matter: thoughts after #cph150. Great insight from Alex.
• Why these friendly robots can’t be good friends to our kids. Is a drive for Genuine People Personalities in our robots going to do us more harm than good?

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

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 4th 2017

• The Disruptors. Interesting article about how finance controls the world. The observation that investment funds have effectively created a monopoly layer one level up from firms themselves becoming monopolies is particularly interesting.
• Unapocalyptic Software. I think the article that Tim is responding to was an earlier Interesting Thing on the Internet, and this is a good alternative take.
• Breaking Cliques at Events. Good advice that I need to try harder to heed. I think I do a reasonable job at observing the related Pac-Man rule, but I'm not the best at saying hello to newcomers.
• Toxic experts.
• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? This gave me much food for thought.
• At One College, Women Engineers Help Reshape The Machine Shop.
• Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will.
• Tesla Approaches Terminal Decline. Interesting take on how things are going with Tesla.
• Tim O'Reilly's WTF? A book that tells us how to keep the technology baby and throw out the Big Tech bathwater.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 13th 2017

• Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish. So true.
• How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met. Facebook happily building up a profile on you based on data they've hoodwinked (I'm sure it's all strictly within the law, as ever) other people into giving them.
• Mondragon through a Critical Lens. A good look at the world's largest co-operative economy.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 6th 2017

• The Gig economy Limps on. The "limp economy" rather than the "gig economy". "It was not the nature of work itself that changed in this period, but the relationship of workers to their employers and to the state."
• Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects. Big data and AI's infallibility is a lie.
• On Being A Senior Engineer. Equally useful reading for junior and senior engineers.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 30th 2017

• MAKING. A lovely essay about making, from maker-extraordinaire Tim Hunkin
• Why is anyone listening to Tim O’Reilly?

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2017

• I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either. 'Do these people doubt themselves? have moments questioning whether they deserve to be where they are? Of course they do! It is a key part to being a humble, likable, open-minded developer. They aren’t “suffering” from a “syndrome”.' Perpetual confidence is a bug, not a feature.
• The Boring Designer. Good advice, not just for designers.
• The Ethical Minefields of Technology. "Instead of looking at technologies programmed to enable human beings to better navigate the world I see technologies optimized to help corporations better navigate and manipulate human behaviour.”
• DING: A magazine about the internet and things. #1 AUTUMN 2017. Interesting reading. A little strange for such a Web/Internet-centric organisation to be publishing things as a PDF, but still...
• Showing the Algorithms Behind New York City Services. An interesting proposal in New York to make its algorithms more visible.
• 13 things I learned from six years at the Guardian. Lots of good insight on what's important for organisations in the modern world, including this gem: "people who do the flashy things are plentiful, and people willing and able to graft on the stuff that just incrementally makes things better are in sadly short supply."

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 2nd 2017

• The Coming Software Apocalypse. Interesting appeal for more formal verification in software. We do need to get better at building software, although I think formal verification should be matched with more design or systems thinking education/recognition too. Having had to write a bunch of Z (a formal specification language) during my Computer Science degree, I wonder if TLA+ is actually usable. Z was painful to use, and I had first-year degree maths too, so it's not that I'm completely inept at maths.
• Unpublishable: Censored Emails From Noam Chomsky. Redaction as art. Lovely.
• Smell of data. Beautiful metaphor and well-chosen alert mechanism for data leaks.
• Autopsy of a slow train wreck. Building a business is hard, exhibit A.
• Things learned while running your own self-funded startup. Building a business is hard, exhibit B.
• Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee. Sage career advice for anyone wanting to work in the tech/startup world.
• The 21st floor. Harrowing stories of the families who lived (and survived and died) on just one of the floors of Grenfell Tower. It continues to be a disgraceful affair, and Chelsea council and the Government aren't showing any signs of improving.
• Introducing The National Algorithm. Excellent look at the development of modern army uniforms, and how to create a true Dutch camouflage.
• The inside story of what it took to keep a Texas grocery chain running in the chaos of Hurricane Harvey. Excellent report on how one supermarket chain dealt with hurricane Harvey. What sort of decisions they needed to make, how they adapted their supply chain, and so on. The ability to do this sort of exception handling is so often lost as systems are computerised for "better efficiency".

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

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 25th 2017

• Beautiful 30-day time lapse of a cargo ship’s voyage. What it says on the link. Gorgeous shots out at sea, and interesting port traffic and unloading footage.
• Want to make more ethical tech choices? Check your Tech. Good to see doteveryone pushing on with their work to bring some ethics into the tech world.
• How do you solve a problem like technology? A systems approach to digital regulation. More sharing-their-workings from doteveryone.
• Business As Usual. Kilfoyle, sadly, spot on with the latest round of fantastical figures being claimed for Liverpool regeneration circus.
• Thinking about permission. Giles capturing some of the nuance of organisational transformation.
• The worm has turned. All the regeneration-types claiming that Liverpool Waters will attract company X to the city would be advised to heed "selection of a firm’s headquarters usually comes down to one thing: where does the CEO want to live or spend more time … full stop."
• Understanding Uber: It’s Not About The App. In-depth and measured look at what's behind Transport for London's (correct) decision not to renew Uber's licence.

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)

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 11th 2017

• Essential Developer Skills with Tom Stuart. An excellent exploration of what a software developer is, and how you go from a beginner to an experienced dev. Lots of nuggets about the challenges of helping people on that journey.
• Why Kickstarter Decided To Radically Transform Its Business Model. Nice article on Kickstarter's choice to switch to a public benefit company (a for-profit that isn't solely focused on shareholder returns)
• Gardening, Dark Matter, Grey Havens and the Background Radiation of Maker/Hack spaces. Ross reflecting on DoES Liverpool and maker culture. He's really good at getting, and articulating, the why of things. There are too many bits of this I wanted to quote. Someone should pay him to do more of that.
• Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You. In the aftermath of Equifax showing shockingly bad security practices and allowing a massive amount of US citizens' data to be stolen, some sensible actions for individuals caught in it to take.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 28th 2017

• Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic. An excellent proposal for a better tech culture, from Allison Parrish.
• Decentralize It!. "There’s a whole world of fun potential consumer products that let people do computer things that don’t involve reading ads on Facebook or viewing promoted tweets. No one tells you that, but there is."
• Co-op/Capital. Can democratic tech improve your deal-flow?. Interesting slide deck pitching co-operative conversions for startups to their VCs.

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...

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 31st 2017

• The new Patreon economy. James Governor talking sense (as ever) about increasing the ways we support open source.
• "A cohort of young nerds believes they've hit on the solution to a Big Problem & it involves code...". Good Twitter thread from Jon Stokes on history, power, and naively optimistic coding.
• A Rant on Usable Security.
• Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance! "a fantasy common among Silicon Valley types: that the best path forward is to scrap existing reality and start over from scratch". Yep, less fawning over the shiny, more recognising the ongoing work of making things work, please.
• Hill for the data scientist: an xkcd story. Excellent explanation of some statistical issues, through the medium of xkcd cartoons.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 24th 2017

• This long twitter thread of conference notes from Kevin Marks does a better job of piquing my interest in "blockchain" than any of the breathless "this is the next big thing" articles.
• On my second birthday we landed on the moon. Mike Monteiro talks about us.
• Young explorers. Delightful films of toddlers setting out into the brave wide world.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 26th 2017

• Celebrating Infrastructure. Appreciating the overlooked. The book he mentions will be going on my wishlist.
• Dumb servers for personal clouds. Another link from Jon Udell, this time pitching ideas/approaches for personal servers (I'm not going to say personal clouds).
• Theresa May and the Holy Grail. This is superb.
• On the referendum #23, a year after victory: ‘a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points’ & ‘how to capture the heavens’ Long article, but interesting (to me) for two reasons: firstly the discussion about how to build institutions that can build the future echoes lots of what we do (or at least try to do) at DoES Liverpool, and secondly because it's the first time I've seen someone propose an argument for either side of Brexit that is forward-looking and optimistic about what it could achieve. It's a real shame they weren't running with this during the campaign.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 5th 2017

• Why we removed the most visited advice page on our website. Good discussion about making the website useful for users rather than just chasing numbers on your analytics.
• Daring Fireball on why Facebook is bad for the web. All good, sound reasons. Some of which I knew, some that I didn't. I'm even less of a fan of Facebook now.
• Gratitude for Invisible Systems. Good explanation of some of the institutions and commons that we normally take for granted despite them underpinning our daily lives.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 15th 2017

• Composers as Gardeners: Brian Eno
• The Power of Dabbling: How Hobbies Make Us More Creative.
• Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance, Maciej continues to speak the truth about our industry.
• The Ultimate Guide To Being An Introvert.
•  The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory. 'It follows that currency-issuing governments could (and, depending on how you lean politically, should) spend as much as they need to in order to guarantee full employment and other social goods. MMT’s adherents like to point out that the federal government never “runs out” of money to fund the military, but routinely invokes budget constraints to justify defunding social programs. Money, in other words, isn’t a scarce commodity like silver or gold.' An interesting approach, particularly if you then pair it with...
• ...the idea that universal basic services are more important than income (that's behind the FT paywall, sadly)
• Consultative democracy and how do we combat mass manipulation? A good summary of what's wrong with politics at the moment, from Suw Charman-Anderson.
• WannaCrypt incident report? An excellent suggestion from Russell, about the aftermath of the NHS cybersecurity issue. That concept of building the body of evidence of what's happened, and how it was fixed, is part of why we track our to-do items for DoES Liverpool on an open issue tracker - the Somebody Should list. The information captured in the comments and links between the issues means the closed issues are as important and useful as the open ones.
• OpenTech 2017. Great notes from Kevin Marks condensing the full day of OpenTech into a much shorter read.

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.

• What Bullets Do to Bodies. A trauma doctor's view of gunshot wounds and gun control.
• The Case Against Competence. I agree with all of this.
• Shareable graphics for the general election. Much more than that headline indicates.

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 17th 2017

• Bots Should Punch Up. A good treatise on the ethics of bots.
• The Ship Breakers. An amazing photo story of people dismantling ships.
• What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them? Ah, if only all the "innovation" agencies used these criteria for their operations...
• What is responsible technology, anyway? Good to see dotEveryone looking at what ethical tech could be.
• The Elements of Bureaucratic Style. "An uninformed person could read this email and think that nothing United did was wrong—because it appears United did nothing at all."
• Stopped in my tracks. "I love the idea that a computer doesn't know who to tell when it discovers something."

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 3rd 2017

• Users should be able to own the businesses they love instead of investors. "Start-up founders deserve a wider range of choices in how to get their ideas off the ground, and so do their eventual users."
• The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life
• Ethics and paying rent.
• Down with meritocracy. I never knew that "meritocracy" was a term invented as a bad thing.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 27th 2017

• Trolling Scholars Debunk the Idea That the Alt-Right’s Shitposters Have Magic Powers. The world is messy, not a neat and tidy narrative. "the biggest media story to emerge from the 2016 election was the degree to which far-right media were able to set the narrative agenda for mainstream media outlets."
• The Silver Lining Of Anti-Globalism Might Be The Creation Of A True Digital Economy. "Amazon’s purpose is not to make authors and publishers wealthier, but to use its capital to undercut existing players, establish a monopoly, and then used that monopoly to “pivot” into other “verticals.” It’s the same extractive model utilized by 20th-century behemoths like Walmart, except the total domination of a market occurs even more quickly." Lots of hope for a better economic world here.

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.

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...

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."

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 16th 2017

• A Smuggling Operation: John Berger’s Theory of Art. I'd tried watching John Berger's Ways of Seeing before and not managed to get into it. This article, which came to my attention after Berger's passing, finally gave me a way in to understand things more.
• Ways of Seeing - John Berger's excellent series on appreciating art (and how it's not necessarily what the "art world" put forward)
• The Cybersyn Revolution. A good (more in-depth than you usually see) write-up of Stafford-Beer's Cybersyn project which aimed to use computing to help manage Chile's economy, back in the early 70s
• I was wrong (or: five things I learned from Hubbard in 2016) Interesting look at analysing data and thinking about risk.
• How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer. I tend to do 4 and 6 when I'm stuck with 1, 10 and 12, so much 12...
• The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction. Extremely long, but really interesting (and depressing) article about how dysfunctional Westminster is. "Events are over-interpreted because journalists do not want to face the idea that they are usually spectators of over-promoted people floundering amid chaos"

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 19th 2016

• The Strange Death of Municipal England. Stark laying out of the disgraceful impact of central Tory cuts to local councils. The numbers involved are just staggering. Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for communities and local government between 2010 and 2015, declared that ‘[…] People blame the bankers, but I think big government is just as much to blame as the big banks.’ This line of argument has allowed the government to present the slow strangulation of local government as a helpful nudge towards reform. I haven't seen any evidence of a similar slow strangulation of the bankers...
• Five Leadership Hacks. Mostly meeting/scheduling tips, but useful.
• It's Not Innovation If Nothing Changes an excellent talk from Megan Deal, looking at civic innovation projects and pulling out commonalities. Lots of head-nodding (both on what's gone right and on the challenges) from my experience with DoES Liverpool.
• The Greatest View In Liverpool. Not the best subject, litter, but a perfect digitally-native (not that she'd ever use such a term, and quite rightly too) way of communicating the problem, from Jane MacNeil.
• How the tech sector could move in One Direction. Tech, you're looking in the wrong places to solve your diversity problem.
• Defending Accounts Against Common Attacks. A good non-techie primer on keeping your computer secure.
• The demand for Creative Space: 24 Kitchen Street and the exploitation of independent culture. How do we move the planning conversation on so that there's more than just "who has most money?" as the criteria for how our cities, towns and countryside evolve?

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 21st 2016

• When the maps run out. The best take I've seen so far on the current political climate and paralysis. The linked article Unnecessariat is also excellent, if sobering, reading.
• Public In/Formation. A great article arguing for libraries' role in smart city and open data initiatives. A more in-depth look at some of the topics I was poking with my recent talk to the Society of Chief Librarians.
• You Are Still Crying Wolf. Trump is bad, but maybe not as bad as the media's hyperbole paints. Or at least, maybe he's bad in different ways.
• Kim at Interesting. Touching, sad, beautiful.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 14th 2016

• The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release. Fantastic skewering of the techno-determinism and the religion of disruption.
• UK hospitals shut down by malware. Why we shouldn't let politicians—however well-meaning—water down online security.
• Practical Frameworks for Beating Burnout. Not revolutionary, but some good reminders in there.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 31st 2016

• A Devil’s Dictionary of Educational Technology. "Asynchronous, adj. The delightful state of being able to engage with someone online without their seeing you, while allowing you to make a sandwich."
• The Rise and Fall of YPlan Is The Most Boring Tech Story Ever. Less reporting of money raised as "news" please.
• DJ Prime Cuts Hip Hop Don't Stop- The Greatest [Disc One]. Excellent mix of all of the early 80s hip-hop (or at least that's how it feels :-)
• Science fiction about AI never seems to talk about the interesting stuff, tax and geography and work. "A local job, and it’s associated tax, is potentially displaced by an algorithm charged by the hour run somewhere distant, written by person working somewhere else with the profits and costs, rolled up into intellectual property licensing, moved to be taxed in the most expedient territory. We can’t stop it. We shouldn’t stop it. But it won’t be comfortable if we don’t plan for it."
• welcome.js. A lovely hidden way to delight and encourage anyone poking around behind the scenes of James' website.
• The Weaponisation of the Working Class. Why is it that the working-class is "listened to" when they talk about immigration, but not when they talk about the dismantling of the NHS, the lack of jobs, university fees...?
• Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech. "We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 24th 2016

• Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children. Harrowing, powerful long-form article from the BBC about the Aberfan mining disaster. A difficult read at times.
• Team. Yes. There is more to gain from working out how to take advantage of the tech we've got than in pushing ever more technology onto the world.
• The future of work as a building block of change. "The political landscape has still not got its act together – and I am too impatient to wait for it to change"
• Reading and writing for our peers. I much prefer reading amateur writers writing about the field in which they're experts, rather than expert writers writing about fields in which they're amateurs.

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!

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 ;-)

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 8th 2016

• The uncelebrated typographers of the road. Lovely short film of how roadmarking is done.
• The smug style in American liberalism. Not just an American problem. There's been plenty of this in response to Brexit.
• On finding political axes using maths. Francis laying out one possible explanation for the confusing political world in the UK at the minute.
• New York-Style Tech. A technology community driven by values, not just profits. Not just something happening in New York, we've got that in Liverpool too (though it'd be lovely to have NY's scale! :-)

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 25th 2016

• Shaula Evans on the problems with Twitter's new everyone-can-apply-for-a-blue-checkmark policy. Also why diversity in your teams is important.
• Frank Cottrell Boyce: what's the point of culture in Brexit Britain? This is great, although I disagree that culture is different from business - it's not, but that's because business should be more like art and culture, not the other way round :-)
• ‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times. Lots of great stuff in here, not least the recognition that visible change is often the result of long patient groundwork.
• Brexit Blues by John Lanchester. Good, clear, analysis (as ever) from John Lanchester.
• Corbyn: the summer of hierarchical things. Paul Mason on the political climate, not just on Corbyn.
• Liberalism after Brexit
. Will Davies' latest take on Brexit.
• Anti-racism stand by Liverpool judge, 1944. Lovely piece from the archives. "you can always tell the better class of people in factories, because they are people who do not believe in colour bars and other matters of privilege. I do not understand how in the British Empire, with so many coloured people as its citizens, anything in the way of a colour bar can exist, or ever be allowed to exist by any Government that is worth the name of Government"

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 18th 2016

• The Very Quiet Foreign Girls poetry group. Loved this story.
• BBC Radio 3, Between the Ears, We Are Writing a Poem About Home. A radio programme about the poetry group.
• The Alun Parry Podcast – Ep 01 – A world based on need and justice? An interesting interview about all things co-operative movement.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 11th 2016

• A Manifesto for a Great United Kingdom in a Great Europe & a Great World. (Version 2.0), an interesting pitch from IndyJohar.
• The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me… or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck? An excellent pitch for better design of new technologies (or design that doesn't just look at the technical side of the problem)

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 4th 2016

• Vi Hart on shootings, stalkings, and Internetting While Female. Hard to watch, but important to watch.
• The Biggest Mistake in Leadership (You’re Probably Going to Make). Let's hope there's someone who can match this to provide some leadership for the UK.
• Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit. A good read on understandable reasons that people have voted for leave. (via Phil Gyford)
• Dear England. Richard Pope's entry into the #dearestengland project has lots of sensible suggestions.
• Unbiasing. A good companion piece to Richard's, to remind us to question our assumptions on what we should do next.
• What sort of crisis is this?. A follow-up to Will Davies' piece on the sociology of Brexit.

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.

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."

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 2nd 2016

• Email Isn’t The Thing You’re Bad At "You do not need a smartwatch to tell you exactly how many messages you are never going to reply to."
• How the Hillsborough inquest jury ruled on the 14 key questions. I don't have any stories to relate, but as a Liverpool FC fan - and particularly since being back living in the city - this has been part of the background of how life is for my entire adult life. I was 14 when the disaster happened. The extent of the cover-up and smear campaign is disgraceful.

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"

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 11th 2016

• OMATA: A Modern Mechanical Design Approach. Lovely article about OMATA's beautiful GPS bike speedometer. I especially like the term modern mechanical. It sums up nicely the sort of products I'm aiming for with MCQN Ltd.
• What It’s Like to Get a National-Security Letter. A behind-the-scenes look at the usually-shrouded-in-secrecy process of responding to a request for information from the US security services.
• Design Facts. An interesting collection of facts about design (as you'd possibly expect :-)
• Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals. Interesting article about an interesting person. Will have to seek out some of his books.
• ‘The Finkbeiner Test’. Good set of tests/rules to follow when writing about scientists (who happen to be women).

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 21st 2016

• Man 2 Man Meet Man Panel - “Male Speaker”. Nice policy to encourage fewer all-male speaker tracks.
• Cameron, Corbyn, The City and Steampunk. The main article linked at the top is a good read, but the comments thread is (as you'd expect from MeFi) engaging too.
• Use the words normal people would use. Wise words from Giles, on how to write for companies.
• No Motive. Heh, my bank balance suffers for it, but as last Friday's performance at Liverpool Acoustic Festival testifies, there's still plenty of doing stuff for the hell of it around here.
• Weeks 167-169. Tom, eloquent as ever in capturing a nebulous concept or feeling or whatever, on the importance of carrying on.
• From Adam Smith to Duncan Smith. Text of Paul Mason's speech to the Adam Smith Business School. Interesting thoughts on how we de-financialise the economy and encourage more development in the open source and collaborative economy(NOT the gig economy that masquerades as that)

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.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 22nd 2016

• Robert Caro Wonders What New York Is Going To Become. Great interview with the author of Power Broker - the story of how Robert Moses shaped New York in the 1960s.
• Apple's letter to its customers about security and privacy. Great to see Apple taking a stand against the US government's desire to remove customers' security.
• The Giant Zero. Thought-provoking article on how we might frame our thinking about the Internet.
• Garlic Bread of the Revolution. Come for the recipe, stay for the commentary on capitalism.
• Never trust a corporation to do a library's job. Lamenting Google's disregard for its acquisition and subsequent abandoning of the Internet's history, but celebrating the Internet Archive's sterling work to preserve things.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 15th 2016

• What if boldness were an explicit value of the civil service?. Trying to take more of this to heart.
• The London problem (a #ukgc16 post). Yes. Particularly the "London goggles" section (of which I'm also guilty, at times).
• Put down all behaviour hurtful to informality! Excellent post from Matt.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 8th 2016

• Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks' malware checklist "the entire surveillance project has been undertaken in secrecy, within the bubble of people who already think that surveillance is the answer to virtually any question."

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 1st 2016

• A Good Death. Touching post from Alex.
• Affective Labour and Digital Collaboration. Interesting post looking at types of work and how they're recognised, prompted by discussions at the RCA's Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing symposium that I attended last weekend.
• Class (American). "The one great instrument of social mobility in the US is college. But it's not the degree. It's the socialization. College – residential college – is most people's one great shot (or not so great shot) at being socialized into a higher social class." I think this all stands for the UK too. Thought-provoking stuff.
• Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours. A lovely short story.
• A nation of slaves.
• The Porous City.
• The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust. Is Jersey a canary for the rest of the UK?

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 11th 2016

• Technology and inequality. Paul Miller provides another great response to the recent Paul Graham essay.
• 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned. Lots of good advice in here.
• What to do when you're not the hero any more. "stories are mirrors, but they are also windows. They let you see yourself transfigured, but they also let you live lives you haven’t had the chance to imagine, as many other lives as there are stories yet to be told, without once leaving your chair."
• Year in Review: 2015. "What does capitalism mean when the rate of profit can’t beat the lowest interest rate in history? Money has never been so cheap for so long, and people still can’t think of capital worth investing in."
• We're living the dream; we just don't realize it.

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...

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 28th 2015

• Let’s See What We Can Do: Designing Agency. Thoughful stuff, as ever, from Dan Lockton.
• a16z Podcast: London Calling for Tech Done in a Different Way with Russell Davies and Martha Lane Fox. Great thoughts on the challenges for tech and the opportunities for the UK in that, from Russell and Martha Lane Fox.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 21st 2015

• Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess. How, and when, to use really secure passwords.
• Happy Fifty Years, Gentrification! ... Does Gentrification Gentrify without Gentrifiers?
• An Unbelievable Story of Rape.
• Can they? By the time this is published the title should read "Did they?" as Spain goes to the polls on the 20th. Still, an interesting look at the Podemos movement.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 14th 2015

• Social Media Snakepits & Solidarity Versus Corporate Shafting, UK 2015.
• Ada’s List: meet the female tech workers reclaiming the sector. More of this sort of thing please.
• When is it time to start a revolution? My answer, I'm not sure, but something needs to change.
• ‘Superficial’ relationships: near-strangers, weak ties, and older men. Kevin Harris on good form around community and neighbourliness.
• On winning the Turner Prize. It's lovely to see the hard work the Granby community have put in over years being recognised (albeit in a roundabout manner). So I now live ~5 minutes walk from a Turner prize-winning artwork. And I've also exhibited alongside the Turner prize-winning artists - Assemble were part of the Build Your Own exhibition that we (as DoES Liverpool) made Desktop Prosthetics for.
• Turner Prize – truth behind the Toxteth terraces. Following on from the previous link, this does a decent job of showing the backstory to the Granby 4 Streets project.
• So you want to reform democracy. Find the right ways to build civic tech.
• Software has diseconomies of scale - not economies of scale. At least until it's written, then it scales massively.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 30th 2015

• The Pill versus the Bomb: What Digital Technologists Need to Know About Power. More pills, fewer bombs please.
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Still working through this, but an interesting piece on systems thinking. And a great accompaniment to the next link (as pointed out by Tom Taylor)
• What can a technologist do about climate change? (A personal view). I'm not doing anything on this. And I should be.
• A digital white paper. Russell capturing perfectly how to describe the infused-with-interactivity elements of the climate change piece.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 23rd 2015

• Pinboard on the Next Economy Conference. Maciej providing commentary that careers between enraging, depressing and laugh-out-loud - in a good way.
• The Day Google Deleted Me. "That's no way to live. Constantly in fear that one day the most powerful information gatekeeper on the planet can decide you are persona non grata."
• Leaking renewable targets. At a loss for words.
• How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name. Lots I agree with here.
• Beyond Beveridge - An interview with Charles Leadbeater. Lots of good thoughts on the welfare state. We need to move it to working with the people, not just for the people.
• Please Stop Writing Secure Messaging Tools. Not just a list of good security projects to work on, a list of features and projects that would be good for all of us.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 16th 2015

• Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups "We are alive at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic—it’s just a light responsibility, don’t stress—to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans?" Not just a choice for food startups.
• I do not share your consensus, and that’s fine. Ant Miller pointing out what should be, but seems not to be, the bleeding obvious.
• Does Facebook record conversations when it identifies the things I’m listening to or watching? Basically, yes. Although I see they've updated their FAQ to make it sound less creepy.
• Communicating DND, in a nice way. Good idea, that I should be implementing.
• A blog is your brain, over time, on the internet. Perfectly put.
• Resist and Thrive. "It feels like we’ve been auto-subscribed to a newsletter that’s sending increasingly depressing emails. How do we get off this ride?"
• Increase Your Options: A talk at Digibury Weekender 2015. A good talk from Anjali about technology for good.
• Basic income: how Finland plans to implement the first nation-wide project in the EU. Interesting experiments being proposed in Finland, and this is a good summary of some of the pros/cons.
• The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock. Really interesting piece on the organisational structure of Visa.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 9th 2015

• Liverpool Futurist Excellent architectural round-up of Liverpool, by Jones the Planner. Including some sadly spot on questions about some of the city. "Why would you want Liverpool Waters to repeat all the mistakes of Princes Dock on a grand scale?" Exactly.
• The Fallacy of Hunt. Depressing reading on the NHS. *Insert Chomsky quote about privatisation here*
• Rational renationalisation. Interesting argument in favour of nationalising infrastructure (and things best provided as a monopoly)
• Big Data, No Thanks. Is Big Data this generation's anti-nuclear cause?

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 26th 2015

• We Need the Right to Repair Our Gadgets. Manufacturers could and should do better. At the least, they shouldn't be allowed to actively prevent repair.
• Fortunate People Say No.
• Emergency, stealth or story. A couple of links to great talks about government, infrastructure and the institutions we need for the modern age.
• Code for Liverpool. An embryonic movement to encourage (and implement) more useful tech, tools and civic hacking in Liverpool.
• Choose Boring Technology. Spend your tech innovation tokens wisely.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 19th 2015

• Are you happy now? The uncertain future of emotion analytics. Computers are starting to guess how we're feeling from looking at us. Should we let them?
• move fast & break nothing. A good treatise on software development.
• Metafoundry 16: Fission-Fusion Society. Deb Chachra eloquently dismantling competition. "[Paul] Graham and I do agree on the disutility of competition, which I cordially despise. I hate how it’s considered to be a motivating force [...]"

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”.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 5th 2015

• Sara Hendren in Eyeo Festival 2015. A really good talk from Sara Hendren about design, engineering, art (and disability).
• How we pass the buck. Not just a problem in advertising. It'd be good to find ways to reward taking responsibility rather than rewarding avoiding it.
• Brian Eno's BBC Music John Peel Lecture. An excellent lecture about art and its place in the world. Worth watching by everyone, not just those into music or art.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 28th 2015

• What Happens Next Will Amaze You. Maciej explaining (with great style) how advertising and the web is broken, and how we can fix it.
• Interview with Brenda Laurel. Great insight into gaming, and its possibilities.
• Without Scars: Domestic Violence, Abuse and the Tech Pipeline.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 21st 2015

• Metadesign For Murph, and How To Organise Your Library and you can listen along to John's talk too.
• Open Labour. Interesting post from James Darling with glimpses of how a 21st-Century political party might be organised.
• Product Land (Part 3). Excellent post (and source of the last link) from Richard Pope about the challenges in "digital".
• Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot. Don't believe the (tech) hype.
• Sharing Economy: Three Critical Pieces. A good piece on things like tool banks as well as AirBnB/Uber/etc.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 7th 2015

• Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. Fantastic post about building a tech company's culture, from Etsy's (now former, presumably) CTO.
• Blinded by technology: has our belief in Silicon Valley led the world astray? Turns out technology isn't going to solve all our problems. Who knew?
• Tech nerds are smart. But they can't seem to get their heads around politics. US-focused, but most of it applies to the UK too, and follows nicely from the last link.
• Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis.
• Refugees. A summary of links for more info and how you can help with the refugee crisis, from a good friend of mine. He's been over to Jordan a couple of times to help out.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 31st 2015

• The real power of free markets: not efficiency, but innovation and dumb luck. Can we stop only chasing efficiency now please?
• How to Beat Procrastination. Not really anything new, but a timely reminder, well presented.
• Solutions don’t scale, questions do. Matt Edgar with some good tips on service- and culture-design.
• The End of the Internet Dream. I'm torn on this one, I don't believe in mass surveillance and censorship, but I also don't believe in bullying, doxxing... I guess it's that I'm against abuse of power, and that's a constant balance and struggle for society.
• "Means Well" Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions "the precise problems of pushing technology on those that you think will need it, the elderly, when it is actually you that needs it to validate the fact you’re not a terrible child to your aging parents."
• Change you can engage with. Excellent analysis of how people should be trying to encourage political change (assuming you don't want to start an actual revolution...)
• By Hand & Brain. An excellent series of essays about craft, making, and culture, from a bunch of interesting people.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 17th 2015

• The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the trappings of success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in. I do wonder if gentrification is an inevitable pattern, or if there are better alternatives.
• Lunch with the FT: Mariana Mazzucato.
• PostCapitalism: a Review. Good review of Paul Mason's PostCapitalism.
• “I am very taken with the notion that, statistically, we almost certainly do not exist” – Leila Johnston, Hack Circus. "In short, I want people to see that things don’t ‘have’ to be done in a certain way."

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 10th 2015

• You can't fix services with engagement. Excellent insight from Russell. I wonder if part of the problem is that it's easy to hire a "social media" agency to bolt on this service, whereas fixing things properly requires deeper changes to your organisation. Something I touched on a while back.
• "People call him a “curmudgeon”, but they don’t really understand how much love, how much actual faith, that kind of skepticism takes.[...] Only when you fully believe in how wonderful something is supposed to be does every little daily indignity start to feel like some claw of malaise." - Leigh Alexander.
• Labour through the looking glass: 15 early-morning speculations on the Corbyn surge. I haven't been following the Labour leadership contest at all, but the Corbyn-surge has filtered through into my general awareness. I don't know how likely any of Dougal's imagined future is, but it makes heartening reading, and it's good to see someone articulating a better future and one way that it could come to pass.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 3rd 2015

• The Myth of the Ethical Shopper. Ethical supply chains requires more than just voting with our wallets.
• Watch and listen to 8,500 programmes on the BBC website. Great to see the BBC cataloguing all of their content, and pointing to places where it's available online too!
• How much longer can food banks pick up the pieces?. The Government is consistently making us a less civilised country.
• You're already dead. The last link shows why we sorely need progressive politicians with some actual beliefs. This article, sadly, does a great job of showing how far the Labour party are from anything resembling that. Which is a disgrace.
• "The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it.". Stewart Brand on new tech.
• On Moving Lines and Network Life. Good, level-headed article from Quinn Norton calling for better security and more regulation of software, among other things.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 27th 2015

• Web Design: The First 100 Years. Maciej's talks are always excellent, and this is no exception. "Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation."
• The Violence of Algorithms.
• Is innovation faltering - or is GDP? Some serendipitous background to my tweet the other day.
• Fairly Random Thoughts on Ashley Madison & the Swiftly Moving Line. Rather than the web-we-lost, this is the web-we-built-and-the-huge-gaping-problems-in-that.
• Here’s the solution to the Uber and Airbnb problems — and no one will like it, and digging into that in more detail there's also . The how-companies-are-accountable-to-their-workforce (or the *handwave* not really a workforce, they're private contractors, honest) part needs more development, but there are some interesting ideas in there worth exploring further.
• The Verge's web sucks. I'm sure it's not just the Verge, but downloading 9.5MB and hitting over 20 different sites for ads, tracking, etc. in order to read a sinlge article is crazy and bloated.
• "If you think about it in that light, it makes the achievements of the socialist bloc seem pretty impressive: a country like Russia managed to go from a backwater to a major world power with everyone working maybe on average four or five hours a day. But the problem is they couldn’t take credit for it." Interesting perspective on the morality of work.
• The Art of the Car Chase. Fantastic supercut of movie chase scenes. Jason is right, the Indiana Jones/Alex Foley segment is sublime.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 20th 2015

• The ethics of digital design. "Startups are optimised for shaking up vulnerable industries rather than assessing the resulting social, legal and ethical impact. Progress itself is the yardstick; whether that progress is in a worthwhile direction is sometimes secondary."
• Unintended Consequences. "Big data is made of people"
• The Web We Have to Save. Amen to all of this.
• everything is recapitulation. Nick Sweeney expands eloquently on the Web We Have to Save.
• A World Without Work. Interesting things for us to be considering, as software eats the world. Maybe the arts and caregiving could become ways that people show they're "adding value" in order to get paid more than the universal citizen's income?
• David Brooks, Commencement Address.
• Thinking Liverpool. Paul's excellent curated mailing list of interesting events in Liverpool.
• The end of capitalism has begun. Paul Mason offers some optimism compared to the web-we-lost and future of work...

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...

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 22nd 2015

• Sewing and the Supply Chain. A good piece on globalisation and the supply chain.
• Salad days: the gentrification of the self.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 15th 2015

• Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. I think there's a definitely some truth in that, for many things.
• We Need A Modern Origin Story: A Big History. An interesting take on how science and art could meet and help us understand the world.
• Productivity Quest: Email. Lots of good advice, some of which, I'll hopefully remember to implement more frequently!

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 1st 2015

• Labour and the vision thing. I'm not all that interested in whether the Labour leaders pay any attention to this or not, but it's a good summary of where we might find better visions for our future.
• Instantiation. Your website is too slow, and it's your fault.
• Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web. Linked from the previous article, but good enough to get a pointer of its own.
• the responsibility we have as software engineers. Ethics is important in all fields of work, not just for doctors and nurses.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 25th 2015

• False prophets [post 48/100] Beware the shyster futurists.
• My Wife's Struggle With Cancer - The Friend. A heart-wrenching yet beautiful story.
• Tech giants’ utopian branding drifts ever further from their amoral reality. And now that you're thinking about what's important in the world, here's an article to remind you how messed up the frothy tech startup world is...
• My life, standing on the shore. As in freelance writing, so in running a business. Writers just have a better way of expressing that ;-)

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).

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 11th 2015

• I miss not being scared.
• To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past. Great piece on the history of Silicon Valley.
• The programming talent myth. Fantastic piece about the hero-culture of software. I love the metaphor of making it more like running.
• Riskstarter. If we don't have failed kickstarter projects, we aren't exploring the edges enough.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 27th 2015

• Lessons Learned in Software Development. All important, hard-won gems of lessons.
• How to Survive the Looming Tech Bubble: Ignore the Gurus. Always good to be reminded, and this is a good reminder, no to believe everything you read.
• In praise of friction. A pitch-perfect post about why you should install (this) ad-(and tracking)-blocker.
• A Quick Note on Airbnb’s San Francisco Report. This is a fantastic take-down of the statistics quoted by Air B'n'B. You could apply almost all of those complaints to any of the reports that get generated to "prove" how much value tourism/arts/council-or-gov-topic-du-jour bring to the city.
• The Slow Death of the University. "What if the value of the humanities [and the arts] lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions [of society's prevailing ideologies], but in the fact that they don’t?"

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."

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 13th 2015

• Mikey Dickerson to SXSW: Why We Need You in Government "Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents." and "this country belongs to you and me and it is exactly as good as we make it. Grownups are not going to fix it for us and billionaires are not going to fix it for us. We either do it ourselves, or nobody does."
• The internet won't forget Cameron's lies, and neither will the British people.
• Code and Law between Truth and Power. Great lecture from law professor Julie E Cohen about privacy, data, networks and power. Great to see someone pointing out that - like code - law is not a neutral actor in good or bad. There's a write-up of the lecture at We are citizens, not mere physical masses of data for harvesting if you want a shorter read.
• Why Are Glasses Perceived Differently Than Hearing Aids?. All technology is assistive, so why is some stigmatised over others?

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 6th 2015

• Post-Mortems at HubSpot: What I Learned From 250 Whys. Detailing a good approach to technical project post-mortems.
• MPs - please post your CVs here. Francis' Democracy Club CVs gets a write-up in the Guardian.
• A Year of Reflection. Fantastic set of thoughts on learning curves, relevance and running an agency. That description doesn't do the article justice.
• NO DICKHEADS! A Guide To Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams. Lots of insight into how to build a team and set the culture of the company. Especially for "No dickheads allowed. Really! My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team."
• Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurial. Giving would-be business founders a better security net is a better way to increasing how many companies we have than increasing the spoils for those which are lucky enough to be successful (by lowering taxes).

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 30th 2015

• Everything is Made up and the Points Don’t Matter "But I've come to see that the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied."
• The graph George Osborne doesn’t want you to see
• Roger Martin's Unconventional Wisdom. Good thoughts on strategy and innovation (with a dash of #bigdata).
• Hidden stress. A good article on harder-to-spot depressive tendencies from Roo Reynolds.
• Liverpool's Open Data portal. Early days, but Ross Jones has fired up a CKAN instance for Liverpool. Basically, somewhere to store links to open data sets about the city. Add any you know of.
• On the politics of lying: Hillsborough and the British institutional malaise. It's good that the truth is finally being officially acknowledged. It's a disgrace that it's taken such effort to get to it.
• Slow boat to China. Lovely travelogue of a trip aboard an ACL container ship from the US to China.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 23rd 2015

• Why the alternative is called alternative. "Having thoughts like this now, and sharing them is becoming more and more normal. You could say, that the alternative is becoming the normal."
• The Man Behind MakerBot on Finding the Stories That Build Your Brand.
• Coase cost and web 2.0 (explained by Cory Doctorow). "if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss’s permission, then, brother, look out, because the CoaseCost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a *lot* cheaper."

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 16th 2015

• Towers of SIAM, trade associations and Civil Servants. Good analysis of how the UK Government is changing how it approaches IT. I'm with Simon in it being a great move.
• A Richter scale for outages. An interesting idea from Matt
• My IxD15 conference talk: “Jumping to the end”. A lovely talk about (interaction) design from Matt Jones. It's been a while (I think) since he gave a talk, and I've missed that.
• Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities. Simple to explain, difficult - I suspect - to implement.
• How Apple Makes the Watch. A great, detailed look at the manufacturing processes shown in Apple's videos for their new watch. Far better than the annoying breathless commentary on the videos themselves.
• People are more likely to spend time together in public spaces than they were 30 years ago. I'm surprised by this, but it's good to have your assumptions challenged.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 9th 2015

• Alternative Innovation — Do we really need startups?. Not just for Belgium, this is a good manifesto for tech everywhere.
• Interview: Bruce Sterling on the Convergence of Humans and Machines. Another interview with Bruce Sterling about the future of technology. Just as good as the one I linked to last week.
• Sixteen Years. It won't get reported in any of the mainstream press, but this is the next stage in the well executed life of the right sort of Internet firm.
• The beige world of clickbait journalism. Alison Gow on the endless froth of brands and media titles chasing clicks. I hope the clicks are worth it for the firms in question, compared to the damage to how I perceive them.
• The Web’s Grain. Interesting thinking about how to approach web design.

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 2nd 2015

• A different cluetrain. Charlie Stross on finance, politics and power.
• The Seven Reasons Why Super-Rich British Tax Dodgers Don't End Up in Jail. And following that, a more concrete and depressing example of how the establishment works. When is there going to be a political party that makes some inroads on that?
• Emma Thompson on tax-strike until HSBC tax evaders are jailed. Maybe this is a way forward for the rest of us?
• Bruce Sterling on why you shouldn't care how SIRI feels. Bruce Sterling doing an excellent job in reminding us that artificial intelligence is our era's horseless carriage. We should be having discussions about the ethics or dangers of the systems we're building, but we shouldn't only apply that approach to something we can identify as AI because then we'll miss the important developments.
• Hardware by the Numbers. Great read if you've anything to do with building hardware.
• Hacking for the planet. In Chicago, civic hackers are working to improve local life with data and technology.. "Getting the right people together is more important than patching the right code together. That’s one of the most important things to understand about this movement. This is not a bunch of coders coming in on white horses going ‘I can fix this with code!’, but rather people with technology skills partnering with non-profits, government agencies, community activists, to build something together that solves problems in our cities.". I wonder who wants to run something like this here in Liverpool.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 16th 2015

Infographic of the year, so far. By @davegray pic.twitter.com/szSb8ffnPY”

— mark_barratt (@mark_barratt) February 11, 2015

• Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet. An interesting look at the risks of the behemoth walled gardens on the Internet.
• Crash Override: "Our mission is to return control to the victim". Shame it's needed, but good to know there are options out there to help people being abused online.
• Of robber Barons and Corvo antics. JP is right, we need to work out ways to reduce inequality.
• Of barons and corvos, continued.
• An Update on Indie.vc. This funding model from Indie.vc is a promising development in new ways to fund good companies.
• Press Play. Looks like it was a fantastic course in writing, and if nothing else read the "Personal Standards" section - applicable to so many groups/workshops.
• Shabby housing and shiny skyscrapers "The dereliction of the Liverpool waterfront is a result not of the port’s disappearance, but of its new insubstantiality. The warehouses that used to line both sides of the river have been superseded by a fragmented, mobile space: goods vehicles moving or parked on the UK’s roads. The road system as a publicly-funded warehouse.” So true.

Interesting Things on the Internet: February 9th 2015

• Why I’ve found that online communities on media sites always seem doomed to fail. Interesting insight into running, changing, and closing online communities and messageboards.
• The Internet's Own Boy. An important documentary about the Internet. If you're in the UK, watch it over the next few weeks while it's available on iPlayer.
• Notes (Rants) from Berlin: On Art and Engineering. Interesting thoughts on critical inspection of technology. I particularly liked "Dan Williams succinctly reminded me that we should always be replacing the word ‘algorithms’ with ‘a set of instructions written by someone.’"
• Silence isn’t Sexy — It Is Actually Very Reactionary.
• The Upsetting Reality Of Modern Day Poverty.. This does a much better job than I can of explaining part of why this Government needs to change. Part two is also worth a read.
• Arts Emergency: An interview. Josie Long and Neil Griffith on the benefits of the liberal arts.
• The Art of Management. An in-depth look at the history of some of management theory, with lots of good detail on Cybersyn and Stafford Beer.
• A Tale of Two Zippers. A delightful look at the factory automation that lets zips be made, and a valid rant about how tiny design decisions can result in huge amounts of mindless labour.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 26th 2015

• Open Source Is the Only Way for Medicine. Open-source is the software equivalent of the scientific method, when closed-source is alchemy.
• Why GitHub is not your CV. Thought-provoking article about innate privilege in having enough time to contribute to open source projects.
• Long, cold cyberwar. Francis on sobering, but important form.

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."

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 12th 2015

• Why This Shepherd Loves Twitter. Connecting interesting people and their experiences to the rest of us. What has always been a great thing that "social media" can do.
• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?"
• We need more rubbish on the internet. A great riposte to the "I don't know why people share what they had for breakfast online" crowd.
• What I Learned about Strangers from Jane Jacobs on my Winter Vacation. I like the idea of designing for strangers. "Is it really necessary for visitors to share their life stories with each other? Is it OK for them to just share a pair of scissors?"
• The Life Behind the Lifestyle Blog. Frank and interesting interview with Ben Hammersley about his life and finances.

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:

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 29th 2014

• Trending Market Forces: Women in Tech. More progress needed, obviously, but we're heading in the right direction.
• HAPPIDROME - Part One. Adam Curtis on good form. Could the Internet remove our hierarchical control systems and lead to a better future, or are we just being controlled and kept happy and sedate by a technocratic elite?
• Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things. A great snapshot of a potential vision of an IoT future, although not a good future. I (and we, collectively) need to work on better visions for IoT.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 22nd 2014

• The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
Who's the Boss? "The Elf on the Shelf" and the normalization of surveillance. Normalising acceptance of the panopticon, and no technology in sight.
• Have fun and be silly. I brought this up in class but it bears repeating. If you are working on something and its not fun, take that as a sign that you should try something else.
• Apache (and other foundations) considered useful. What new institutions do we need for the new open-source, Internet age?

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 15th 2014

• Start-ups and Emotional Debt That is, treating “the money problem” as a strict subset of “the life problem” is a mistake. As tempting as it is for programmers, it’s impossible to divide-and-conquer the good life. Like it or not, “the money problem,” “the love problem,” “the friendship problem,” and “the true-passion-in-life problem” are all intertwined, and they develop together. That’s part of what makes life so interesting.
• Stewart Lee: “I don’t mind causing offence when I intend to, but I don’t like causing it accidentally”. Great interview on all sorts of topics like social mobility and politics.
• What I Learned From Building An App For Low-Income Americans.
• Why I Joined The New Artists’ Union. In the recent art project I've worked on about 30 years since the Miners' Strike there's been some thought-provoking discussion about the place of unions; whether I'd strike if the same situation arose; and which union I'd be part of. So it's interesting to see that there is a fledgling union for artists. Not that I'm sure that I'd qualify.
• Inside the brain of a designer. A lovely video showing the (/a) creative process.
• Sarah Churchwell: why the humanities matter Let me answer the question: what’s all this art for? It’s for us.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 1st 2014

• The End of Imagination. A wonderful short story about the future.
• Is saving Newcastle a mission impossible?. Distressing reading, as it brought home that this isn't just happening in Liverpool but across the country. It'd divide and conquer politics, and the challenge is finding a way beyond that, to counter it.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 17th 2014

• The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? Entitlement and class, through the lens of amusement parks.
• The great system thinking battle that is to come. Sounds like "The Whitehall Effect" might be an interesting read.
• The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare. I hope justice is done, but either way, surely we should be implementing laws, processes, etc. so that we don't end up with a financial system "too big to fail" again (or at least for another 50 years until it inevitably fades from the folk memory...)?!?
• Are low-paid, outraged workers ready to fight back?
• The Nor - All Cameras Are Police Cameras. James on excellent form, about city walls (of various forms)
• Leah Meisterlin — Antipublic Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Downtown Project. An excellent exploration of the Creative-Class-Regeneration-project in Las Vegas. There are echoes of what I espouse for DoES Liverpool's role in Liverpool in there, but I hope (truly hope) that we have a more human, considerate, inclusive intent (and I'd hope people would hold us to account and point out our failings if we don't live up to that intent).

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.

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."

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 :-)

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 20th 2014

• How to build a fairer city. Takes a while to get going, but the suggestions for how cities should look to develop, rather than compete, could move the debate on usefully. It would be good to see the council considering what this would look like for Liverpool
• Organize! What the Artists’ Union of the 1930s Can Teach Us Today. Interesting to see that artists formed a union back in the 30s, given that it seems difficult to see who the "boss" would be that they'd organise against today. Maybe they could just lend weight to, or seek to influence, political parties instead?
• Radio: Experimental Form. Always nice to see people experimenting with device interfaces, particularly when they're in such a beautiful wood case.
• Listening Post Ten Years On. Nice look at some of the techniques used in creating an interesting piece of media art. Wonder if FACT could be persuaded to bring it to Liverpool sometime?
• Bohemias and Backwaters. The best time to start creating is today.
• "This kind of naive scoring system is a terrible idea. The only thing worse would be a sophisticated scoring system." The comment, and the linked article, are both well worth a read.
• Something New for Politics? A nice intro to James Smith's new political party.
• Mind The Gap: You Are As You Are Eaten. Rather deep and philosophical, but interesting thinking on consumerism, big data, and the meaning of life.
• Art at the Edge of Tomorrow. A great piece on Lillian Schwartz's work at Bell Labs. "Because there are so many Lillian Schwartzes who are looking for their Murray Hill, and so many Bell Labs who need to find their Lillian Schwartz."

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 13th 2014

• Why nerd culture must die. I'd always thought (/hoped) that the geeks gaining more power would be good, as we knew what it was like to be outsiders, and would be more empathetic to other outsiders. Sadly that's not always the case.
• Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us. Not sure what to make of this, but it's given me food for thought. (Like I needed more of that... ;-)
• Make technological utopia easier with this one weird trick. Mapping out a utopia for us to strive towards.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 29th 2014

• I Had a Stroke at 33. An incredible story.
• Which celebrity is taking a taxi where? And what gentlemen’s club are you visiting? Another tale of how "anonymized" data turns out not to be truly anonymous. This stuff is hard, we need companies/researchers who know what they're doing if they're releasing such datasets. And most of us don't know what we're doing.
• Culture Stories: Introduction and Milk. James Darling doing a good job of explaining that culture change is better than strategy.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 22nd 2014

• Be a squeaky wheel, but always bring oil. Don't manage. Multiply.
• What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Making. A rather different, and thought-provoking, look at diversity and privilege. Really good.
• Hypertext as an Agent of Change. Really interesting talk from Mandy Brown about the network, inequality and other great stuff.
• Still Life with Emotional Contagion. Aaron Straup Cope talking about archives, the network, and a rejection of the perpetual state of living in the now online. Seems dConstruct this year has a really good crop of talks.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 8th 2014

• Waffle on Social Media "The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email."
• Antilogs: How To Draw The Right Lesson Learned
• Putting Awesome into words. Zarino doing a great job of explaining Awesome Liverpool and the Awesome Foundation. A lovely project.
• Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse " Wars could break out; so could genuine global environmental leadership. Either could dramatically affect the trajectory." Fingers crossed for the latter, eh?
• My Cousin Is Not a Hero "Sometimes, a bunch of terrible things happen right in a row, and it’s just terrible. It doesn’t make for a good story. It doesn’t make you a better person. It just sucks."
• Not Safe for Not Working On. A good look at the wider issue (for developers, and which should be demanded by users) around the exposing of celebrity nude photo trading networks.
• What is “fairness”? Great piece about the fairness of algorithms by Danah Boyd
• There's poverty in the UK, but we are better off calling it inequality. John Lanchester on good form.

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 1st 2014

• How to be Polite… for Geeks. I don't think this is just for geeks, personally.
• A right to build: An open approach to housing provision: self-provision. An interesting take on the UK's housing situation. It'd be great to, for example, see Liverpool's Mayor Joe Anderson experimenting with this approach in some of the areas with great community, like Granby, rather than the business-as-usual approach.
• I have every admiration for Linda Sandvik in following her conscience even when that means resigning from something she loves.
• Adman in Techland: 8 Points of Perspective. Some good thoughts/tips on running a business in here.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 18th 2014

• Would a citizen’s income be better than our benefits system? "There would be other advantages from such a system. First, it would be universal and hence avoid the stigma attached to benefits. Secondly, people taking a job or starting a business would have the security of knowing that they would still have their citizen’s income if the venture did not work out."
• Five Years of "Not the Valley"
• How to Be Polite. Bits of that reminds me of my approach to my first year (and maybe a bit longer) at uni. I don't practice quite as much now, but maybe I should.
• Ten years of OpenStreetMap. A nice overview of all that the OSM community has achieved so far.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 4th 2014

• The Internet of Things Will Ruin Birthdays. The perils of giving more control to people who want to find excuses to insert their brand into your life.
• Privacy Economics. Tim Bray showing a different (to last week's Anil Dash link) way that privacy is a grey area, and how that's good.
• A recipe for starting & prototyping new projects Good tips for life in the digital age.
• Amazon v Hachette: The enemy of your enemy is not your friend. This pretty much sums up this author's take on the Amazon/Hachette battle.
• 'Artists and makers, it's time to be leaders' From John Maeda. Indeed, otherwise we cede control to the beancounters and form-fillers...
• IFB shows Liverpool’s business needs more diversity. Laura on good form exploring how the recent business-jamboree International Festival for Business could be better when it next runs (in 2016).

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

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"

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 21st 2014 Edition

• Dark Matter. How museums and galleries should embrace Internet Thinking, but applicable to lots more than that.
• This Is How Your Financial Data Is Being Used to Serve You Ads. Interesting, if rather frustrating, look at how data is used to serve you more ads.
• Thirty Things I’ve Learned. Life lessons. Nothing revolutionary, but good to be reminded of these things.
• An Open Rant Against Birthday Dinners. I'm not sure what a better option would be, but lots of that rings true :-)
• Disappointingly the DRIP legislation was passed this week, so this good speech from Martha Lane Fox was in vain.
• Surveillance and Austerity. Politics these days is all about keeping people in their place, so the powerful can keep consolidating theirs. We deserve a better alternative.
• Don’t blame the mandarins "every department should have its Chief Historian, in order to remind the short term and media-harried boss of the day exactly how many times his recent idea has failed."

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.

• Colonising the Clouds. Could Google, Facebook, etc. start thinking of themselves as the new states?
• Forcing through the surveillance laws is a further erosion of political trust
• Something terrible could be happening in Parliament on Monday and I need your urgent attention.
• DRIP: a shabby process for a shady law.

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 7th 2014 Edition

• Retail futures, mediated through our phones. Premature monetisation risks ruining the future city. The slick user story of personalised service, smoothly delivered to the wealthy relaxed consumer as they browse the aisles is seductive. We told ourselves we were “improving” the experience. The reality is going to be every single store, shouting with a desperate digital screech, delivering invasive messages and insta-deals.
• You and your research. Text of a great speech about the discipline and techniques required to do great work.
• The Disloyal.
• Can we stop talking about transformation? Julian on fine form. Looking forward to discussing smarter cities with him at an event on July 10th
• (Not only) Women sailing on a new holistic business wave. Contributoria continues to attract good work (and they've just introduced an option to subscribe to a printed version too)

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 30th Edition

• On Taxis and Rainbows. How not to anonymize data sets, in this case NYC taxi journeys.
• A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit. Really tempted to write a bot to track the number of jobs lost/created according to estate agent/regeneration press releases. Think it'll have to wait until I've more time.
• The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy. I wonder if this provides at least one vision of an alternate future in a serendipitous response to last week's Maximum Happy Imagination?
• Of Moonshots and Slingshots: Bringing Policy and Technology into Planetary Alignment "It's been a long time since any nation staked its national pride on exploring space, or, frankly, doing much of anything useful at all"
• In Deep. A wonderfully written account of a deep cave exploration expedition.
• The Disruption Machine. Another long read (like the caving link), this time an interesting critique of innovation and disruption.
• The coolest culture hack of all is not hacking your culture. Culture is too important to hack.
• Corrupt Personalization. A great article, with good concrete examples (from Facebook in this case) of how personalization can be a bad thing.

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

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 23rd Edition

• UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance of residents’ Facebook and Google use. So, AIUI, the Government would need a warrant to read an email I send someone, but not to read a private message sent via Facebook or Twitter...
• Anne, Sue, Bob and Nigel too, a short story about privacy, politics and the press. Part of the reason the previous link is an important, and disgraceful revelation.
• Be Nice Or Leave.
• Maptime: Changing culture in geospatial tech learning, one meetup at a time. I've been wrangling OpenStreetMap data to produce laser-cutter files of late, so rather envious of beginners mapping groups in other cities.
• Six steps to better business digital of things. I do wonder if the field that "Pretend Office is one of the best companies in the field that it’s in" is writing strategy documents for the council. Or maybe some other local companies...
• The sun does not rise: How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science
• Maximum Happy Imagination. Matt Jones pointing out how all these visionaries who look to disrupt everything always seem to stop shy of disrupting the consumer-capitalism environment itself...

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 16th Edition

• We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow. This piece on surveillance technology could have been written today. However, it was actually written back in 2005!
• The art of asking: or, how to ask and get what you want.. This is something I still struggle with, especially when it's for important things like work. Go on, hire me to build you an interesting IoT device. (Always be practising ;-)
• And via that last link, also Creative People Say No. I always find that tricky to balance, particularly while trying to grow a culture, which puts me more in the manager role where you have to be available to help people...
• Industry clusters: The modern-day snake oil. It's all about the people. As ever. Which makes it trickier to engage with. (But I don't think it's impossible. Anyone want to pay me to work up my ideas into an alternate strategy?)
• Leila Johnston is interviewed by Cory Doctorow. Lots of good thinking about tech, art and capitalism (but much more readable than I've just made it sound!)
• Consumers, users, people, mammals. Russell doing his usual sterling job of clarifying things that you hadn't spotted needing clarification until he showed you.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 9th Edition

• Nobody Goes to Art School to Make Money, so Fuck Off. "In other words, we went to this art school because we too are interested in programming and making, but disagree with the rest of what we see in the tech industry now."
• The Good, the Normal and the Everyday. Thought-provoking ruminations on craft, democratized design and making.
• Reality Distortion Field. There are no short cuts, just enjoy the work and get on with it.
• Designing the Good Life: The Ethics of User Experience Design. Lots to chew on here, about what work you undertake. Not just applicable to designers.
• Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World. And once you've read the slides in the previous link, go watch this.
• Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7. "The need not to know yourself. Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think, I’m agoraphobic, I’m a shy person, whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge." (there are more bits I could quote, but that was the one that drew me in initially)

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 2nd Edition

• The Internet With A Human Face - Beyond Tellerand 2014 Conference Talk. If you only read one link on the Internet this week, make it this one from Maciej Ceglowski.
• Michael Bierut on Massimo Vignelli, 1931-2014.
• Gradual Engagement between Digital Devices as a Function of Proximity: From Awareness to Progressive Reveal to Information Transfer. An interesting look at how to transfer content between devices.
• Diary of a Corporate Sellout. Although we didn't have the wider community, given that STNC wrote web browsers for OEMs to ship on their mobile phones, lots of this rings true for my experience when we became part of Microsoft. And that's a big part of why MCQN Ltd hasn't ever looked for funding.
• I will not comment on the attendant irony. Language used to conceal rather than communicate.
• and a robot pony. Nick Sweeney doing an excellent job of bringing some clarity to the OMG-Google-self-driving-car debate.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 26th Edition

• How ‘competitiveness’ became one of the great unquestioned virtues of contemporary culture. A good analysis of how judging everything in purely economic terms has become pervasive. Would be nice if we can find a way to reverse that.
• Everything is Broken by Quinn Norton. "There is certainly a limit to what an organized movement of people who share a mutual dream can do, but we haven’t found it yet."
• BPF - the forgotten bytecode. A look inside how tcpdump works. Particularly interesting for protocol engineers like myself :-)
• Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time. In fact, I'm probably winging it just now as you read this.
• Mammon's Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now by David Marquand – review. Yet more analysis of what's wrong with society, without a particularly clear idea of what to do next. Not sure I agree with the analysis that everyone is too individualistic these days, I think Hugh MacLeod's the market for something to believe in is infinite has a lot to be said for it.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 19th Edition

• Spurious Correlations. Who knew that eating sour cream increases motorbike fatalities... ;-)
• Where the brick breaks: augmented humans and the Internet of things. Louisa Heinrich does a great job of pitching how we should be designing for humans in the Internet of Things.
• The Fifty-nine Story Crisis. A gripping tale of an engineer discovering a flaw in his work, and doing the right thing to fix it.
• Unseen Sensors: Constantly Sensing but Rarely Seen. Ever wondered about all those grey and beige boxes dotted around the city? You will after reading this article from Mayo Nissen
• The "Drinking Coffee and Stealing WiFi" 2012 World Tour. I love hearing about the deep thinking that really good web people (such as Aaron) do about how to work with "digital" as a material. We need more of this - both the sharing, and the sort of people doing this work.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 12th Edition

• "These are all solvable problems. Smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything."
• Nest’s Tony Fadell on Smart Objects, and the Singularity of Innovation. I like his thoughts on how it takes heavily-integrated companies to provide the innovative solutions, although I suspect I've a more open approach to how they should also enable others to integrate with them.
• The Enervation Precinct. This article is about rebuilding Christchurch in New Zealand, but equally applies to almost any innovation-through-regeneration projects anywhere.
• Digital civic space – the diagram. Catherine seems to be finding some interesting subject areas and making some interesting findings. I particularly like her four qualities of digitally active citizens.
• Land of Impunity. Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do. This is the real problem in politics, fix the lack of accountability and lots of UKIP and the like's "support" will disappear.
• URLy warning and Chrome obfuscates the URLs, Google benefits. Two good blog posts about Google's Chrome browser experimenting with hiding the web address and why that is a bad move. It's moves like this that are part of the reason that Firefox remains my default browser, and why I try to limit the amount the holds Google has over my life. They are becoming too powerful, regardless of whether or not they're using that power responsibly.
• Letter [to Google] from Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer. The great Internet serendipity engine in full effect. A long, but well thought through exposition of some of my concerns from the previous list item.
• The myth of the science park economy. Not sure I agree with all of the analysis in here, but there's lots of good stuff about innovation, science parks, university technology transfer, etc.
• The question of Civic Pride and Community. A mild-mannered manifesto for being a citizen. The world needs more people like Emma.

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 5th 2014 Edition

• How Your Face Changes in Different Lighting. Hypnotic if a little spooky.
• U.S. Promotes Network to Foil Digital Spying. Wonder if the US government wants to fund a mesh network here in Liverpool? ;-)
• Circuit Stickers Manufacturing Retrospective: From Campaign to First Shipment. Hardware is hard. More useful tidbits of advice from Bunnie.
• Company Rule. Good reminder of how/why such an entity as a company came to be. Do today's circumstances call for an alternative approach to be available too?
• Screw London, Move to Britain.
• Sales for Hackers. Despite having done enough of it to survive for over a decade running my own company, this is still hard.
• Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities
• Properly Funding Democracy Club. With a general election beginning to loom over the horizon, it's good to see the more civic-minded hackers working at tools to help improve democracy. However, I think Francis' idea to take things to the next level is a good one.

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 28th 2014 Edition

• The Argument For Worker-Owned Tech Collectives. More people trying more company structures is a good thing(tm)
• What is the distance between hand and machine? Interesting look at the differences between craft and handmade.
• More thoughts about handcraft versus machine craft. Further thoughts from Rena Tom about the differences between craft and manufacturing. "I took time out of my day to love these drawer hardware. That’s good design."
• A follow-up to my post about the risk of the Banksy Rat being destroyed, while it's long been gone from the building, they've actually removed it and auctioned it off. Although not mentioned in that article, I think the proceeds are being donated to charity. Which is some small comfort I guess. The comments from the people selling it off are rather telling though. For all the claims about "landmark" developments, it seems that once your property is at risk of being recognised as an actual landmark, that's a "liability" for the developers.
• No Exit. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
• Inequality UK.
• Product-driven versus customer-driven. I think this explains a lot of why I struggle with lean startups and lots of the find-people-with-pain approaches. Not that it guarantees I'm not on a hiding to nothing still.
• The Logic of Stupid Poor People.

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 14th 2014 Edition

• Can press freedom exist at all in a corporate world? Rather dense and heavy-going, but a good reminder of the water that we swim in, and that even things like companies are a construct that society has invented, and so could be replaced with something better.
• The 7 habits of successful women An excellent article from Leila Johnston.
• The Next 5 Years for Drones. A good exploration of the sorts of things drones are likely to be up to (or capable of) in the near future. Helped me realise that while there's lots of good stuff that could come out of the technology, there's also a danger of it just helping to concentrate power in those who already hold it.
• HiFi-/design-/Dieter Rams-porn - Braun SK55.
• Five Reasons Not to Raise Venture Capital. Number 4 (and to some extent number 3) is the main reason MCQN Ltd hasn't looked to raise VC.
• Capitalism isn't working.
• Design tutorials: the basics. Matt Ward takes a detailed look at part of how he teaches design.
• The price of everything and the value of nothing...

Interesting Things on the Internet: Apr 10th 2014 Edition

• The Search for the Next Platform Fred Wilson on the move into hardware, etc. from the big tech companies. "Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. "
• Freedom of Information Requests: A citizen journalists' guide to unlocking Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts. Some good pointers on how to hold those in power to account.
• An Investor's Guide to Hardware Startups. A good summary of the different phases, growth and challenges for hardware startups. Not just useful for investors, lots of good stuff in here.
• Meet The Radical Berkeley Artist Whose Company Is Turning Trash Into Electricity. Taking the hacker/maker sensibility to power generation.
• Lecture: Trust and the Fall of Public Relations. The age of the spin doctor is passing (can't come too soon). We should judge and be judged on what we do, not what we say.

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 24th 2014 Edition

• Gove nicked our schools and handed them to his mates I really hope that this gets properly investigated.
• A much better slide deck of rules for life than you'd (probably) get from Mr Gove ;-)
• Worse "In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their customers or users."
• The Invasive Valley of Personalisation. A nice term for it.
• Interesting article about how Chipotle cultivates the business culture to help performance. It's all about the people.
• Solve Hard Things Early, another good piece on management structure, etc. In particular this - "Build great habits around communication and decision-making when everyone still knows each other well." - something we've consistently struggled with at DoES Liverpool
• The Overprotected Kid - part of me wonders if we're worrying too much about how kids grow up, or alternatively going through the "in my day..." phase, but an interesting article nonetheless.
• Why Startups Should Train Their People. Expectation-setting, I think that's something I'm not very good at. Possibly because of a mixture of perfectionism and not wanting to tell people things they don't want to hear. Not that the realisation of that makes fixing it any easier...

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.

Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 10th 2014 Edition

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

• A local shop for local people. A lovely tale of a locally-sourced veg shop in Glasgow.
• SeeChange - asking all the right questions (which aren't just "get rid of all the cameras!?!") about the proliferation of the amount of streaming video recording that's going on.
• Full NHS hospital records uploaded to Google servers. In case anyone was in any doubt as to why the Government needs to do much better on looking after our NHS data. (The "infinitely worse" story currently might be about mock data, rather than real data. But I might be revising that before I publish this...)
• Civic Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data. We could probably do with something similar for the Internet of Things.
• "Anyone with power has a responsibility to consider how its use affects others." Thoughts about Radical Transparency
• A Day at the ODNI. Quinn Norton writes up the day workshop on identity that she attended at the US intelligence agencies. However, it's a much more interesting read than that makes it sound.
• Great article on the invention of the AeroPress coffee maker. I never realised it was invented by the same guy as the Aerobie.
• The Creep Factor: How to Think About Big Data and Privacy. Worth a read for the term "data redlining", if nothing else.

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...):

• Our Comrade the Electron. A fantastic talk from Maciej Ceglowski, including a right on the money rant about how we've built the surveillance state by accident.
• Escape from the 'sink' estate "Either you believe that people who are born into Britain's disaffected underclass are born with criminal proclivities - a belief which I hope you find bigoted and ridiculous - or you accept that the criminal behaviour of the underclass is the direct consequence of environmental factors."
• Google lobbying for unsafe driving - A good point about how, in lobbying for their tech to be allowed when driving, Google should then be held partly responsible for any subsequent accidents caused by that change.
• Another less-than-glowing article about Google, Georgina Voss talking about arts patronage, following the launch of the Google DevArt programme. I know Georgina, some of the artists initially announced with the DevArt programme, and also one of the Google developer advocates who helped pull it together. I think, as ever, there's an element of clumsy manoeuvring from the big corporation rather than any real malice, but the article raises good points.
• Continuing the somewhat anti-corporate-tech slant: a long, but interesting look at the growth of Amazon, particularly from the book-world viewpoint.
• Privacy Icons. It's good to see projects like this which try to help non-techies understand what's happening behind the scenes with the digital services that they use, and give all of us ways to make better decisions about which ones we trust.
• Urban data: From fetish object to social object looks like an interesting one-day conference, organised by the excellent Adam Greenfield. Annoyingly I'm already busy on the 14th, otherwise I'd be heading along.

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.

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.

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...

Links: Tech and a Talk

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

• Jonathan Corum's slides and notes from his talk at the second Visualized conference. Great insight into the nuance of creating good data visualisations.
• Label Whisperer A lovely use of good API and URL design combined with small pieces, loosely joined to produce a prototype service to help museum visitors find out more about exhibits.

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.

January Link Roundup

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

• The Rise of the Female Hardware Entrepreneur. This is one of the nice things about the Internet of Things / hardware / wearables / etc. subset of the tech world - lots of women in high profile roles. There's always room for more, naturally, but it's a move in the right direction.
• A good article from Martin Spindler about the Google Nest acquisition. I particularly liked his slide deck at the end of that post, which is more about the Internet of Things in general.
• Value is Created by Doing. Good to remember that doing work is important, not doing things that look a bit like work...
• Websockets (accidentally) blocked by mobile networks, a reminder that vanilla HTTP is often still the best solution to getting your client code to talk to your web service. I might have some experiences with that and server-sent events soon.
• Dude, where's my North Sea oil money. A rather depressing look at how the UK might have fared had the Thatcher government not passed all our oil money onto rich people.
Artisanal Capitalism: The art and craft of business. The Economist looks at the craft/maker movement.
• Dan Hill being his usual insightful self and looking at the Uber taxi app service and what that means for the privatisation of civic services and hand-waving around rules and regulation.

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...

• How I Built Emojitracker A great, in-depth explanation of building a web service at a massive scale (even though he didn't intend to do that when setting out to make it...)
• Following on from that, Stream Updates with Server-Sent Events was a good overview of how web servers can send multiple events to a client. A good way to avoid polling if you don't need bi-directional communication
• Disability Mapping with OpenStreetMap - one of the benefits of open-data such as OpenStreetMap is that new communities can repurpose it to better suit themselves, and everyone benefits from their work
• A fantastic overview from Tod E. Kurt of how they took blink(1) from prototype to production
• They may have the money, but we have the tools of technology, which is a longer-winded hint that more of the tech community is starting to realise that they can't pretend that tech is apolitical. For a more direct approach in a similar vein, see OpenPolitics
• The Inferno of Independence. Lots of this rang true, from the stress of being independent (see also Dan Catt); to the frustration at watching (and participating in) talented friends struggling to be paid for their good work while barely talented chancers cash in; to the importance of language and the words we use.
• Shared under sad circumstances, as an eulogy to Red Burns, but it's a wonderful list of maxims for thinking about technology and design
• In what's turned out to be a follow-up to my last post, which also linked to him, Jeremy Keith's transcript of his talk at Beyond Tellerand is a superb talk about the future of the Internet, caring about data, and longer-term thinking
• David Simon (creator of The Wire) speaks out about the divide between rich and poor in "There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show"
• More post-Snowden thinking from Bruce Schneier - The Battle for Power on the Internet
• Maciej Ceglowski's talk from XOXO - mentioned in The Inferno of Independence that I linked to above, but worth its own link - Thoreau 2.0

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...)

• Why Satisfying Needs is Not Enough
• Stamen Design's Backchannel visualisation project
• A good post appealing for web developers to think beyond just replacing native apps from Scott Jenson
• Pocket CNC, an affordable 5-axis CNC machine
• How to boot your Raspberry Pi into a fullscreen browser kiosk (this will let us update the DoES Liverpool Doorbot)
• Cousins UK (a good source of clock parts. More on that once the project that'll need it is finished...)
• The digital touch: Craft-work as immaterial labour and ontological accumulation (academic papers are far too long and dense for my blog-post conditioned brain, so I'm not sure when/if I'll find time to read through this...)

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...

• The Gift of Doubt
• Paul Graham on Good and Bad Procrastination. Especially for this ice-breaker (or is it a friend-losing?) question: "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"
• Bill Thompson's #opentech talk
• An Aura of Familiarity - a collection of short stories about a possible networked future. Mostly rather dystopian, so maybe a warning of things we should steer away from towards nicer (but less exciting to write about ;-) futures
• James Bridle doing a great job of explaining how Test Match Special is exploring our attitudes to technology
• A warning salvo from the US of the problems of a world where the rich can segregate themselves from the poor - Detroit, and the Bankruptcy of America's Social Contract

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 :-)

• Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas
• The Entrepreneurial Generation
• Sending Astronauts to Explore the New Economy (this was a really good one)
• The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect" (actually, this was too - about the Internet's affect on society IIRC)
• 'Smart City' Planning Needs Just the Right Balance
• Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong (this was a great piece about how little sharing actually happens on "social media", compared to shared among people in general, something to bear in mind when the social media experts and companies are trying to persuade you otherwise...)
• No to NoUI (The NoUI phenomenon as a specific term had passed me by, but Timo does a fantastic job of explaining how we should disregard anyone trying to sell us a "seamless, invisible interface")
• He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman

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...)

Blog All Documentary Quotes: I Love This Dirty Town

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.

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...

On businesses in the city...

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...

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:

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...

links for 2011-09-17

• Government spending: Costly contractors | The Economist
  "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?"
  (tags: government economics)

links for 2011-09-13

• Are jobs obsolete? - CNN.com
  "Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff."
  (tags: jobs work employment economics)

links for 2011-09-08

• SPIN Farming Basics: a book review » Transition Culture
  Review of an interesting book arguing that urban farming is a profitable business to run. Surely there are plenty of candidate sites in Liverpool? It'd be lovely if the Urban Gardening Group at DoES tied up with Transition Town Liverpool and spawned some businesses to do that...
  (tags: urban farming sustainability)
• circuit design - Differentiate between clapping and talking - Electrical Engineering - Stack Exchange
  Might come in handy for the next time I want an Arduino to detect some sound events
  (tags: hardware algorithm sound analysis)

links for 2011-08-31

• URBEINGRECORDED » Blog Archive » Getting to Know Your Ghost in the Machine
  Interesting piece exploring how digital identity might affect the coming ubiquitous computing and augmented reality world
  (tags: ubicomp iot augmentedreality)

links for 2011-08-27

• Australian Design Review / Historian of the present: Wouter Vanstiphout
  Excellent interview talking about the politics and a different approach to regeneration projects. Source of Dan Hill's "dark matter" phrase from Laptops and Looms.
  (tags: regeneration architecture planning urban)

links for 2011-08-23

• Golden Grid System
  A rather lovely CSS grid system that lets you target bigger screens by moving to multiple columns as the screen gets wider
  (tags: css webdev framework)
• Old Plans for Merseyside - SkyscraperCity
  A good roundup of the variety of plans that have been drawn up over the years for how Liverpool/Merseyside should evolve.
  (tags: urban planning liverpool merseyside)

links for 2011-08-22

• Functional Autonomy » Blog Archive » So Having Dreamt, and Heavily Armed
  A long, but good blog post from David Hayward digging into some of the stuff around the recent riots. And that's a really bad summary of it really...
  (tags: uk riots society)
• Stefan Collini · From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities · LRB 25 August 2011
  A well written, if ultimately disheartening, article dismantling the approach and the language of the changes in university funding.
  (tags: university education uk funding)

links for 2011-08-07

• Simple online hosted CRM for small business, SMEs and sales teams | Capsule CRM
  Useful-looking CRM tool, recommended by Chris Hough.
  (tags: crm business)
• Laser cutting from the command line » NYC Resistor » Electronics, Hacking, Classes, and Workspace.
  Developing an open source driver for Epilog laser cutters
  (tags: fabbing lasercutting open_source)
• cd3wd - now available FREE on an offline 4xDVD set to Third World/Developing Countries - 4000 Electronic Books online and offline with Practical Technical Development Information
  It's like a Haynes manual for basic civilisation.
  (tags: surivial manual howto reference agriculture technology tools)

links for 2011-07-29

• download cell phone diagram, circuit diagram, pcb diagram, UPP LAyOut,
  Interesting site with some pretty detailed circuit diagram details on all sorts of mobile phones. Hopefully one of these days someone will use this sort of info to work out how to build new software images for old Nokia Series 40 phones and we can start doing interesting things with the old handsets rather than just breaking them up for precious metals
  (tags: phone circuit diagram pcb hardware)

links for 2011-07-28

• MAKE | Horizontal iPhone 4 Dock
  Lovely CNC milled and laser-cut design for an iPhone dock, with a well done promotion video
  (tags: design fabbing inspiration)

links for 2011-07-27

• SensorBase | Sharing is Caring
  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)
  (tags: data web service iot)

links for 2011-07-24

• Prototyping PCB Minimum Spacing Limitation | ITead Studio
  Some more detailed tips on sizes, etc. from iTead
  (tags: pcb fabbing electronics hardware)
• Quirks of PCB manufacturing at ITead - GitHub
  Some tips on using iTead as a PCB fabber
  (tags: pcb fabbing electronics hardware)
• PCB prototyping service
  iTead, one of the recommendations (and one of the cheapest) from the PCB comparison I just posted
  (tags: pcb fabbing hardware electronics)
• PCB Fabrication Sources | General Electronics
  Good comparison of PCB manufacturing websites
  (tags: pcb fabbing hardware)
• Creative 'melting pot' DoES Liverpool is open - LDP Creative
  (tags: DoESLiverpool press)
• Hi-tech workspace DoES Liverpool open for business - Business News - LDP Business - Liverpool Daily Post
  (tags: DoESLiverpool press)

links for 2011-06-30

• fabfi - An open-source, city-scale wireless mesh networking system with access control and monitoring - Google Project Hosting
  An interesting project to provide WiFi mesh networking over city-wide sorts of distances
  (tags: wifi networking)
• Base2 - Advanced Circuits Tour
  Lots of photos and a description of the process of making PCBs
  (tags: electronics pcb manufacturing)

links for 2011-06-22

• How to run a great unconference session « Scott Berkun
  A good explanation of how to approach attending an unconference and what may or may not work for sessions to run.
  (tags: barcamp unconference conference howto)
• Analog by Design Show - Reality TV for Design Engineers
  Not watched any of these yet, but expect they'll come in handy.
  (tags: video hardware electronics)
• - My Favourite Quotes
  A nice collection of quotes from Euan (and I think it's the place he adds any new ones he finds too)
  (tags: quotes)

links for 2011-06-16

• Kickstartup — Successful fundraising with Kickstarter & the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo — Craig Mod
  A detailed and wonderfully written explanation of how one guy used kickstarter to raise the money to fund printing his book.
  (tags: kickstarter funding entrepreneurship business startup)
• FreedomBox Foundation
  Interesting project to give people a secure, private "Internet appliance" that sits in their home/office/etc. and takes care of a lot of the stuff we're currently busy offloading onto "the cloud"
  (tags: privacy internet opensource software)
• Create a new box
  Haven't tried this yet, but a nice parametric tool for knocking out designs for boxes that you can feed into your laser cutter.
  (tags: lasercutting box design object)
• Pay as you go sim with data Wiki
  Suspect this will come in handy some time I'm off abroad and need mobile Internet access
  (tags: travel mobile phone data)

links for 2011-06-14

• Project Euler
  Interesting project to introduce people to learning programming by giving them interesting, teasing puzzles to solve.
  (tags: programming education)
• Welcome to Dr James A R Willis
  The "Paradox of Progress" is a good read. I particularly like the idea of the "Ministry for Leaving Well Alone".
  (tags: society risk)

links for 2011-06-05

• Cheap and cheerful Arduino breadboard basics - Hack a Day
  How to build an Arduino-compatible on stripboard
  (tags: arduino howto breadboard)
• Video intro to Smarcos project
  One of the best videos providing an introduction to what the Internet of Things is that I've seen.
  (tags: iot ubicomp video)
• Westside Consulting Blog: Export jqplot to PNG
  I found jqplot to be quite a nice cross-browser graphing library for jquery, so saving this in case I ever need to offer an "export to png" option for the graphs
  (tags: javascript graph webdev)

links for 2011-05-15

• New life into an old phone 2 « MediaBizTech
  Useful list of links to handy bits of software for the Nokia N95 8GB. I think the next thing I need to get for mine is a new battery.
  (tags: nokia phone software)
• Batteryless Bicycle safety lights, No battery, No friction!)
  Interesting (if not particularly pretty) bike lighting kit. Toying with getting one to replace the rear light on my bike now it's been stolen (the LED throwie currently in its place isn't a particularly long-term solution :-)
  (tags: cycle lights led)
• http://bifferos.bizhat.com/
  Interesting cheap, low-power Linux single-board computer
  (tags: linux embedded hardware)
• Rails 3: Fully Loaded | Intridea Blog
  With so many options to choose from, and given that I don't do Rails work day-in-day-out, these sorts of posts which collect together the popular or recommended gems are really useful.
  (tags: ruby rails webdev)

links for 2011-05-11

• Spirit Circuits - Go Naked - Free 48-hour prototype service for PCBs
  Another UK PCB manufacturer, with an interesting service - PCBs without soldermask, etc. so they can offer them for free. Very useful for getting prototypes made up to check your PCB design before paying for a run
  (tags: pcb hardware electronics)

links for 2011-05-09

• Melisma Stochastic Melody Generator
  I keep thinking up project ideas that need unique music or visuals generated from some form of unique code, so saving this for when I actually start building one of these projects
  (tags: software music algorithm)
• The eTextile Lounge : a global hackerspace: Tuesday Nights on uStream | Lynne Bruning
  A good (from a quick look) jumping off point for lots of useful wearables info or contacts.
  (tags: wearables hacking)
• Adoption Curve » Blog Archive » Git For Cowards
  Tim does a good job of introducing how you'd work with git.
  (tags: git webdev software tools)

links for 2011-05-08

• level |
  Free access to the accounts of most (/all?) businesses in the UK.
  (tags: business uk)
• Welcome to the Locker Project :: TLP - The Locker Project
  Interesting-looking project trying to tackle one of the more important, but oft-overlooked problems with all these web services that we're using. How to keep hold of all of our data.
  (tags: data open privacy identity)

links for 2011-04-26

• Arduino Forum - Road to solve the delay on the Arduino IDE
  Fix for the slowdown on Windows machines with Bluetooth when you open the Serial Port menu in the Arduino IDE.
  (tags: arduino windows)

links for 2011-04-20

• SentiWordNet
  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
  (tags: sentiment analysis programming)

links for 2011-04-14

• Nuvoton » ISD17120PY » Available to buy online at Sequoia Technology Shop
  Audio recording/playback chip. The sort of thing like you get in cards to play back a sample when opened (although this is probably bigger and more expensive, but still only a few quid each)
  (tags: hardware components)
• I Wish This Was
  I love the idea of these stickers. It's a shame that there's no way to link back to local projects from them though, otherwise I'd get some and stick them up around Liverpool
  (tags: community regeneration)
• www.airsensor.co.uk
  The built-environment sensors that Michael Margolis has been involved in designing.
  (tags: environmental sensors)
• Please In My Back Yard - etc
  A lovely idea - kickstarter for starting local businesses. As @cityofsound mentions in the comments, we need to start building this.
  (tags: entrepreneurship regeneration open_source)
• SpotCloud - Cloud Capacity Clearing House / Spot Market: Home
  Interesting idea to provide a market for buying/selling cloud computing capacity
  (tags: cloud)
• How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon
  Great article about how to do creative work (and probably lots in there if you're not doing creative work too). Recommended.
  (tags: inspiration creativity)
• Improving Putty settings on Windows | Field Commander Wieers
  PuTTY is my default choice for ssh or telnet on windows, but sometimes it's useful to tweak the defaults it uses, so saving this for the next time I need to use it.
  (tags: putty ssh telnet windows howto)

links for 2011-04-05

• UK PCB manufacturer
  Recommended by someone on a mailing list somewhere, but it's been sat as an open tab for too long for me to remember. One to try next time I'm getting PCBs made
  (tags: pcb hardware)
• YouTube - The Social Web of Things
  The best video I've seen so far at showing what the ubicomp Internet of Things future should look like, but still leaves plenty to be desired.
  (tags: video internetofthings iot ubicomp)
• thought maybe » Adam Curtis
  I keep wanting to point people at the Adam Curtis documentaries, particularly The Mayfair Set, so it's good to find a collection of them all online.
  (tags: documentary adam_curtis bbc politics society)

links for 2011-03-24

• Wukong | Infochimps Blog
  I keep wondering what Hadoop is and how it would be useful, so maybe this way of fusing it with Ruby would help me get to grips with it
  (tags: ruby hadoop)
• Andrzej on Software: 15 TDD steps to create a Rails application
  Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
  (tags: webdev development ruby tdd testing)
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The RSpec Book
  Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
  (tags: webdev development ruby tdd testing)
• Ruby on Rails Guides: A Guide to Testing Rails Applications
  Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.
  (tags: webdev development ruby tdd testing)
• Why learning TDD is hard, and what to do about it | dave^2 = -1
  Whenever I start a new Ruby on Rails project I make another attempt to try test-driven-development. Each time, so far, I've given up before I've seen any benefits. I'm collecting links to help me get started next time.

  This article confirms a problem I've hit with making the jump from trivial example to actual project, but hasn't made it completely obvious how I'd get past that. Maybe some of the links from the bottom will help.

  
  
  (tags: webdev development ruby tdd testing)
  
  

links for 2011-03-22

• Mesos, a Cluster Platform for Distributed Applications
  Been looking at easier ways for people to deploy generic parallel software apps.
  (tags: cloud cluster)

links for 2011-03-19

• Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers
  Looks like a good overview of statistics.
  (tags: statistics tutorial)
• d3.js
  Yet another javascript visualization library, with some rather pretty examples.
  (tags: javascript datavis visualization data library webdev)
• element14: Video: Energy Harvesting - Is It For Fools?
  Interesting video showing details of a couple of power management chips that are useful for energy harvesting circuits.
  (tags: electronics energy harvesting)

links for 2011-03-11

• LRB · Benjamin Kunkel · How Much Is Too Much?
  A long but very interesting article looking at the financial crisis (and probably other themes too - read this a while back and it's been sat as an open tab waiting for me to do something with it since then...)
  (tags: economics politics economy)
• teho Labs | KiCAD Tutorial
  I'd always avoided KiCAD for PCB design as I'd wrongly assumed it was a KDE package (which would require lots of extra gubbins on my Ubuntu machine), but it's not. Suspect this tutorial will come in handy when I design my next PCB
  (tags: pcb layout hardware electronics)

links for 2011-02-24

• A successful Git branching model » nvie.com
  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)
  (tags: git development workflow)

links for 2011-02-18

• Workshop SOLAR MONSTERS @ Pavilhão do Conhecimento | Leds & Chips
  Another simple solar circuit, would be good to build some of these at Maker Night sometime.
  (tags: electronics solar projects)
• paperplanes. The Virtues of Monitoring
  Lots of useful info on what and how to monitor websites.
  (tags: monitoring website deployment)
• The Awesome Foundation
  An awesome idea. Getting a collection of people together to all chip in some cash in order to hand out grants to let people get projects off the ground
  (tags: ideas groups funding)
• RadioAntenne - Stichting Wireless Leiden
  And again, for the next time I'm playing around building wifi antennas...
  (tags: wifi antenna waveguide)
• TREVOR MARSHALL - Slotted Waveguide 802.11b WLAN antennas
  Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
  (tags: wifi antenna waveguide)
• LEON-XVII'S WI-FI PAGE
  Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
  (tags: wifi antenna waveguide)
• Kerry D. Wong » Blog Archive » A Sensitive DIY Ultrasonic Range Sensor
  Good, in-depth description of building an ultrasonic distance sensor from components (rather than off-the-shelf). At some point I'll use this to build a no-moving-parts anemometer...
  (tags: electronics ultrasonic hardware)
• The paradox of DIY electronics warranties - DIY Drones
  Interesting to read about what DIY Drones is doing with their warranties. Concerns on that is what's holding back development/release of the Mazzini boards - selling something that people then wire into the mains has proved a bit too scary
  (tags: hardware warranty business)
• Hold Conversations, Not Meetings - Tony Golsby-Smith - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
  A good article arguing for better meetings
  (tags: meetings productivity business)

links for 2010-12-27

• Coding Horror: So You'd Like to Send Some Email (Through Code)
  Thorough explanation of the things to do to ensure that any emails your service sends have the best chance of arriving.
  (tags: email webdev development)
• Broccoli & blue cheese soup recipe - Recipes - BBC Good Food
  Perfectly fitted the bill for lunch, as it didn't require any ingredients that I didn't already have in and tasted rather nice.
  (tags: soup recipe)

links for 2010-12-24

• Informed and willing participation - Neighbourhoods
  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.
  (tags: legal liability community)

links for 2010-12-19

• Urban Omnibus » Give a Minute
  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
  (tags: city civic local engagement)
• OpenSpaceWorld: WorkingInOpenSpace
  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.
  (tags: collaboration conference groups longconf barcamp)

links for 2010-12-17

• tmm1/perftools.rb - GitHub
  Tool to profile the performance of ruby apps
  (tags: ruby performance profiling)
• Arduino Forum - ultrasonic wind sensor
  An Arduino project to build an ultrasonic anemometer
  (tags: arduino anemometer ultrasonic)
• DIY Ultrasonic Rangefinder « Keith's Electronics Blog
  How to build an ultrasonic distance sensor from the raw tranducers. Hopefully this will come in handy when I get chance to build an ultrasonic anemometer.
  (tags: hardware howto ultrasonic)
• Waveguide Antenna 2.4 GHz for 802.11b (WiFi) WLAN
  Detailed instructions on how to make a "cantenna" - a directional WiFi antenna made out of a Pringles can (or similar)
  (tags: wifi antenna howto hardware)
• Liverpool SciBar | It's Science in a Bar
  Interesting-looking group giving talks on science once-a-month in Liverpool. Will have to get along to one some time (which also reminds me I still haven't made it to the Cafe Scientifique either...)
  (tags: liverpool events science)
• ‘Culture beats strategy every time’ – wish I’d said that | Creative Disruption
  Great quote, and gets across how important the company culture is to how it functions.
  (tags: quotes business culture)
• James Burke: Connections | Watch Free Documentary Online
  Interesting set of programmes about how interwoven with technology our life is, and they were made in 1978 - so things have become even more entwined since then!
  (tags: documentary)
• Traveling with DIY Electronics « Teach Me To Make
  Tips on how to get through customs/security more easily when you're carrying a load of home-built electronics.
  (tags: hardware electronics travel)
• SparkFun Electronics • View topic - WiFly Shield code library alpha 2 release
  Not tried this yet, but given that the last time I tried my WiFly shield things didn't work particularly well, I'm hoping this will be much better. Suspect it will be, given who's written it.
  (tags: arduino wifi wifly library software)

links for 2010-12-11

• Miller Solar Engine - BEAM Robotics Wiki
  Circuit showing how to use a capacitor to store energy from a solar panel until there's enough to power something.
  (tags: solar hardware electronics)
• Shhh!
  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)
• Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
  "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."
  (tags: leadership business management)

links for 2010-12-07

• Printed Circuit Boards ~ PCB suppliers ~ PCB Train.co.uk
  UK-based online PCB manufacturing site. More expensive than PCBcart.com, but not ridiculously so.
  (tags: pcb prototype hardware manufacturing electronics)

links for 2010-11-10

• Self-Repair Manifesto - iFixit
  Would go nicely alongside our "Get Excited and Make Things" poster in the #RoT29 office I think...
  (tags: manifesto repair sustainability)

links for 2010-11-09

• The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics Co. - Project Gutenberg
  Now this is a rather different sort of book. A great look back at the sorts of projects that children/teenagers were encouraged to make.
  (tags: book diy)
• The Design of Approximation Algorithms
  Looks like a pretty in-depth book that could come in handy if I ever need to solve such problems.
  (tags: book programming algorithm)
• Hardware Will Cut You @ EEVblog – Electronics Engineering Video Blog
  Video of a great presentation outlining the steps in making hardware when you're doing more than one or two of a device.
  (tags: hardware electronics)

links for 2010-11-06

• Final Projects ECE 4760
  A huge collection of microcontroller and electronics projects, from the final year projects archive at Cornell university.
  (tags: electronics hardware projects)
• Blogging Ottinger (tim) :: Use VIM Like a Pro
  Unlike the other vim tutorial I've saved today, this starts at the basics and shows lots of the ways to use the default options. The other tutorial is more about customising vim to let you work better, this is about getting a better handle on how vim works without so much customisation.
  (tags: vim tutorial howto)
• Coming Home to Vim / Steve Losh
  I use vim for most of my text editing, but know that I barely scratch the surface with how powerful it is. I keep reading tutorials or blog posts explaining bits of it but this is the first that's made me think "I should set aside some time to try this stuff out".
  (tags: vim configuration howto tutorial)
• Buy wine online - the internet's biggest wine store - everywine.co.uk
  Huge selection of wine, and the prices seem pretty reasonable too. They've even got La Luna e I Falo, a Barbera d'Asti that I used to regularly get in Seven Up, the little restaurant round the corner from our apartment in Turin where R worked.
  (tags: wine uk supplier)

links for 2010-11-04

• The CircuitCalculator.com Blog
  Lots of useful calculators and other info to help out with PCB design.
  (tags: electronics hardware pcb)
• The Explosion of Micro-Crowdsourcing Services - A Computer Scientist in a Business School
  A good list of the Mechanical Turk-like services springing up to let people do micro-tasks in exchange for cash.
  (tags: crowdsourcing)
• City Views - Reason Magazine interview with Jane Jacobs
  An in-depth interview with Jane Jacobs which covers quite a lot (it seems) of her ideas and opinions on bottom-up city regeneration. I really need to find the time to read some of her books.
  (tags: jane_jacobs interview regeneration urbanism)
• Recommended PCB houses / Assemblers - Electronics and Robotics - Stack Exchange
  Good list of alternatives to PCBCart.com (who I'm pretty happy with so far, but it's good to know what else is out there).
  (tags: pcb hardware electronics supplier)
• Social Art Project Roles « Perfect Path
  A good explanation of how to organise groups and the differing roles that people need to take within them in order to get things done.

  "They’re not in any particular order here. No one person did all of these throughout, they can be passed from person to person and sometimes more than one person needed to take the role on at a time. Also the names don’t matter, I’m not aiming to create anything special or precious here, just trying to explore the ideas."

  
  
  (tags: leadership groups organising)
  
  
• 
  
  www.lushprojects.com - Electronics for Absolute Beginners
  
  
  Could be useful when introducing people to electronics at Howduinos.
  
  
  (tags: electronics hardware tutorial pdf)
  
  
• 
  
  Simple Dissipative Topologies -- Switching-Mode Power Supply Design
  
  
  I'm often building power circuits of one form or another, and it would be nice to make them switched-mode as that's more efficient. However, it's also more complicated. Hopefully this will help demystify things.
  
  
  (tags: hardware tutorial power electronics)
  
  
• 
  
  Lost Tribe of Everton and Scottie Road | Homepage
  
  
  Maps, and a searchable directory of people from the Scottie Road area of Liverpool (including my grandparents) from just before the slum clearances of the 1960s.
  
  
  (tags: Liverpool Everton history)
  
  
• 
  
  Georgian and Regency Liverpool - SkyscraperCity
  
  
  Huge collection of photos of Georgian/Regency housing stock in Liverpool, and not all taken round the Georgian Quarter.
  
  
  (tags: Liverpool photos)
  
  
• 
  
  Doors of Perception weblog: A Tale of Two Trains
  
  
  An interesting look at distance and why we should maybe resist attempts to compress it.
  
  
  (tags: transport sustainability)
  
  
• 
  
  Where's Your Windmill?
  
  
  “You’re charged VAT to repair old buildings, and you’re charged zero VAT to build new ones, or to build new estates on greenfield sites. That’s absolutely bonkers, and everybody knows it in the building industry, we’re just all keeping quiet about it."

  Is anyone campaigning to get this fixed? Seems like a stupid state of affairs to me...

  
  
  (tags: housing uk regeneration)
  
  

links for 2010-10-20

• OpenBricks
  Interesting project to make building embedded Linux systems easier.
  (tags: linux embedded framework)

links for 2010-10-19

• “Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward Shitstorms | 43 Folders
  If you only read one article about getting things done this year, then make sure it's this one.
  (tags: productivity procrastination philosophy)
• Tangent Tutorials
  A whole range of electronics technique tutorials.
  (tags: electronics tutorial video)
• Git from the bottom up - Lost in Technopolis
  I'm still unconvinced that git is a better solution for source control than subversion for my needs, but saving this for the next time I need to get my head round how it works.
  (tags: git tutorial development)
• Learn Python The Hard Way: Learn Python The Hard Way
  After resisting learning python (although not until I'd tried to get to grips with it once or twice) it looks like I might be needing this sometime soon...
  (tags: python programming tutorial books)
• Concise electronics for geeks
  Quite a detailed introduction to electronics, including some of the physics behind it. Haven't had time to dig into it yet.
  (tags: electronics tutorial)
• Not So SMART: Replicating (Instead of Growing) Natural Small Organizations « how to save the world
  Interesting post about the pitfalls of the usual command and control management techniques.
  (tags: management)

links for 2010-10-03

• What Happens At Y Combinator
  Long, detailed explanation of what goes on at the Y Combinator startup incubator project
  (tags: startup entrepreneurship business)
• fabrickit : fabrickit
  Interesting beginners plug-and-play wearable computing components.
  (tags: wearables arduino hardware electronics clothing fashion)

links for 2010-09-24

• cityofsound: Contingent: recent films by BERG/Dentsu London and Keiichi Matsuda
  Another great post from Dan Hill. The BERG video is lovely, and the Augmented City / Domestic Robocop videos are superbly produced but give a worrying view of the world once augmented reality takes hold. Luckily I don't believe that things will play out that way, or is it that I'll be trying to edge the technology in a different direction...
  (tags: augmentedreality videos ubicomp)

links for 2010-09-02

• Setting Up Twitter Bots with OAuth | maSnun's logs
  An easy to follow (so far - haven't finished migrating my Twitterbots over to OAuth yet) explanation of how to move over to the new OAuth API for Twitter.
  (tags: twitter oauth)
• Self-Improving Bayesian Sentiment Analysis for Twitter
  Some useful links and explanation of how to do basic analysis of the sentiment of tweets. Might come in handy some time...
  (tags: algorithm sentiment analysis data)
• Seth's Blog: Responsibility and authority
  "Many people struggle at work because they want more authority.

  It turns out you can get a lot done if you just take more responsbility instead. It's often offered, rarely taken.

  (And you can get even more done if you give away credit, relentlessly)"

  
  
  (tags: authority responsibility motivation)
  
  

links for 2010-08-16

• Be The Change Symposium
  A free one-day conference being (co)organised by the Transition Towns Liverpool group. Not sure I'm in Liverpool when it's on, but if I am then I think I'll be heading along.
  (tags: Liverpool conference sustainability)
• Inspiring Digital Engagement
  Sounds like an interesting conference coming up in Sheffield soon. Heard about it through the Bookleteer guys at #Be2campbrum
  (tags: sheffield conference bigsociety)
• Vertical Axle Wind Turbine(VAWT) with noise decreasing upgrade by ...
  I wonder how well this would work when mated to a printer-scavenged stepper motor...
  (tags: environment energy wind)
• Kernock Park Plants - Carpet Bedding
  (tags: gardening supplier)

links for 2010-08-09

• Taykt - information on the go
  A more affordable option for SMS integration with web apps.
  (tags: mobile sms api)
• IndyHall Blog » Indy Hall – By the Numbers - Coworking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  Detailed look at the finances and growth of a co-working space in Philadelphia.
  (tags: startup coworking business office)
• Arduino - LiquidCrystal - Character Creator
  Nice tool to generate character arrays for use in Arduino LCD or LED matrix code. Similar to, but prettier and more polished, something I knocked up during Howduino NCL to help the guys working on their LED matrices.
  (tags: arduino lcd led tools)
• Ganglia Monitoring System
  Interesting-looking performance monitoring tool used by Etsy (i.e. that's where I heard of it).
  (tags: monitoring tools open_source)
• Scaling startups
  Good post on the importance of the company's culture. I don't think it just applies to startups really. And rightly shows that process is important, but similarly that there should be as little as necessary and there should be some flexibility in applying it.
  (tags: business startup management culture)
• Make: Online : How-To: Design something without a computer
  Fascinating video showing the techniques used in the 1960s for building prototypes of a new design
  (tags: video design prototype 1960s)

links for 2010-08-04

• Promoting Investment and Economic Development: The Future of Liverpool
  Great to see a conference on the Big Society happening in Liverpool. Less great that it's an exclusive £300-odd per ticket event. I also can't find where it's being held... maybe that's because my immediate reaction to finding out about it was to suggest we could hold a better, free, more inclusive rival conference next-door to it :-)
  (tags: Liverpool bigsociety bsitnorth conference)
• Plastic Recycling - MakerBot Industries
  For ages I've been wondering if it's possible to grind up old milk bottles (and any other domestic plastic waste) and use it as the source material for 3D printing on things like the RepRap or Cupcake. It's great to find that lots of other people have had the same idea, and actually gotten on with experimenting with it.
  (tags: recycling fabbing)
• History of Liverpool in Lancashire | Map and description
  Archive of writing about Liverpool.
  (tags: liverpool history)

links for 2010-08-03

• designswarm thoughts » Blog Archive » Ikea and coffee: Thoughts on innovation hubs
  Alex on top form. I think I violently agree with every word of this.
  (tags: innovation city architecture office)
• Mango, open source M2M
  Interesting-looking system for data logging, monitoring and control of sensors, building systems, etc.
  (tags: m2m monitoring open_source)

links for 2010-07-31

• Make: Online : Detroit is the freedom to make things... by Bethany Shorb
  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."

  
  
  (tags: detroit regeneration tinkering)
  
  

links for 2010-07-29

• Worldchanging: Bright Green: Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?
  "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.

  
  
  (tags: green sustainability civic)
  
  
• 
  
  Git Reference
  
  
  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.
  
  
  (tags: git development reference)
  
  
• 
  
  Pay as you go sim with data Wiki
  
  
  Handy wiki to track what sort of SIM to get when you're visiting a different country
  
  
  (tags: mobile travel phone)
  
  

links for 2010-07-10

• Betavine Forge: Vodafones Linux Based Femto Cell: Project Info
  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.
  (tags: linux open_source mobile)
• Urban Omnibus » Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism
  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.
  (tags: urban future city ubicomp adamgreenfield)
• You wouldn’t burn a book, or some reflections on narrative capital « matt.me63.com – Matt Edgar
  "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."

  
  
  (tags: Leeds docks regeneration)
  
  

links for 2010-07-07

• JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
  Another nice looking javascript library for doing visualisations. Can't see, from a quick look, if it supports IE as well as newer, fancier browsers.
  (tags: javascript visualization library webdev)

links for 2010-07-05

• How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late: Andy Grove - Bloomberg
  Fantastic piece from the former CEO of Intel on the problems with focusing on profit-margins over jobs. The possible decline of Silicon Valley looks rather similar to the collapse of manufacturing that the UK went through in the late-70s and 80s. The challenge for us is to work out how to recover from that problem.
  (tags: economics business manufacturing technology management)

links for 2010-07-04

• My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists – ChrisAshworth.org
  Great article in favour of find ways to bring more flexibility to the workplace from an employers perspective.
  (tags: business startup)
• A Beginner’s guide to making an Arduino Shield PCB | AaronEiche.com
  Looks like a pretty good introduction to PCB layout with Eagle.
  (tags: arduino hardware pcb design tutorial)

links for 2010-06-25

• Tagmap | Data Visualization Demo
  Some very nice dataviz modules for Drupal. I need to have a play with some of the more advanced features of Drupal sometime... not quite sure when that's going to happen...
  (tags: data visualization drupal)

links for 2010-06-19

• Dailymotion - The Daily Show: An Energy-Independent Future - a News & Politics video
  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.
  (tags: energy environment oil)
• Made in Brooklyn | Metropolis Magazine
  "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."
  (tags: industrial regeneration brooklyn green)

links for 2010-05-16

• The Law of Success 2.0: case 28: Adam Greenfield
  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."

  
  
  (tags: business workplace office ubicomp)
  
  

links for 2010-04-26

• The UK Camp Site for Tent and Caravan Campers in the UK
  Keep talking about going camping again (and keep wondering about throwing the tent on the back of the bike again, although I'd need more clothes in UK than I did in Italy...) so this might come in handy for finding sites.
  (tags: camping uk)
• Home (Liverpool Cafe Scientifique)
  Interesting-sounding gatherings just down the road in Liverpool. Haven't made it along to one yet, but I'm sure I will sometime soon.
  (tags: liverpool science technology events)
• Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software
  Nice looking open-source tool for generating data visualisations for datasets that can be shown as graphs (i.e. a network of nodes and connections)
  (tags: visualization graphs software tools data)
• Skiffy plastic parts, Skiffy metal parts, components
  Lots of small plastic and metal parts, like PCB spacers, nuts, bolts, that sort of thing. A huge range by the looks of it.
  (tags: parts electronics hardware)
• Tableau Public | explore, create, share.
  Some nice data viz examples produced with the Tableau software
  (tags: visualization data tools)
• Liverpool Daily Post.co.uk - News - Liverpool News - Opinions divided at leaders’ debate party in Liverpool bar
  Coverage of the leaders debate watching party that Bubblino and I attended on Thursday, including a very brief quote from me.
  (tags: press liverpool politics)

links for 2010-04-17

• Create - Community recycling and training
  Another electronics recycling social enterprise here in Liverpool
  (tags: recycling electronics liverpool)
• Thinking About Innovation // NoahBrier.com
  Excellent blog post and slide deck about innovation, and how it's really the commercialization of invention rather than invention itself. Worth reading just for the onion/Gilette slides, but lots more good stuff in the rest of it.
  (tags: innovation business)
• Why Content Is a Public Good - Charlie's Diary
  Really good and academic (though in an extremely readable way) look at the economics around charging for music, films, etc.
  (tags: economics music art piracy debill)
• Ignite Liverpool returns for people to share passions - LDP Creative
  Alistair Houghton's write-up of the second Ignite Liverpool event in the Liverpool Daily Post LDP Creative blog.
  (tags: igniteliv ignite liverpool)

links for 2010-04-09

• Fiddler Web Debugger - A free web debugging tool
  Useful tool to check out what web requests a page pulls in, and more importantly, how long they take to download.
  (tags: windows webdev debugging performance)
• Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained - good coders code, great reuse
  Lots of useful tips for faster and more productive shell usage on Linux (and probably quite a bit would work on Cygwin on Windows too)
  (tags: linux tips unix commandline)
• Protomold » Rapid Plastic Injection Moulding
  Next step up from Ponoko and Shapeways on the tinkering -> mass-production product curve?
  (tags: hardware product manufacturing design)
• Iota - wearable mobile phone
  Very nicely packaged wearable mobile phone, complete with Bluetooth and NFC (RFID) reader.
  (tags: mobile wearables)
• Skeptobot: The Digital Economy Bill passed: The internet watched live as a handful of MPs ignored democracy in their attempts to control that which they don't understand.
  A good summary of the Digital Economy Bill debacle as it was just rushed through Parliament. The (soon to be illegal?) mashup video is particularly nice.
  (tags: debill government uk internet)
• Northwest Electronics Recycling | home
  Electronics and white-goods recycling place out in Tuebrook. Handy to know from both a getting rid of old computers and electronics, and an acquiring old stuff to rip apart point of view.
  (tags: liverpool electronics recycling)

links for 2010-03-20

• THAT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME YOU'RE AMAZING
  I think I need to start sending this link out to people after they've done cool stuff.
  (tags: fun achievement reward)
• Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Follow Curiosity, Not Careers
  Interesting piece on career development and the problems with universities (and not just because I've accidentally been following that advice for years now ;-)
  (tags: career university creativity learning)

links for 2010-03-13

• My biggest mistakes « Scott Berkun
  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.
  (tags: career business)

links for 2010-03-01

• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: US Manufacturing Is Not Dead
  According to this analysis, US manufacturing is far from in decline, it's just manufacturing job numbers that are falling due to increased productivity. Would be interesting to see a similar version for the UK. The big question, that this doesn't seem to address at all, is what's going to provide the alternate employment for the workforce?
  (tags: economy manufacturing unemployment)
• Ove Arup's Key Speech | Arup | A global firm of consulting engineers, designers, planners and project managers
  The speech that Ove Arup (the founder of engineering firm Arup) gave which outlines the companies aims and core values. A great blueprint for any company, I think.
  (tags: business inspiration speech arup)
• Draft: The Salmon Protocol
  Interesting specification for a way of providing signed comments and syndication of said comments to piggyback on an Atom feed. Lots of good links to other standards for doing signing, etc. too
  (tags: syndication comments specification webdev feed atom)

links for 2010-02-26

• gheat - Project Hosting on Google Code
  A nice solution to do heatmaps on Google maps.
  (tags: maps visualization python webdev)

links for 2010-02-24

• Strong Opinions, Weakly Held - Bob Sutton
  A lovely approach to life.
  (tags: philosophy inspiration)
• Lyons: How Google & Facebook Violate Your Privacy - Newsweek.com
  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)

links for 2010-02-15

• cityofsound: Emergent Urbanism, or ‘bottom-up planning’
  Interesting thoughts on how people might engage better with the planning of their cities, and wondering if there are better ways than just NIMBY-style actions to prevent change. How could people propose more developments that they would like, rather than just oppose plans that they don't like?
  (tags: urbanism city planning)

links for 2010-02-10

• FangleTronics
  Lots of interesting little projects a guy is making for his and his kids' enjoyment.
  (tags: electronics blog)
• Britain's “broken society�?: Through a glass darkly | The Economist
  "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)

"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.

Tags: architecture planning Liverpool Southampton

links for 2010-01-25

• Saul Griffith's House of Cool Ideas
  A blueprint for MCQN Ltd?
  (tags: business inspiration entrepreneurship)

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.

links for 2010-01-14

• EZ430-Chronos - Texas Instruments Embedded Processors Wiki
  Not as pretty as the Sony Ericsson Bluetooth watch, but an interesting wireless dev kit watch, and reasonably priced at $49.
  (tags: ubicomp hardware watch)
• Telling time with open realtime data » Headway
  Nice project using a Bluetooth watch to display the times of the next buses. Hadn't realised you could get Bluetooth watches, could be a good option for future research into glanceable ubicomp.
  (tags: bluetooth ubicomp watch hardware)
• Saving The Planet @Home - Earth Notes
  Lots of useful information from a guy who's been moving his home office off-grid and trying to make it carbon-neutral.
  (tags: energy sustainability solar)
• YouTube - Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small
  Superb lecture about the management techniques and process at Pixar. Packed full of useful ideas and things to remember. Let's hope some of them have lodged in my brain somewhere
  (tags: pixar management lectures video)

links for 2010-01-06

• Lecture slides released « The Wireless Embedded Internet
  Good set of slides explaining some of the concepts behind 6LoWPAN, a version of IPv6 for very low power devices - sensors, etc., the usual ubicomp/Internet of Things sort of stuff.
  (tags: IPv6 embedded ubicomp)

links for 2009-12-25

• Dolores Labs Blog » Not-quite-live-blog: Jonathan Zittrain on “Minds For Sale�?
  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.

  
  
  (tags: crowdsourcing ethics)
  
  

links for 2009-12-16

• Made by Hand | Porsche 356 « A Continuous Lean.
  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.
  (tags: porsche car manufacturing video)

links for 2009-11-26

• www.homeworkshop.org.uk - Advert - All Ads
  A good site to pick up second-hand tools like lathes, bench drills, etc. Handy if you're kitting out a workshop or maybe a hackspace...
  (tags: tools workshop hackspace industrial)

links for 2009-11-20

• todbot blog » Blog Archive » Too Much RFID
  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.
  (tags: rfid overview hardware)

links for 2009-11-13

• UX Week 2009 » Blog Archive » VIDEO: Matt Webb
  Really interesting and insightful talk from Matt Webb about building products and the challenges of taking them to market.
  (tags: product design manufacturing)

links for 2009-10-15

• The fun theory
  Fantastic set of projects to encourage good behaviour by making doing the right thing more fun. Sounds all very worthy and dry but just go and watch the video of the World's Deepest Bin.
  (tags: fun design civic)
• Make: Online : How-To: CD drive scavenging for parts
  Step-by-step instructions for dismantling CD drives and which parts can be reused. Handy accompaniment to the vibrobots project as you can find most of the bits to build a vibrobot in a CD drive
  (tags: electronics howto howduino)
• Make: Online : How-To: Classroom vibrobots
  Step-by-step instructions for building vibrobots (aka brushbots).
  (tags: electronics howto howduino)
• WiShield 1.0
  Finally an affordable WiFi shield for the Arduino. Haven't bought one yet, but I'm sure I'll get one eventually
  (tags: arduino wifi hardware)
• Arduino Blog » Blog Archive » Arduino Manufacturing and Carbon Neutrality
  Good to see the official Arduino board manufacturers are thinking about the environmental impact of the boards. Also good to see that they're not claiming that offsetting is a full solution, but it's heading in the right direction.
  (tags: arduino hardware sustainability environment)

links for 2009-10-09

• TEDx Leeds | NTI Leeds
  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.
  (tags: TEDx Leeds tedxnorth)

links for 2009-10-08

• Bob Sutton: The "No Dick Rule" and the "Asshole-Free Section"
  Interesting story of one of the ways that ARUP tries (and seemingly succeeds) to maintain a good culture within the company. One bad apple really can spoil the whole bunch and it takes courage to oust them early, particularly if they seem to be talented.
  (tags: company culture)
• Generating Electricity With Stepper Motors
  Lots of interesting possibilities for further reuse of bits from printers. Obviously someone needs to work out what to do with the non-stepper-motor bits of a printer :-)
  (tags: electricity electronics energy)
• Cyliax-186.pdf (application/pdf Object)
  Internet-Connected Sonic Anemometer. You can measure wind speed and direction with some ultrasonic sensors. No moving parts. I've been wondering whether to see if the guys at the bombed out church would like one of these to let them show on their website whether St. Lukes will be open or not
  (tags: sensors wind electronics)

links for 2009-10-05

• Museum 2.0: The Magic Vest Phenomenon and Other Wearable Tools for ...
  A good summary of how putting on a uniform (or some sort) can help you overcome both your own sh