March 24, 2013
An Assortment of (relatively) Old But Interesting Links
These tabs have been cluttering up my browser for months now... nagging reminders that I'm not blogging as much as I'd like (one of many things I'm not finding as much time to do as I like, but what's new...)
Anyway, rather than just close them, I'll share them here. Feel free to read them and then imagine what the blog post they would've inspired would look like, or write one of your own instead :-)
- 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
January 23, 2013
Links: Design, the Internet of Things, legalities and work
Things are rather busy at the minute, and I'd amassed a few open tabs in Firefox of assorted things I thought "ooh, I should share that" when I encountered them in my RSS reading. Normally they'd just go out as a tweet, with a brief bit of background but as (a) I'm not on twitter as much at the minute (see earlier point about being busy...) and (b) when I am, I'm already sharing plenty of links (partly because we're in promo mode for the Good Night Lamp kickstarter campaign and partly because I've been blogging quite a lot - for me of late - recently) I figured I'd continue the blogging-kick and post an old school link post.
- Hack Design An online course trying to teach developers how to be better designers. I've signed up, and so far it's been quite interesting. We'll see how long I last...
- A few thoughts on design and the internet of things. A fairly long piece from Tim Burrell-Saward, which suggests some design principles for connected devices. It's nice to see other people starting to talk about these sorts of things. I liked "make it Poppins"
- Tom Coates - An Animating Spark: Mundane Computing and the Web of Data. More principles for the Internet of Things, this time from Tom Coates. Principle #3 is excellent, although I'm not sure I agree with principle #7, I can see why he's included it but I'm much more a fan of keeping intelligence at the edge of the network where possible.
- A Moment of Silence for Aaron Swartz. Bunnie Huang sharing his experiences of challenging tech behemoths and how the legal system can be used against someone doing things on the edges of the ordinary. A great post, such a shame it was written in the tragic circumstances of Aaron Schwartz's suicide.
- Hiut Denim - Do the work. Now you're (hopefully) fired up about doing important work and changing the world, a great reminder from Hiut Denim that all we need to do now is the hard work it takes.
Which is a good note for me to end on - part of the reason I've been blogging (a bit) more of late is that it works as a good way to get my writing muscle-memory going, so I can get on with finishing the next chapter of my book (another thing I'm long overdue explaining here, but that will have to wait for another day...)
January 05, 2013
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...
December 30, 2012
Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding
What's the video equivalent of dog-earing? Whilst finding details about the recent Golden Age of Steam documentaries, I stumbled across the BBC Four Collection on Steam.
The BBC Four Collections are a fantastic way to start opening up the archives, and it's lovely to be able to watch old documentaries again. I have a feeling I'll be leafing through some more of them in future, this Panorama documentary from 1966, for instance, looks interesting - predicting what the tech industry in California will look like in the year 2000... There's also The Great Railway Cavalcade: Rocket 150 at Rainhill, looking at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Rainhill Trials, which I remember attending as a boy.
Anyway. I've just watched the Tuesday Documentary: Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding. First broadcast in November 1969, it's a look at the railway network and men who worked on it, particularly the area around Sheffield and Manchester but also touching on London.
It's from a time when steam was on the wane and the electric and diesel engines were taking over. Commenting after a section showing old railwaymen sharing stories and banter in the railwayman's club, the narrator says:
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...
September 17, 2011
links for 2011-09-17
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"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?"
September 13, 2011
links for 2011-09-13
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"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."
September 08, 2011
links for 2011-09-08
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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...
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Might come in handy for the next time I want an Arduino to detect some sound events
August 31, 2011
links for 2011-08-31
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Interesting piece exploring how digital identity might affect the coming ubiquitous computing and augmented reality world
August 27, 2011
links for 2011-08-27
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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.
August 23, 2011
links for 2011-08-23
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A rather lovely CSS grid system that lets you target bigger screens by moving to multiple columns as the screen gets wider
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A good roundup of the variety of plans that have been drawn up over the years for how Liverpool/Merseyside should evolve.
August 22, 2011
links for 2011-08-22
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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...
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A well written, if ultimately disheartening, article dismantling the approach and the language of the changes in university funding.
August 07, 2011
links for 2011-08-07
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Useful-looking CRM tool, recommended by Chris Hough.
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Developing an open source driver for Epilog laser cutters
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It's like a Haynes manual for basic civilisation.
July 29, 2011
links for 2011-07-29
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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
July 28, 2011
links for 2011-07-28
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Lovely CNC milled and laser-cut design for an iPhone dock, with a well done promotion video
July 27, 2011
links for 2011-07-27
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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)
July 24, 2011
links for 2011-07-24
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Some more detailed tips on sizes, etc. from iTead
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Some tips on using iTead as a PCB fabber
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iTead, one of the recommendations (and one of the cheapest) from the PCB comparison I just posted
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Good comparison of PCB manufacturing websites
June 30, 2011
links for 2011-06-30
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An interesting project to provide WiFi mesh networking over city-wide sorts of distances
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Lots of photos and a description of the process of making PCBs
June 22, 2011
links for 2011-06-22
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A good explanation of how to approach attending an unconference and what may or may not work for sessions to run.
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Not watched any of these yet, but expect they'll come in handy.
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A nice collection of quotes from Euan (and I think it's the place he adds any new ones he finds too)
June 16, 2011
links for 2011-06-16
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A detailed and wonderfully written explanation of how one guy used kickstarter to raise the money to fund printing his book.
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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"
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Haven't tried this yet, but a nice parametric tool for knocking out designs for boxes that you can feed into your laser cutter.
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Suspect this will come in handy some time I'm off abroad and need mobile Internet access
June 14, 2011
links for 2011-06-14
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Interesting project to introduce people to learning programming by giving them interesting, teasing puzzles to solve.
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The "Paradox of Progress" is a good read. I particularly like the idea of the "Ministry for Leaving Well Alone".
June 05, 2011
links for 2011-06-05
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How to build an Arduino-compatible on stripboard
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One of the best videos providing an introduction to what the Internet of Things is that I've seen.
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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
May 15, 2011
links for 2011-05-15
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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.
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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 :-)
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Interesting cheap, low-power Linux single-board computer
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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.
May 11, 2011
links for 2011-05-11
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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
May 09, 2011
links for 2011-05-09
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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
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A good (from a quick look) jumping off point for lots of useful wearables info or contacts.
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Tim does a good job of introducing how you'd work with git.
May 08, 2011
links for 2011-05-08
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Free access to the accounts of most (/all?) businesses in the UK.
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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.
April 26, 2011
links for 2011-04-26
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Fix for the slowdown on Windows machines with Bluetooth when you open the Serial Port menu in the Arduino IDE.
April 20, 2011
links for 2011-04-20
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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
April 14, 2011
links for 2011-04-14
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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)
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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
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The built-environment sensors that Michael Margolis has been involved in designing.
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A lovely idea - kickstarter for starting local businesses. As @cityofsound mentions in the comments, we need to start building this.
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Interesting idea to provide a market for buying/selling cloud computing capacity
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Great article about how to do creative work (and probably lots in there if you're not doing creative work too). Recommended.
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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.
April 05, 2011
links for 2011-04-05
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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
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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.
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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.
March 24, 2011
links for 2011-03-24
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
March 22, 2011
links for 2011-03-22
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Been looking at easier ways for people to deploy generic parallel software apps.
March 19, 2011
links for 2011-03-19
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Looks like a good overview of statistics.
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Yet another javascript visualization library, with some rather pretty examples.
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Interesting video showing details of a couple of power management chips that are useful for energy harvesting circuits.
March 11, 2011
links for 2011-03-11
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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...)
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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
February 24, 2011
links for 2011-02-24
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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)
February 18, 2011
links for 2011-02-18
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Another simple solar circuit, would be good to build some of these at Maker Night sometime.
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Lots of useful info on what and how to monitor websites.
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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
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And again, for the next time I'm playing around building wifi antennas...
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Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
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Would've been handy for a project I've recently finished, so for the next time...
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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...
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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
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A good article arguing for better meetings
December 27, 2010
links for 2010-12-27
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Thorough explanation of the things to do to ensure that any emails your service sends have the best chance of arriving.
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Perfectly fitted the bill for lunch, as it didn't require any ingredients that I didn't already have in and tasted rather nice.
December 24, 2010
links for 2010-12-24
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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.
December 19, 2010
links for 2010-12-19
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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
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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.
December 17, 2010
links for 2010-12-17
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Tool to profile the performance of ruby apps
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An Arduino project to build an ultrasonic anemometer
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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.
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Detailed instructions on how to make a "cantenna" - a directional WiFi antenna made out of a Pringles can (or similar)
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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...)
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Great quote, and gets across how important the company culture is to how it functions.
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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!
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Tips on how to get through customs/security more easily when you're carrying a load of home-built electronics.
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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.
December 11, 2010
links for 2010-12-11
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Circuit showing how to use a capacitor to store energy from a solar panel until there's enough to power something.
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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...
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"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."
December 07, 2010
links for 2010-12-07
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UK-based online PCB manufacturing site. More expensive than PCBcart.com, but not ridiculously so.
November 10, 2010
links for 2010-11-10
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Would go nicely alongside our "Get Excited and Make Things" poster in the #RoT29 office I think...
November 09, 2010
links for 2010-11-09
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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.
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Looks like a pretty in-depth book that could come in handy if I ever need to solve such problems.
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Video of a great presentation outlining the steps in making hardware when you're doing more than one or two of a device.
November 06, 2010
links for 2010-11-06
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A huge collection of microcontroller and electronics projects, from the final year projects archive at Cornell university.
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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.
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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".
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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.
November 04, 2010
links for 2010-11-04
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Lots of useful calculators and other info to help out with PCB design.
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A good list of the Mechanical Turk-like services springing up to let people do micro-tasks in exchange for cash.
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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.
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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).
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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."
Could be useful when introducing people to electronics at Howduinos.
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.
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.
Huge collection of photos of Georgian/Regency housing stock in Liverpool, and not all taken round the Georgian Quarter.
An interesting look at distance and why we should maybe resist attempts to compress it.
“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...
October 20, 2010
October 19, 2010
links for 2010-10-19
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If you only read one article about getting things done this year, then make sure it's this one.
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A whole range of electronics technique tutorials.
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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.
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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...
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Quite a detailed introduction to electronics, including some of the physics behind it. Haven't had time to dig into it yet.
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Interesting post about the pitfalls of the usual command and control management techniques.
October 03, 2010
links for 2010-10-03
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Long, detailed explanation of what goes on at the Y Combinator startup incubator project
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Interesting beginners plug-and-play wearable computing components.
September 24, 2010
links for 2010-09-24
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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...
September 02, 2010
links for 2010-09-02
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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.
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Some useful links and explanation of how to do basic analysis of the sentiment of tweets. Might come in handy some time...
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"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)"
August 16, 2010
links for 2010-08-16
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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.
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Sounds like an interesting conference coming up in Sheffield soon. Heard about it through the Bookleteer guys at #Be2campbrum
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I wonder how well this would work when mated to a printer-scavenged stepper motor...
August 09, 2010
links for 2010-08-09
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A more affordable option for SMS integration with web apps.
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Detailed look at the finances and growth of a co-working space in Philadelphia.
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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.
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Interesting-looking performance monitoring tool used by Etsy (i.e. that's where I heard of it).
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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.
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Fascinating video showing the techniques used in the 1960s for building prototypes of a new design
August 04, 2010
links for 2010-08-04
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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 :-)
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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.
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Archive of writing about Liverpool.
August 03, 2010
links for 2010-08-03
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Alex on top form. I think I violently agree with every word of this.
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Interesting-looking system for data logging, monitoring and control of sensors, building systems, etc.
July 31, 2010
links for 2010-07-31
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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."
July 29, 2010
links for 2010-07-29
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"The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren't, and that we're so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.
Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it."
Ostensibly a look at the Transition Town movement and postulating that it's targetting the wrong problems, but in addition to the green agenda this could almost be a manifesto for civic renewal.
Another cheatsheet for git. One of these days I'll use it enough to get my head round it and not need to look through these things whenever I'm doing anything with it.
Handy wiki to track what sort of SIM to get when you're visiting a different country
July 10, 2010
links for 2010-07-10
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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.
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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.
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"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."
July 07, 2010
links for 2010-07-07
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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.
July 05, 2010
links for 2010-07-05
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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.
July 04, 2010
links for 2010-07-04
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Great article in favour of find ways to bring more flexibility to the workplace from an employers perspective.
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Looks like a pretty good introduction to PCB layout with Eagle.
June 25, 2010
links for 2010-06-25
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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...
June 19, 2010
links for 2010-06-19
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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.
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"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."
May 16, 2010
links for 2010-05-16
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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."
April 26, 2010
links for 2010-04-26
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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.
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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.
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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)
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Lots of small plastic and metal parts, like PCB spacers, nuts, bolts, that sort of thing. A huge range by the looks of it.
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Some nice data viz examples produced with the Tableau software
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Coverage of the leaders debate watching party that Bubblino and I attended on Thursday, including a very brief quote from me.
April 17, 2010
links for 2010-04-17
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Another electronics recycling social enterprise here in Liverpool
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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.
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Really good and academic (though in an extremely readable way) look at the economics around charging for music, films, etc.
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Alistair Houghton's write-up of the second Ignite Liverpool event in the Liverpool Daily Post LDP Creative blog.
April 09, 2010
links for 2010-04-09
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Useful tool to check out what web requests a page pulls in, and more importantly, how long they take to download.
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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)
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Next step up from Ponoko and Shapeways on the tinkering -> mass-production product curve?
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Very nicely packaged wearable mobile phone, complete with Bluetooth and NFC (RFID) reader.
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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.
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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.
March 20, 2010
links for 2010-03-20
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I think I need to start sending this link out to people after they've done cool stuff.
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Interesting piece on career development and the problems with universities (and not just because I've accidentally been following that advice for years now ;-)
March 13, 2010
links for 2010-03-13
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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.
March 01, 2010
links for 2010-03-01
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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?
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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.
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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
February 26, 2010
February 24, 2010
links for 2010-02-24
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A lovely approach to life.
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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."
February 15, 2010
links for 2010-02-15
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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?
February 10, 2010
links for 2010-02-10
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Lots of interesting little projects a guy is making for his and his kids' enjoyment.
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"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.
February 06, 2010
"New Southampton looks much the same as New Everywhere Else"
I was just going to add this link to my delicious stream, but I wanted to pull just that bit too much in the way of quotes out of it, and so figured a blog post was more suitable.
In From the Mill to the Mall, Owen Hatherley provides a lovely essay on lots of the problems with the retail park and shopping mall architecture and planning of the modern city. It's nominally about Southampton, but I was pointed to it by someone spotting the similarities with Birmingham, and obviously I can draw the comparisons with Liverpool (even down to the hugely busy but invisible container port and the civic architectural legacy from the White Star and Cunard lines)
"Jobs For Local People are no doubt the eventual result, and the alibi for the extremely profitable land deals. The result is a city devoid of any real civic pride, with a series of chain pubs where shops used to be, competing for cheap pints."
"(Southampton is lucky enough to have only one 'Quarter', though a Cultural Quarter has been promised for some time)" Indeed. Liverpool isn't so lucky, we have the Knowledge Quarter, which seems to overlap quite a lot with the Georgian Quarter, and in the centre of town is the Met Quarter (although maybe the council isn't responsible for that, as it's basically a shopping mall... At least the redevelopment around the Baltic Fleet pub is the Baltic Triangle.
At least our big city-centre shopping temple, Liverpool One, does a reasonable job of interfacing to the surrounding city - its walkways are covered rather than enclosed, so there's plenty of natural light and some exposure to the elements; there's some variety in the architectural styles; and the preservation (or recreation) of the original street pattern gives it some ebb and flow with the existing city. It's still a big shopping mall, full of chains that could be anywhere else and has privatised a huge chunk of the city centre, but it's in the centre and about as well done as you could hope for.
Anyway, my ranting aside, it's a good read.
January 25, 2010
January 20, 2010
Gordon is Right
Gordon McLean has written an excellent post on his blog, entitled Why blogging is good, pointing to some of the conversation around the recent blog post from Clay Shirky claiming arrogance and lying can be useful traits. There are links to the discussion over on Gordon's post, so you should go and read them first because (1) they're good, and (2) I'm going to assume that you have for the rest of this post :-)
I was just going to comment on Gordon's post, but decided I should celebrate the fact that I've got a blog (even if I don't post to it as often as I'd like) and write my comment here.
Gordon says: "As for the issue being discussed in these posts I have to agree with Tom, particularly when he talks about how arrogance and confidence have a place in your “personality toolbox?, but the person who only has those tools is all the poorer for it. Unfortunately society, and certainly the workplace, still seem to favour people with confidence when what we should be doing is cutting through the noise to see what substance lies underneath."
I agree, but I also think that we should all strive to reach into our "personality toolboxes" for our arrogance and confidence in order to call "Bullshit" to dampen the "noise" when we can.
January 14, 2010
links for 2010-01-14
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Not as pretty as the Sony Ericsson Bluetooth watch, but an interesting wireless dev kit watch, and reasonably priced at $49.
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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.
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Lots of useful information from a guy who's been moving his home office off-grid and trying to make it carbon-neutral.
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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
January 06, 2010
links for 2010-01-06
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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.
December 25, 2009
links for 2009-12-25
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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.
December 16, 2009
links for 2009-12-16
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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.
November 26, 2009
links for 2009-11-26
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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...
November 20, 2009
links for 2009-11-20
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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.
November 13, 2009
links for 2009-11-13
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Really interesting and insightful talk from Matt Webb about building products and the challenges of taking them to market.
October 15, 2009
links for 2009-10-15
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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.
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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
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Step-by-step instructions for building vibrobots (aka brushbots).
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Finally an affordable WiFi shield for the Arduino. Haven't bought one yet, but I'm sure I'll get one eventually
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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.
October 09, 2009
links for 2009-10-09
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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.
October 08, 2009
links for 2009-10-08
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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.
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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 :-)
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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
October 05, 2009
links for 2009-10-05
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A good summary of how putting on a uniform (or some sort) can help you overcome both your own shyness and others reticence to engage with you. I think "magic vest" is a great term for it.
September 29, 2009
links for 2009-09-29
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An interesting approach to recovering from illness - Jane McGonigal devised a game to help her recover from concussion. There's an interesting comment from someone wondering what would happen if the technique was applied to the long-term unemployed. There must be some funding for someone to try that out.
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Slightly higher level sniffer than Wireshark, might come in handy for those times when I don't want to be poking around in packet contents.
September 20, 2009
links for 2009-09-20
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Tips about the best and cheapest ways to travel by train, in the UK and abroad.
September 18, 2009
links for 2009-09-18
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A good explanation of how Pete Ashton used Twitter at the recent Supersonic Festival in Birmingham. Includes details of how he explained what was happening to festivalgoers (a screen showing recent tweets alongside printed instruction posters).
August 13, 2009
links for 2009-08-13
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Write-up in the Liverpool Daily Post of the TEDxLiverpool event that was last Friday, including a quote from me and mention of both Bubblino and Howduino.
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Very nice twitter visualisation, perfect for conferences and Barcamp-style events. Should've bookmarked this ages ago after we used it for #be2campnorth and #howduino
August 08, 2009
links for 2009-08-08
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Freely downloadable book about wearable technologies - Lilypad, etc. Wasn't going to bookmark it until I'd read it, but as it's been a while now and I still haven't found time it's better to share now and worry if it's any good later :-)
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Useful library of interface devices, materials, audio equipment, etc. - sure it will come in handy to mine when I've got some strange hardware project on the go
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Nice, simple generator for public domain "spinner" graphics (those little circle animations to show that something's happening).
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The programme of open days for various places around Liverpool has been published for this year. Now I just need to work out which ones I can make it along to
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Surprisingly good (as it features me talking quite a bit :-) video taken at the recent Art of Digital Learning Lab 3 in Lancaster. I talk a bit about Arduino and then show off Bubblino
July 25, 2009
links for 2009-07-25
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Interesting route planner which compares flights and trains and driving to see which is fastest or cheapest or greenest.
July 14, 2009
links for 2009-07-14
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A bit late, but always good to brush up on il mio Italiano.
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Cross-platform software to rip DVDs to AVI (or similar). Recommended on GeekUp, so keeping a note of it in case I want to use something like this in future (maybe if I get round to moving all my DVDs onto the media server)
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Interesting-looking website gathering information about local councils (in this case Liverpool). The committee meetings calendar seems particularly useful stuff to surface. Of course, it could be that all this is already on the Liverpool City Council's own website somewhere...
July 13, 2009
links for 2009-07-13
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Lovely API to get all the information about the BBC schedule. If only I had the time to do something with it.
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Interesting project to build something to measure physical movement - it's intended that you'd just wear it as you go about your life, and then can do interesting stuff with the data captured. (via russelldavies)
July 07, 2009
links for 2009-07-07
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Looks like it would come in handy to protect any tasks I've got running regularly with cron
June 30, 2009
links for 2009-06-30
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Interesting bit of hardware that adds GPS and environmental sensing to a homing pigeon to then map the city.
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The fix to the problem I had recently on the second Bubblino, where it doesn't work when not powered by USB.
June 23, 2009
links for 2009-06-23
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Great idea to work out ways to overcome the myriad little problems that face organisations when trying to take advantage of new Web2.0 tools and social media
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An essential tweak if you're using the Arduino IDE on Windows on a machine with Bluetooth. I used to have to wait around half-a-minute whenever I clicked on the "Tools" menu as it tried to connect to all the Bluetooth devices setup. With this fix the menu appears instantaneously!
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For future reference if I end up doing some detailed air monitoring.
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"In 1986 Barnsley Council adopted an energy efficiency policy with a target of reducing energy consumption by 15% in 5 years. They actually achieved a reduction of 20% in 4 years." Well done Barnsley Council for showing the way forward.
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Info on identifying and reusing stepper motors (after salvaging them from printers or floppy drives, etc.)
June 20, 2009
links for 2009-06-20
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How to use the three-pin temp sensors like the LM35
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Another Arduino and other bits supplier, based in Kent and selling solar panels to use to power your Arduino projects (although maybe only low current draw projects and maybe only 3.3V Arduinos like the Pro?)
June 17, 2009
links for 2009-06-17
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Nice project by Landon Rohatensky, who's modified my Alertuino perl script to trigger his Arduino controlled teasmaid. It picks up the type of tea from a tweet, and that sets the time that the tea steeps before it is dispensed into the cup, ready to drink.
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It turns out that a bike left unlocked in the centre of Liverpool lasted longer (nearly four hours) before being stolen than any of the other locations they tried, including London and Norwich
June 07, 2009
links for 2009-06-07
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All sorts of electronics and hardware goodness.
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A great idea endeavouring to make different ways of getting together to achieve things easily legal. Hopefully will offer a simple menu of choices to make it easy to form co-ops, collectives and collaborative businesses.
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"[tinkering] is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you"
May 31, 2009
links for 2009-05-31
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Lots of interesting parts to use in projects.
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The SCAXb, an Arduino-compatible board with XBee wireless on the board rather than on a separate shield. A cheaper way to get Zigbee comms with your Arduino projects
May 28, 2009
links for 2009-05-28
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Useful templates for things like business cards. I never know how much bleed area, etc. to leave normally, so these are very handy.
May 26, 2009
May 25, 2009
links for 2009-05-25
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Eco-friendly printers based here in Liverpool. I used them for the Howduino posters - their prices seem comparable with anyone else, and their service was great.
May 11, 2009
links for 2009-05-11
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A brief explanation of how Scott Bader Co Ltd became the Scott Bader Commonwealth.
"What that did was change a traditional firm, accountable to its shareholders, into one that could balance doing well with doing good."
Interesting approach with a laudable set of rules to govern how the business is run.
May 09, 2009
links for 2009-05-09
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I should print out the "Right now is a good time" picture and stick it somewhere I'll see it regularly.
May 01, 2009
links for 2009-05-01
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Good overview slide deck for businesses wanting to get their head round social media and web2.0
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Our upcoming Howduino hackday was mentioned in the Liverpool Daily Post, Liverpool's local morning paper.
April 28, 2009
links for 2009-04-28
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Haven't found anything particular I want from here, but saving it for future reference.
April 24, 2009
links for 2009-04-24
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Starting to collect Liverpool-related calendars to feed into an events feed for the city. Feel free to add any you find to delicious with tags Liverpool and Calendar
April 21, 2009
links for 2009-04-21
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A good collection of ways to get started producing better designs in CSS if you're just a programmer rather than a designer. I've used some of the stuff in here, but it still contains lots of good ideas.
April 20, 2009
links for 2009-04-20
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Interesting firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G WiFi router. Would be useful if I get round to getting one to use to make Bubblino easier to hook up to a WiFi network (i.e. I could use this rather than a laptop as the Ethernet <-> WiFi bridge)
April 18, 2009
links for 2009-04-17
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Interesting organisation providing funding for community groups and individuals for sustainable projects in the North West
April 14, 2009
links for 2009-04-14
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I didn't think ASBOs were particularly useful, but this report shows they can be effective.
I loved this quote:
"They all act like they are some sort of gangster and think they have power and drive flash cars but the reality is they all live at home with their mums."
April 04, 2009
links for 2009-04-04
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Great use of the Open Street Map data to overlay all sorts of useful info about Sutton (part of London). Click on the "+" on the right and you can bring up things like recent planning applications, "fix my street" issues, local gyms...
March 20, 2009
links for 2009-03-20
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Good round-up of the different business models that are used for web sites and services.
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Interesting-looking very-small-footprint OS for embedded systems. Wonder if it will run on an Arduino Duemilanove?
March 19, 2009
links for 2009-03-19
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The BBC's article about Maker Faire UK this past weekend in Newcastle. And yes, that is the same Adrian McEwen quoted about halfway through the article.
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Lots of footage from the recent Maker Faire UK in Newcastle, all made by a local enthusiast and he's done a good job - although I am one of the few stands that he missed
March 06, 2009
links for 2009-03-06
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A research paper analysing the usage patterns in an office to see how much energy could be saved when people aren't at their computers or in the office.
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Interesting approach to bootstrapping product sales - Moq act as an escrow service to safeguard buyers money whilst letting manufacturers get solid sales figures to work out demand. Then once the Minimum Order Quantity is reached, the product can go into production.
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Interesting web service which can analyze mp3s that you upload. If I ever get round to building my mood-jukebox project, I think I might be using this.
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Wonder if I can amend this design to check for water leaks under the washing machine?
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A great community-led initiative to help the UK Government on their recent open source strategy plan.
February 27, 2009
links for 2009-02-27
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Interesting scheme for authenticating which websites are yours (or that you built), although it doesn't stop people attributing more things to you that you haven't actually done.
February 25, 2009
February 12, 2009
links for 2009-02-12
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Google are getting into energy visualisation. Looking forward to hooking up Mazzini to their system.
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Dedicated mapping Linux distro. Should be a good way to have a play around with the assorted mapping tools without installing them all on my laptop.
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Phil Gyford has been experimenting with using his blog front page as a place to collect all of the "stuff" he does on the web. When I finally get round to redesigning McFilter, I want to do something similar.
January 30, 2009
links for 2009-01-30
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Saving this for when my Tikitag starter kit arrives. I doubt I'll want everything to run through their servers, so working out how to bypass them will be handy
January 24, 2009
links for 2009-01-24
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A bit of a rant, but a great summary of the potential problems of "cloud computing".
"this idea that ... a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand."
January 19, 2009
links for 2009-01-19
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I need to start playing around with some of this stuff, as that'll soon be the next step to take with Mazzini. Lots of useful discussion in the comments too
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More of Chris Jordan's fantastic pictures helping us visualise our consumption. Stunning.
January 14, 2009
links for 2009-01-14
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Delightful - an instructable detailing all the steps taken in boxing up an Arduino robot kit, from laser cutting components to weighing the bags of bolts to ensure there are enough in there. It also shows the fun you can have building custom machines with a laser cutter - all those clear plastic constructions remind me of Fraggle Rock!
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A great collection of photos taken in Liverpool in the 80s. A real trip down memory lane for me - there's even one of the Albert Dock before it was done up, complete with the missing corner from where a bomb hit it in WW2
January 13, 2009
links for 2009-01-13
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Code profiler for C and Linux. Haven't used it (it was recommended on the GeekUp.org mailing list) but saving it for next time I need one.
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Great post from Tim O'Reilly expanding upon his recent theme of "work on stuff that matters". Everyone working should read it.
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This is a cool way to apply some decoration to wood - burning a pattern into it with high voltage electricity. Wonder where I can try this out... ;-)
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Very interesting approach to the business model for some hardware. Make everything open and transparent, including the markup. Then let people decide to DIY if they don't want to pay your margins.
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A few useful beginner tutorials for some of the less well covered electronics topics.
January 07, 2009
links for 2009-01-07
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Suw has just launched "Ada Lovlace Day" - a movement to celebrate and promote women in technology. I've signed up to the pledge, and you should too.
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One of the dilemmas of modern technology: the cost of storage makes it easier for more and more data to be collected and kept, and remembering things for us is a useful feature of computers - but should they remember everything for ever?
I think more people should be worrying about the answer to that. This paper proposes a good solution, where all data is given an expiry date and is deleted at that point.
I think there's scope for a more nuanced solution though, where data gets fuzzier over time. For a while it could be useful to know that I made a phonecall at 10:34am this morning, but in 10 years if I need to know at all then surely something like "early Jan 2009" would be close enough?
Tricky to implement, because remembering is such a hard task that deliberately forgetting feels very wrong, but I think we should be exploring what we do and don't want to keep for ever.
January 06, 2009
links for 2009-01-06
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Great five-part series suggesting how we should develop politics and society. Lots of this resonating with the sorts of things I'd like to develop further.
December 28, 2008
links for 2008-12-28
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Excellent public information video about cycling. I had to watch it again as I was so surprised that I'd fallen for it
December 22, 2008
links for 2008-12-22
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Useful-looking charting library for web apps. Has a couple of features (like saving charts as images) that my current choice doesn't.
December 20, 2008
links for 2008-12-20
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Clamp to measure current flowing through a cable without cutting the cable. Sometime I'll get round to buying some and seeing if I can hook them up to an Arduino to build a variation on the CurrentCost, etc.
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The UK is getting a Maker Faire, and for once it's not an event in London!
December 12, 2008
December 11, 2008
links for 2008-12-11
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About half of these are within a couple of minutes walk of our flat. Excellent. Will have to try more of them out. The Quarter is good, and the Leaf Tea Shop was good for the Barcamp afterparty (although very limited in its range of beer), will have to try it for food sometime.
December 09, 2008
links for 2008-12-09
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Cool new service showing you what's happening near where you live. Pulls in info from PlanningAlerts.com, FixMyStreet.com as well as things like Upcoming, BBC News, and even things that users have added.
December 08, 2008
December 04, 2008
links for 2008-12-04
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"a subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month."
Great to see Merlin back on form. I'm glad I didn't unsubscribe during his dip. Go read it.
November 22, 2008
links for 2008-11-22
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Interesting spec for running IPv6 over Zigbee networks. Might end up using this for some of the Mazzini stuff
November 17, 2008
links for 2008-11-17
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A good roundup of the geeky (and some not-so-geeky) meetings, talks and groups of techies in the Cambridge area.
November 13, 2008
links for 2008-11-13
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32 minute trip down memory lane, or the ultimate game of "Name that tune"? I'll let you decide, but this mp3 of the first 10 seconds of every number one from the 80s is cool
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Useful disk defragment tool, which you can set up to run as your screensaver. Never need to remember to defrag your hard-drive again
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A set of cards and scenarios to help people discuss and brainstorm how to use "Web 2.0" tools.
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In my limited experience, getting HTML emails working across the different email services is a nightmare. This is a good (and exhaustive-looking) comparison of which CSS elements work on which email clients
October 27, 2008
links for 2008-10-27
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The opposite of a property ladder... search for houses that are falling in price and also see how long they've been on the market.
October 22, 2008
links for 2008-10-22
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Interesting article about the business models in use by teams like the Arduino guys
October 19, 2008
links for 2008-10-19
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"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.". It often surprises me that I ended up blogging, given that I spent my A-levels and degree trying to get away from writing essays.
October 18, 2008
links for 2008-10-18
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Place in Shrewsbury selling sheets of recycled plastic, much as you might with wood or MDF. A bit pricey, but not exorbitant.
October 09, 2008
September 22, 2008
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
Last month the BBC website had a series of articles about the problems with the sorts of numbers and statistics oft bandied about by people and the media. They're well worth a read, even if it just means you'll never trust a number in a news report again...
- What the survey didn't say...
- The myth of counting
- Putting percentages in context
- Just what is average?
Tags: statistics bbc
August 08, 2008
The Geldart Public House, Reborn
I last went for a drink in the Geldart when it was a slightly seedy local, good if you wanted a game of pool, or to watch the not-quite-legal-Norweigan-satellite-feed Premiership football, but other than that nothing special. It's main claim to fame in those days was the pretty-much-daily lock-ins which meant it was about the only place to get a drink after hours in pre-liberal-licensing Cambridge.
The lock-ins were clamped down upon and stopped well before the late licences were brought in, and the Geldart went back to oft-overlooked and neglected residential pub.
Tomorrow, however, all that is set to change. My mate Elvis (no, really, that is his name) has left his role as manager of the excellent Kingston Arms in order to branch out on his own and will be relaunching The Geldart under a new guise.
The pub has been completely refitted and refurbished and will be serving good beer and good food in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. There'll be the usual Guiness and a couple of lagers on tap, but the main focus will be a good range of ales.
I had a sneak peek round the place a couple of weeks ago, and it's looking very good. Sadly the beers hadn't arrived (mainly because they'd have gone off otherwise), so I didn't get to sample the drinks. Nor did I get to try the food, which I'm intrigued to try because in addition to the usual pub fare there'll be "hot rocks" where you get to cook the food yourself at the table on, guess what, a heated rock.
The grand opening is tomorrow, Saturday 9th August from 6pm 'til late.
July 22, 2008
links for 2008-07-22
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Breakers yard in Torino, could be handy for hard-to-get Integrale bits in future
July 19, 2008
links for 2008-07-19
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Routes and information about cycling round Liverpool. Think I'll be exploring this further in a few weeks.
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Fresh from the half-pint of lemon juice Ishia experience, this recipe made some more quaffable lemonade earlier
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An interesting website and competition from the UK government to encourage new ideas for opening up public data. Includes some interesting pointers to other data sources too
June 16, 2008
links for 2008-06-16
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Might need this in August if I don't get Internet quickly enough to wherever we're living... ;-) Great idea though.
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Online course notes for a from-complete-novice electronics and electricity course. A first glance seems a little too basic for what I'd like, but you never know.
June 13, 2008
links for 2008-06-13
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Interesting scheme to help people get cheap bikes through work. Might have to see if MCQN Ltd. can join the scheme when I'm looking for a new bike...
June 06, 2008
links for 2008-06-06
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Useful series of blog posts explaining how to write a press release, and listing a number of online services to help you distribute the release.
May 27, 2008
links for 2008-05-27
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Some genuinely useful advice about PR, rather than the usual 5-steps-to-writing-a-press-release sort of content.
May 23, 2008
links for 2008-05-23
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"It shows that people do care. They do care about the world they live in. They just don't care about party politics." Interesting essay on the state of British politics from the leader of the Lib Dems.
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Newly launched service to let you see what other people are reading and keep track of where you are, or your "dog-eared" pages with twitter.
May 15, 2008
links for 2008-05-15
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On the strength of watching this I'll be buying "In Defence of Food". To be healthy, shop round the edges of the supermarket (or better still, not in a supermarket at all)
May 07, 2008
links for 2008-05-07
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Useful collection of charts and different ways to visualize datasets, and it lets you choose what it is you're trying to display and gives suggestions for the types of chart to use.
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Flash-based framework for building data visualizations.
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A paper from the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems looking at how 35 American households have embraced green technology and environmentalism
May 04, 2008
links for 2008-05-04
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A standard for exchanging data from sensors in buildings and such.
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An "open festival". What an interesting idea - choose a week or so for the events to happen, and let the community organise their own events for it, promoting each other under the banner of the festival.
May 03, 2008
links for 2008-05-03
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Shock horror! Most people starting tech companies aren't the twentysomethings looking to be bought by Google.
April 30, 2008
links for 2008-04-30
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Interesting web service to help fund small projects. Propose a project that you need funding, then people can pledge money to fund it; if you get enough pledges then you get the cash, otherwise everyone who pledged gets a refund.
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Project to try to sort out the mess that is HTML email. Includes info about what works and what doesn't.
April 29, 2008
links for 2008-04-29
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Interesting video from Startup School 08. Dispelling the myth that the big, bought-by-Google exit strategy is the best thing to aim for.
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Instructions on setting up a Plimus account to track sales with Google Analytics. Was pretty trivial when I set it up for tedium the other day.
April 22, 2008
links for 2008-04-22
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Interesting article about the economic return on installing solar electricity panels. Upshot is that the return on solar PV can be better than a bank account.
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Interesting site letting you swap books with others (and it even works if there isn't a direct swap - i.e. where you have a book the other wants and vice versa). Think I'll stick to just posting my old books to a friend, but might investigate further in
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Listen to "Business Time" - a fantastic glimpse of what Barry White would've sounded like if he'd just been a normal person rather than a sex god...
April 20, 2008
links for 2008-04-20
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Russell has announced the date that tickets go on sale for Interesting2008. I'm not going as I'll still be here in Italy, but would be otherwise. When's Interesting2009...?
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Will be off to these guys sometime soon to buy a soldering iron and some other bits and bobs. Much consulting with the English-Italian dictionary beforehand I expect...
April 19, 2008
links for 2008-04-19
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The golden rules for picking which songs to cover. Also see the list of "best cover versions" linked at the bottom.
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My mate Ant's band, the Damsons, have their first single out and it's available for pre-order.
April 12, 2008
links for 2008-04-12
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LiveCD to turn a PC into a music server
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People not worrying about waiting for governments to start doing something about climate change, and voluntarily capping their carbon footprint
April 08, 2008
April 06, 2008
links for 2008-04-06
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Useful looking site featuring a load of videos explaining how to repair and maintain your bike.
March 21, 2008
links for 2008-03-21
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Interesting discussion about the nascent open source hardware movement. Touching on business models and the current crop of projects.
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A rather sad, but interesting documentary from 1967 about the more everyday and run-down parts of London.
March 15, 2008
links for 2008-03-15
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Celine Roque of PimpYourWork.com interviews me about tedium, how it came into being and a little about my philosophy for where it's headed.
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A free book putting figures to the question of whether the UK can provide all its energy sustainably, written by a professor from Cambridge Uni physics department.
March 09, 2008
March 06, 2008
links for 2008-03-06
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Collection of links and information about how to make graphic design, and printing in particular, more environmentally-friendly.
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Found this archive of the BBC's Reith Lectures whilst looking for the one Richard Rogers gave in 1995. Unfortunately that one isn't online, but I'll be having a listen to some of the others over the next few days.
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Been looking for more info on Richard Rogers since watching the Imagine programme about him - this is the report generated by the Urban Task Force that includes him as a member. It discusses ways for cities to evolve and be revitalised.
March 04, 2008
links for 2008-03-04
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Great thread on Ask MeFi about songs for guitar. Superb links to some "books of chords", which will save me trawling through ultimate-guitar.com looking for stuff I want to play
March 03, 2008
links for 2008-03-03
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There are overtones of the Simpsons' monorail episode, but how cool would a maglev link from Liverpool to Manchester be?
February 22, 2008
links for 2008-02-22
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The introduction (and main index) for my series of blog posts with ideas and techniques for managing your time and accomplishing more.
February 19, 2008
links for 2008-02-19
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Doesn't cover Turin unfortunately, but will be trawling this looking for a just-for-fun team when I get to Liverpool.
February 15, 2008
links for 2008-02-15
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Five simple steps to follow in order to have more ideas. Simple in how they can be explained, that is ' there is some work to do in implementing them.
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I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by Prince Charles giving a speech about climate change, but I am impressed at how well he puts the problems across. I hope it has some effect.
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Useful collection of articles about how to create digital art - sound, graphics, hacking together bits of hardware to control things... Lots of links to other bits of software and hardware
February 13, 2008
links for 2008-02-13
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Shame I'm not in Cambridge any more, but here's a list of the seminars given at the Computer Lab and they're open to the general public.
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Long, detailed exploration of what the street of the near-future could look like, from Dan Hill. Written as a narrative through the lives of the users of an imagined "smart" street.
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"Have your say about the future of Channel 4". Good to see this if C4 are serious about engaging with people about what they should be doing. Get rid of Big Brother would be my first suggestion... ;-)
February 07, 2008
links for 2008-02-07
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Guide to theming drupal sites.
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More on theming drupal.
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Interesting prototype smart meter that shows your electricity usage broken down by time, or by appliance.
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A collection of videos imagining what a sustainable life could be like. It's an interesting and novel approach, which is trying to show people that green could be normal.
February 05, 2008
links for 2008-02-05
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How to get cool mouse-gesture goodness on Linux. Shame I'm using Windows for my laptop, the number of times I've tried to use the Firefox gestures outside the browser...
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It's going to be tricky to recapture that true Italian pizza feeling if I don't have a wood-burning oven to cook it in...
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Danah puts a great argument for treading carefully when building Facebook-like services. Unfortunately, history shows that the geeks will likely ignore her, because they can.
January 30, 2008
links for 2008-01-30
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The latest service from the superb mysociety.org - you give them your email address and postcode, and they email you whenever there's a planning application in your area.
January 28, 2008
links for 2008-01-28
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Every now and then I end up playing with different video formats and never know what software to use or how to convert from one to another. Lots of info here on how to do so.
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Haven't played with this yet, but it looks like a much cooler and more finished version of what I was trying to do with the New Music Radio project to listen to mp3 blogs
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How to build shelter, find food, and generally survive if everything goes to pot...
January 18, 2008
links for 2008-01-18
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Cool video of people doing parkour round some of Cambridge. Very impressive, as this flinging yourself off buildings in a controlled manner always seems to be.
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Interesting property website. Very Web2.0 with google maps overlays giving you rough property prices for areas, and also has lots of data available about how much properties have been sold for and when - even goes as far back as my house in Cambridge (in
January 16, 2008
links for 2008-01-16
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Nice collection of pointers to an assortment of graphing solutions. Of course, this only crops up _after_ I've already chosen one. Never mind...
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Some videos showing how to set up, and how to start using Google Analytics to track visitors to your website
January 15, 2008
January 13, 2008
links for 2008-01-13
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Forums for the community of people who enjoy exploring strange and deserted urban areas. Lots of photos of interesting old industrial sites, like the United Glass silos in St. Helens, or the docks in Liverpool.
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A set of 21 cards to help you think about different facets of the design when creating appliances.
January 12, 2008
links for 2008-01-12
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Manchester gets a barcamp. It's happening in March, which is long before I'll be in the area. Still, I'm sure it'll be worth attending
January 05, 2008
links for 2008-01-05
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Well, at least I'll have some time to get through some of my reading list before I'm next in Liverpool... then this place looks like it'll be worth a browse round.
January 04, 2008
links for 2008-01-04
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The fun way to understand the problem of climate change. It's like someone took the Stern Review and condensed it into a 10-minute video with funny hats and explosions!
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My reading list is already far too long, but I think there are some good recommendations here. Maybe when I get through my current glut of marketing tomes...
December 18, 2007
links for 2007-12-18
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Lots of good looking form goodness. Always useful to find out better ways of formatting and displaying forms - they seem one of the trickier bits of HTML to get to look good.
December 16, 2007
December 03, 2007
November 29, 2007
links for 2007-11-29
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Losing a sister isn't the same, but losing anyone is different for everyone. A heartfelt and honest account on one man's loss of his son.
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And now something to lighten the mood. An excellent idea for a game where you scrawl on the "page" with a "crayon" and your drawings become physical objects that move a ball around... oh, just watch the video.
November 26, 2007
links for 2007-11-26
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If the terrorists want to use fear to disrupt and affect our lives then, with the continued ridiculous measures from the government, haven't they succeeded?
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The video of a presentation given by Dan Germain of Innocent smoothies fame. An honest and passionate talk about the business and getting started as an entrepreneur.
November 18, 2007
November 10, 2007
links for 2007-11-10
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Nifty tool to convert bitmap files into vectors. Very useful if you've got a logo or something that you want to blow up without getting all blocky.
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Interesting approach to learning a new language. I can see some of these patterns and inferences starting to form with my Italian-largely-by-osmosis technique.
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A lovely presentation about typography and design on the web. Explains why typography is important and gives some insightful examples of how popular websites are laid out.
November 06, 2007
links for 2007-11-06
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Google tries to do what Microsoft, Symbian and Geoworks have so far failed to achieve. Expect the tech blogs to be wetting their pants over this "GPhone" announcement for a while...
November 05, 2007
links for 2007-11-05
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A brief but brilliant set of rules and recommendations about how to write good prose.
November 03, 2007
links for 2007-11-03
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More info than you ever thought you'd want about how to setup your home recording studio
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Another big collection of guides on recording music, studio setup, etc.
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Standalone executable VNC server - good for supporting non-techie relatives remotely (although it requires you to not be behind a NAT)
November 01, 2007
October 31, 2007
links for 2007-10-31
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Good thread on MeFi about how to do something useful when you get home from work.
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An interesting tool that tracks how long you spend surfing the 'Net, and where the time goes. I've installed it but not really checked where I'm spending the time. Maybe I'm missing the point...
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Another interesting-looking extension for Firefox. Lets you mark things on your PC and then get at them from your mobile. Sounds similar to something I was thinking of writing a while back.
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A nice tourism video for Torino, although the commentary is in Italian... It gives a glimpse of what the city is like - and I can recognise most of the places they show! Maybe by the time I leave I'll be able to understand all the words too.
October 27, 2007
October 17, 2007
links for 2007-10-17
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One of many icon editors I'm sure, but I'm saving this one as it's pretty decent and it'll save me hunting about next time I want to create an icon.
October 16, 2007
links for 2007-10-16
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Great way to explore what's in the neighbourhood. This is what's around our apartment.
October 12, 2007
links for 2007-10-12
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Help! The city is being overrun by plasticene bunnies! The latest Sony Bravia advert is out, and it's even better than the bouncing balls.
October 10, 2007
links for 2007-10-10
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This is how we'll convince people to save the world! One new "green idea" each month, and if they're all illustrated as well as October's (a great, amusing little video) then surely it'll catch on?
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"When I say 'hip', thou shalt not say 'hop'". Indeed.
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"I made the sun an appropriate distance and laid the stars across the sky, so you could navigate the globe or simply watch a sunrise"
October 05, 2007
links for 2007-10-05
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Very nice soup. Which is handy, 'cos there are still a couple of pints of it cooling in the saucepan. i think I'll be making it again in the future.
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Wiki collecting together gestures used in assorted computing devices, although obviously there's quite an iPhone slant there at present.
October 04, 2007
links for 2007-10-04
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UK-based equivalent to Amazon's EC2. Saving this for when tedium hits the big-time :-)
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Great explanation of Fitt's UI law. "...a penny is a lot easier to point at than a freckle and a house is just as easy to point at as an apartment complex."
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So _that's_ who owns the cows that roam around the commons in the middle of Cambridge. And you can even buy some of their meat. Via saltandwoodsmoke.com
October 02, 2007
links for 2007-10-02
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This is pretty much how I've planned my career, although I think it's useful to work out a plan but only to force yourself to work out what you'd like to do. You won't be able to follow it.
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Curt Rosengren has moved on from The Occupational Adventure Guide and started a new blog. Expanding on his initial goal of helping people find their passion in life to also help them to make a difference.
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Free and more importantly very good way to transfer big files to someone else. The free account gives you up to 5GB of storage and each file is kept for 10 days.
September 26, 2007
links for 2007-09-26
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I've been using this for ages now. Great piece of graphics software, especially as it's free.
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Easy to follow videos showing you how to use Paint.Net to do cool things with photos.
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More tutorials on how to achieve cool effects with Paint.Net. Written rather than video, but there are lots of them.
September 20, 2007
links for 2007-09-20
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I find it rather ironic that social networking sites, of all things, call part of their protocol for interacting (and presumably proliferating) OFF.
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Learning a foreign language gets the Web2.0 treatment. I've been trying the Italian course, and it seems pretty good so far - you get to hear and see the phrases, with nice touches like being able to repeat part of a phrase by clicking on it. Good for a
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Stephen Fry has a blog! Who's going to tell him that the entries aren't supposed to be quite so long? If he carries on like that he'll give the rest of us a bad name...
September 13, 2007
links for 2007-09-13
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An all-in-one Ruby on Rails stack so you don't have to worry quite so much about which software requirements you've got installed (web server, etc.)
September 12, 2007
links for 2007-09-12
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OAuth - a new standard specifying how services can gain access to other web services without you having to hand over your username and password.
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An easier ways to deploy Ruby on Rails apps
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A tool to ease deployment of Ruby on Rails apps.
September 10, 2007
links for 2007-09-10
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A huge list of clubs and bars in (and around) Turin. Not sure we'll visit all of them, but we'll give it a shot... ;-)
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Very good resource for people wanting to learn almost any language (that's real, spoken languages rather than those computer ones). One of these days I'll start using some of this stuff rather than collecting resources...
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Index of materials for people learning new languages (not computer languages)
September 07, 2007
links for 2007-09-07
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Good presentation about how to improve the speed of your web pages. Check out the links to the four-part YUIBlog series too.
September 06, 2007
links for 2007-09-06
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“You’re nobody here at $10 million?. Guess what, earning more and more doesn't help if your peers are doing the same. And shiny new things don't actually make you much happier. A good article to help you realise that.
August 31, 2007
links for 2007-08-31
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A list of all the markets (antiques, arts and crafts, organic produce, local produce...) in Torino. Tells you where they are, and on which days they're held. There are quite a few!
August 27, 2007
Dealing With the Grief of Others
Over on her blog, Zinnia has written a series of excellent articles about what to write or say, or how to act when someone that you know loses a loved one.
Hopefully lots of people will read it and realise that, whilst there isn't a right answer, there are also far less wrong answers. On the whole, when somebody dies the worst things to do are to avoid the people grieving or to avoid the topic of the deceased. Zinnia covers that, but more importantly gives tips and ideas for what you should do.
Tags: bereavement advice death grief
August 26, 2007
links for 2007-08-26
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The challenges for mobile phone UI aren't just that the screen is small and the input methods restricted, but also that the phone is always with the user and often not the prime focus of their attention
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It's good to see that there are people just getting on with doing something for the Capital of Culture, rather than more of the complaining about how it's being run by the council
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"What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it." How true. Stuff ain't worth what it used to be.
August 24, 2007
links for 2007-08-24
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Lots of links to help you when getting started with the Arduino microcontroller board
August 08, 2007
links for 2007-08-08
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For anyone who wants to see more of the city I've moved to - a very varied selection of shots of Torino with a new one posted every day.
August 04, 2007
links for 2007-08-04
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Nifty-looking add-on for Firefox to suggest ways to improve the speed of your website. Haven't tried it out yet, but have installed it.
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Craigslist (i.e. online classifieds) clone for Torino, but doesn't seem to be the best
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Craigslist clone (i.e. online classifieds) for Torino. From a quick browse seems the better one for events, but not the best for jobs.
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Another craigslist clone (online classifieds) for Torino. Seems better for jobs but a bit light on events.
July 18, 2007
links for 2007-07-18
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Handy page featuring pictures of all sorts of electronic components and a wealth of links to decipher what the numbers on ICs mean.
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This will come in most handy when tweaking templates or frameworks and I want to minimize the CSS afterwards. It scans a set of CSS and HTML files and tells you which bits of CSS aren't doing anything useful
July 16, 2007
links for 2007-07-16
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Useful tips on finding and solving performance issues in your Ruby on Rails web app
July 07, 2007
links for 2007-07-07
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Failure IS an option. Lots of great quotes about how only through failing do we really learn how to improve things.
June 20, 2007
links for 2007-06-20
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Not much activity yet, but there are moves afoot to hold a BarCamp event in Cambridge in August. Shame I'll be in Italy by then.
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Very active forum for old Mk1 Fiestas. Just spent far too long browsing round it on a nostalgia kick...
June 16, 2007
links for 2007-06-16
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Find out how well that restaurant you're thinking of visiting has fared on its hygiene inspection.
June 15, 2007
links for 2007-06-15
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Excellent interview explaining the physics behind racing/driving simulators and how they're much harder than flight simulators
June 14, 2007
A Correction: Cannes Is Coming To Cambridge Tonight
I should learn to read things more carefully.
When I blogged about the series of short films being shown at the Box Tree last week I said that the event was happening on that Thursday. I was wrong. It's today.
Hopefully anyone who was planning on going looked at the date in the full post, rather than going from my "tomorrow night" description. Still, the organisers have at least benefitted from some more exposure as a result of my mistake, so I don't feel too bad about it...
Tags: cannes cambridge cfn cambridge_film_network short film boxtree
links for 2007-06-14
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Why aren't products designed to fit into peoples' lives?
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Great post about what to look for when hiring people.
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An interesting read about possible ways of organizing how people work. My current bet is on networks of small firms, but that might be because I haven't built a big corporation yet...
June 07, 2007
links for 2007-06-07
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'Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy"'. A thought-provoking pot-shot at what the future may hold. Do you want it?
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Great collection of tutorials taking you from the very basics of putting together microcontroller circuits.
June 02, 2007
links for 2007-06-02
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Open-source, wiki-like test framework for software, used by the guys I've been working with at Motorola.
May 30, 2007
links for 2007-05-30
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Does what it says on the tin. Lots of useful resources about how to scale websites, particularly database-heavy ones.
May 29, 2007
links for 2007-05-29
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Every now and then I want to record something from the radio on my computer, and never know what software to use. Saving this link for the next time I'm looking...
May 26, 2007
links for 2007-05-26
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Nothing too revolutionary, but some useful links to bits of software that might make disparate dev teams more cohesive
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Interesting ideas about how to integrate paper with computers. Paper doesn't have any battery problems, is more readable outside, can cope with getting a bit wet... but it's hard for information to flow from the paper onto the network...
May 22, 2007
links for 2007-05-22
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Service providing an API to climate-change-related data such as carbon calculators, etc.
May 18, 2007
links for 2007-05-18
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Apartment rental website covering Turin.
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Another Italian rental website
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And another Italian rental website
May 15, 2007
links for 2007-05-15
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This is a novel idea - using smart materials to make it easy to disassemble products. For example, what if the screws holding your phone together lost their threads if heated above 80 deg. C?
May 11, 2007
links for 2007-05-11
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It's a shame R never set-up her t-shirt business, we could've made one of these bad boys.
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This is the kind of lasagne to die for. Many, many layers of wafer-thin pasta. Mmmmmmm....
May 10, 2007
links for 2007-05-10
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How to set-up some simple server-side scripting to do on-the-fly mobilification (err, creating a mobile-phone-friendly version) of your website.
May 02, 2007
links for 2007-05-02
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Into the final for the second time in three years. I'll be looking for a pub showing the match in Aalborg on the 23rd then...
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Reasonably easy-to-use software for managing your PAYE as a small-business owner.
April 28, 2007
links for 2007-04-28
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Now you can pretend you made it to all those important, not-to-be-missed gigs - just print out your own ticket. Or create a ticket for the 'gig' where you sang into your hairbrush in your bedroom...
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Software to let your Symbian mobile phone access the Internet through your computer's connection. Particularly useful for people developing phone software that needs to access the Internet.
April 21, 2007
April 20, 2007
links for 2007-04-20
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An excellent collection of pictures that help you understand things like "how many plastic bags do we get through". Well worth a look.
April 09, 2007
Other Blogs, Loosely Grouped
I don't know when I last updated the list of blogs that appear down the left of the main page of McFilter, but it must be a couple of years at least. The background task to make the maintenance easier (using MTBlogroll plugin) itself has taken over a year...
In that time, the mix of blogs that I read regularly has changed a bit, and expanded quite a lot. There have been more blogs that I was tracking, but I went through a purge a while back when it became clear that just reading them all was taking too much of my time.
So have a browse. They're all interesting in their own way. I've tried to group them into rough categories, but that's only to help people choose what they might be interested in - individuals just aren't that easy to pigeon-hole.
April 06, 2007
April 05, 2007
links for 2007-04-05
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Further to yesterday's link about how the security of Web2.0 sites can be compromised, here are some ways to defend against such attacks.
April 04, 2007
links for 2007-04-04
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Great planning website for trips by public transport (bus, train and foot). Sadly only available in the North West (of England) at present.
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Interesting and rather scary presentation about the kinds of exploits (hacking possibilities) available using javascript.
March 31, 2007
links for 2007-03-31
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Great directions on how to get from Chicago to London. Pay special attention to number 20...
March 23, 2007
links for 2007-03-23
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jRussell Davies proposes "A Conference of Interestingness", aiming to capture some of the feel of TED but in London. Sounds cool, and hopefully I'll make it along
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Stuart (of feelinglistless fame) has launched a new blog to keep track of other blogs in Liverpool.
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Planting guides for how to grow a family's-worth of veg in a 3m by 3m plot, from the BBC Grow Your Own Veg series.
March 16, 2007
Red Nose Day, And The Book Is On Sale
Shaggy Blog Stories by Mike Atkinson (Book) in Humor can now be bought from Lulu.com (who are also donating their profits from it to Comic Relief).
Full details of the contributors and how it all came together over at Mike's blog.
Buy your copy today!
March 13, 2007
It's All For A Good Cause
As Red Nose Day looms there have been a few calls on my hard-earned cash; but as it's all for a good cause, who am I to refuse?
Firstly, my friend Jo (along with some of her colleagues) will be trekking 100km across the South Downs to raise money for Oxfam - and you can sponsor her here.
Secondly, now that the annual Which Decade Is Top For Pops project is out of the way, Mike has launched an ambitious venture in aid of Comic Relief.
Next Friday (March 16) is Comic Relief's Red Nose Day day in the UK. What I’m proposing is to assemble and publish – in the space of just seven days - a paperback anthology of blog writing, that can be sold to raise funds for the charity.
The book will be called Shaggy Blog Stories: a collection of amusing tales from the UK blogosphere."
I don't have any hilarious posts tucked away in the McFilter archives, so haven't submitted anything. What I will be doing though is buying a copy of the book when it goes on sale on Friday.
Head over to Troubled-Diva for full details on the mission.
March 09, 2007
links for 2007-03-09
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It's great to hear that the "Another Place" statues are to stay on Crosby beach. Should mean I actually make it up to see them!
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How to use Nokia LCD units as the display for other hardware
March 06, 2007
links for 2007-03-06
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Interesting idea for ambient visualisation of your meeting data, but what's more interesting is that it's an in-browser demo of what the hardware UI would be like. Gain support for the UI without all that nasty hardware hacking
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Service to let you programatically send/receive SMSes. Seems pretty simple to talk to, and not too expensive. Might be useful as a test-bed if nothing else.
March 04, 2007
links for 2007-03-04
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The joy of table football. Worth watching some of the videos linked in the comments too
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Interesting graphical navigation on this music player website.
February 19, 2007
links for 2007-02-19
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Discussion forums about hacking Nokia handset software. I think old Nokia phones could be a great platform for ubiquitous computing, if they were reprogrammable
February 03, 2007
links for 2007-02-03
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Saving this because I can never remember what it's called when I'm working as tech support for friends and family and want to find out what programs are being launched at startup.
January 28, 2007
Your Weekly Dose of Good Writing
Post of the Week is a newly (re-) launched website aiming to highlight some of the best writing on weblogs, on a weekly basis.
As Mike said when announcing it on his site:
"Absolutely everyone everywhere is heartily recommended to do any or all of the following:
1. Nominate cracking good blog posts for inclusion, via the comments box in the "Call for nominations" section.
2. Volunteer their services as a guest judge, for one weekend only.
3. Publicise the site on their own blogs. Pimp it, kids. Pimp it HARD."
Or at least head over and have a good read.
January 23, 2007
links for 2007-01-23
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Detailed article about how you can use colour to improve your web pages. Includes lots of example colour combinations to highlight the varying levels of readability.
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Another task to do with my music library, once I've found all the album artwork and calculated the BPM for each track...
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Circuit diagram for a USB LCD controller, and it includes a knob and buzzer for additional input and output
January 09, 2007
links for 2007-01-09
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Help stop Milton Country Park (just a short walk from both Science and Business parks in Cambiridge) being closed by the district council.
December 21, 2006
links for 2006-12-21
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Links and comments about some interesting blog redesigns which are experimenting with ways of displaying old posts.
December 19, 2006
December 08, 2006
links for 2006-12-08
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I'll have to see if I can borrow a WiiMote sometime and see if I can get it working with my TabletPC...
November 17, 2006
links for 2006-11-17
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Lots of links to companies offering recycling (and such) services in the (south of the) UK. I thought I posted this ages ago, but couldn't see it.
November 14, 2006
links for 2006-11-14
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Mike Kuniavsky (of Orange Cone blog fame) has just announced the launch of his new company - ThingM. I'll be watching with interest to see what sort of ubicomp stuff comes out of it.
November 12, 2006
links for 2006-11-12
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"95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography."
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Slides from a recent presentation given at Cambridge Energy. Digs into the facts and figures surrounding global warming. Lots of information but it's all well laid out and understandable.
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Multimap for the 1940s - see what your area of the UK looked like half a century ago
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Local handyman who's business is climate neutral. Might see if he can re-plaster the ceiling when we get the bathroom redone
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I often wonder if I should splash out on a good office chair, but am never sure just how good they are. If you watch the woman bouncing on this one, you'll wonder just what kind of chair she was using!
November 04, 2006
links for 2006-11-04
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This was the funniest part of the recent Secret Policeman's Ball in my opinion. Just superb.
November 02, 2006
links for 2006-11-02
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A huge collection of TV ads for a host of old computers. Even includes an ad for the first computer I had - the TI99/4A...
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A long, but readable report into society's attitude to risk. It makes a lot of sense, and calls for us to recognise that a zero-risk life is an impossibility; stop knee-jerk regulation; and promote realistic risk assessment and personal responsibility.
October 21, 2006
links for 2006-10-21
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Useful jumping off point for info on developing web pages / web apps for Nokia phones. The Nokia browser apparently supports AJAX, so I'll have to try it with tedium some time.
October 17, 2006
Divide and Conquer
Collective Genius is a collaborative blog where each month there's a chosen topic for everyone to write about. This month's topic is "Getting Unstuck", and I've written some thoughts about how breaking a task down into smaller chunks can help you start (and finish!) big, nasty tasks in the article Collective Genius!: Cutting Things Down To Size. Of course, keeping track of your newly multiplied tasks is something that tedium is adept at doing...
This has been an announcement from the Where Else Is Adrian's Content Available department.
October 02, 2006
links for 2006-10-02
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Plugin for websites that require users to sign-in so that your website can offer single sign-on from services like OpenID. Is this an indication that some of the federated identity services are starting to mature?
September 23, 2006
links for 2006-09-23
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The poor man's digital whiteboard - take a photo of the whiteboard, send it to ScanR and get a cleaned up digital version back!
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Calendar-picker library which lets users specify dates like "next Wednesday" as well as the more usual 1/2/2003
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Following on from the Nabaztag, this is another playful, hackable, ambient-ish computing device. Pitching it as the clock radio for the Internet age is a good idea ,as it helps people imagine how you might use one.
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Interesting and thought-provoking set of slides from Matt Web where he tries to classify the different types of web apps that might make up the next generation. He's picked some useful themes to think around; particularly, in my case, the ambient and sit
September 15, 2006
links for 2006-09-15
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Directory of links to sites giving details about dismantling, fixing and modding all sorts of mobile phones
September 08, 2006
links for 2006-09-08
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Even on the trackday I never managed anything like this in my M3, but it's great to be reminded of how superb a car they are.
September 07, 2006
links for 2006-09-07
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Very useful. VNC lets you control other machines remotely, but setting up the server means faffing about opening ports in the firewall and such. UltraVNC runs things the other way round, which means it'll be easy to fix my parents computer remotely
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Yet another colour chooser, but these sorts of things are always handy - I'm always looking for help in picking colours for websites...
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This is why more politicians should be blogging: we get to hear about events first-hand rather than through the lense of the media. Tom Watson has posted his resignation letter from the Labour party, and Tony Blair's response.
September 05, 2006
links for 2006-09-05
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Excellent! Although I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't a frenetic dash at the end with only one or two aliens
August 26, 2006
links for 2006-08-26
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Does it make community gardening more fun if it's all a bit illicit? I'm not sure, but I like the idea.
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Cool video that combines cakes and computers - how could I not link to it?!?
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I'm sure at some point I'll want to stick Linux onto one of the laptops lying around the house, so this list of what's been installed on which laptops could come in handy
August 17, 2006
links for 2006-08-17
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Lots of info about how to rip DVDs or the best way to encode video if ripping from VHS. I'm sure I'll need it at some time in the future...
August 16, 2006
links for 2006-08-16
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Growing database of user-submitted cycle routes, including Google map overlays so you can follow them
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An excellent fun use of the Google maps data - fly a little plane over London, or a number of other cities around the world. Makes exploring the Google aerial views even more fun.
August 10, 2006
August 08, 2006
July 27, 2006
Home Energy Check. Create Survey... Check. Make Results Useful... Err...
I've just completed the Energy Saving Trust's online Home Energy Check and I'm rather underwhelmed.
It claims to create a "personalised report listing all the ways you can reduce your energy consumption. You could save up to £250 a year on your energy bills, as well as around two tonnes of CO2 a year."
That all sounds quite useful and interesting so I ran through their short questionnaire filling in my details. My personalised report recommends that I fit more loft insulation, and replace my central heating boiler with a more efficient one. If I do that, I'll save around £86 each year.
Now, I'm sure that I should do both of those things but they aren't particularly challenging suggestions. Where's the recommendation that I switch to a green energy supplier? How much would I save if I installed solar water heating? It seems a wasted opportunity to inform me about some of the less common (but surely becoming more mainstream) options.
Similarly, just telling me how much I could save isn't particularly useful. Given enough investment in solar power and wind turbines, surely I could reduce my energy bill to 0 - but it would cost quite a lot to get there. I'd be more inclined to act upon the survey's recommendations if the results were presented as "fitting a new boiler would cost £700 and save you £86 a year, paying for itself in 9 years". Although writing this blog entry has helped me find out that info, as I've just looked it up to make sure my figures are realistic...
July 18, 2006
links for 2006-07-18
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Statistics on the capabilities of assorted mobile phone browsers - get stats for specific features such as screen size, or XHMTL version, and limit them by phone manufacturer for finer-grained analysis.
What Do You Remember?
The Time When, the latest website to come from the BBC's experimental arm, has just been announced by Phil Gyford.
It's a place for people to record their memories, and it looks quite nice so far although there's not a lot of data in there yet.
Some first thoughts on the how it could be even better though, in case they're reading and because part of the announcement seems to be to start gaining feedback...
A minor techie thing to start with - the URLs aren't very hackable. Surely www.thetimewhen.co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/memorynumber would be better and let people explore more easily. Such a URL structure would also encourage the provision of some other very useful pages - ...co.uk/memory/2006/07/16/ would show me all the memories for yesterday, and ...co.uk/memory/2006/07/ would give all the memories for July 2006 and of course ...co.uk/memory/2006/ would give everything for this year. Or maybe just a calendar showing each day with the number of memories for that day shown by making the day's number/background/whatever more eye-catching? Start with pale grey for days with no events, and run through to bright red bold text for those with lots of memories...
It isn't very easy to browse round memories at present. The popular and most recent lists on the home page are a good start, but are heavily skewed to major events like September 11th 2001. If I search for a year I'd like to get the memories from that year, not the memories from today's date in that year. It would also be good if the individual day pages, in addition to their "previous day / next day" links also had "previous day with a memory / next day with a memory" links, so I can just pick a random day somewhere and still find memories to read about around that time.
I also wonder what the earliest memory is. A search for 1066 did seem like it had found some links, but that's only because it's finding things in the Wikipedia data feed. Unfortunately you can't see what memories William the Conqueror had ;-)
July 12, 2006
links for 2006-07-12
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In-depth article looking at the issues surrounding online identity, what it is, what some of the problems are, and pointing to some of the different approaches being taken to tackling it.
July 05, 2006
links for 2006-07-05
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Some useful links to providers of shortcodes and SMS services. Just in case I ever get the urge to develop some SMS-based app
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HUGE list of bookmarklets (bookmarks/favourites you can use to do something useful to the page you're on, like translate it or blog about it) for all sorts of things.
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And a useful page to help you develop your own bookmarklets
June 24, 2006
links for 2006-06-24
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Interesting article comparing how Spain is devolving power with the failure of regional assemblies in Britain. I wonder if the North-West assembly would've been more successful than the NE one as it wouldn't be much more than re-unifying Lancashire.
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Demo of a 3D interface showing how to arrange documents in piles, or crumple them, bump into each other, and more. I can't see it replacing current UIs for organizing the desktop, but I can see bits of it inspiring all sorts of things
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Does what it says on the tin. And includes links to each of the videos on YouTube.
June 20, 2006
links for 2006-06-20
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Very impressive fountain performance produced with just 101 two-litre bottles of diet coke and some mentos (some kind of sweet afaict)
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No listings yet, but also a free-for-all on who can participate. Will be interesting to see what comes of it.
June 19, 2006
links for 2006-06-19
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Mike Kuniavsky weighs in on the "how to recreate Silicon Valley" debate with a post about how technology art is an important element in the mix
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Guy Kawasaki provides an in-depth view of what politicians should, shouldn't and can't do to help build a copy of Silicon Valley - and vitally points out that people should be aiming to beat Silicon Valley, not duplicate it!
June 17, 2006
links for 2006-06-17
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DTI report looking into the efficiency of solar water heating systems. (PDF file)
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Another DTI report detailing results of a study to test solar water heating, (apparently) showing that such systems pay for themselves after just a few years. (PDF file)
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Supplier of super-efficient solar water heating tubes, and all the other bits and pieces you'd need to fit them. Rough calculations look like it'd be about £900 to buy all the bits I'd need...
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Government grants to help cover the cost of installing things like solar water heating, wind turbines, etc.
June 07, 2006
links for 2006-06-07
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Stuart Bell is writing up a lot of his rides in and around Cambridge including the distances. Looks like it's building up into a useful collection.
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Huge searchable archive of Movietone news reels (as was shown before films at the cinema years ago). Aimed more to let people find clips to licence for use in their own films or TV programmes, once you register you can see a small-sized version of any of
June 02, 2006
links for 2006-06-02
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Given that my main machine is a now-clunky four-year-old laptop, I'm not up to date on the latest hardware developments. This article gives a good basic overview to help you avoid the more obvious gotchas when buying a new system.
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Useful article pointing to lots of information about how to make Linux more environmentally-friendly, including details of how to get it to hibernate and how to use older-spec machines for longer
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Hopefully some of the ideas here will help me remember stuff I read in books, where I can't just cut-n-paste stuff into my blog quite so easily... Pencil notes in the margins, with post-it note markers is the current plan.
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Architecture week soon, and there are some interesting events in Cambridge (some good ones in the North-West too). If I make it to any I'll no doubt write things up here.
May 31, 2006
links for 2006-05-31
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Huge collection of music videos from the 80s
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New Internet "radio" station aiming to fill the gap left by the passing of John Peel. Currently the programming is a continous loop of around 8 hours of material, and it's replaced each month. Keep an ear out for my mate Dan, who has a good two hour slo
May 30, 2006
links for 2006-05-30
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Interesting looking idea for charging people to use websites - as a user, once you've joined IndieKarma, whenever you visit a website that's signed up, they'll get a penny (actually one US cent) from your account. Doesn't cost you much, but potentially a
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Wampad is a new mobile-phone targetted web service. From the review it sounds like the service is actually thinking about what people might want to use their phone for with regard to accessing the Internet. It's making it easy to search google, the imdb
May 20, 2006
links for 2006-05-20
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Newly launched spec from the W3C for an XHTML offshoot which promises to make it easier to author content to display on a multitude of devices. Will be worth a look if I ever need to develop anything for mobile phones in the future
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Interesting transcript of a presentation given by the guy who founded ONEList (which is now Yahoo groups) and Bloglines (recently sold to Ask Jeeves) where he talks about his approach to starting and running startups
May 17, 2006
May 04, 2006
links for 2006-05-04
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Long article about what Al Gore has been up to since losing the presidency battle. You can't help but wonder what the world would be like if he'd won, but maybe his new zeal for solving the climate change problem is more important... maybe it will all wo
April 30, 2006
links for 2006-04-30
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Neat! BBC 6 Music has its own last.fm account. It doesn't capture absolutely everything that's played, only the stuff played off hard disk, but it's cool to be able to see what are the most popular artists and tracks.
April 29, 2006
The BBC Open Catalogue
It's interesting to see that the BBC have launched one of the first pieces of their Open Archive project this week.
The BBC Programme Catalogue doesn't have any actual video footage, but does provide a huge amount of meta-information about the programmes in their archive, so you can do things like find out what was on TV on the day I was born, or all the programmes that Floella Benjamin has been in.
All very interesting, and from a web developer point-of-view, nicely done - Atom and FOAF feeds all over the place; nice little sparkline-like graphs showing how the appearances map over time; and clean, easily-guessable URLs.
April 26, 2006
links for 2006-04-26
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A couple of guys in a 911 GT3 follow the 'Ring Taxi M5 around the Nurburgring. Pretty hairy at times, especially some of the overtaking manoeuvres and they even encounter a coach at one point.
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Handy bookmarklet (drag it to your bookmarks then "go to" the bookmark to have it do its stuff) to flip between amazon.com and amazon.co.uk so when you find a link to a book on amazon.com and you want to add it to your amazon.co.uk wishlist, you don't hav
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A good article to help you notice when you are procrastinating, and why, and ideas on how to deal with it when it happens.
April 11, 2006
links for 2006-04-11
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Interesting video showing what surfing the web is like for blind users, and pointing out some of the common problems with the way HTML is often laid out.
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Web service to let you build your own "River of News" from a list of RSS feeds that you provide
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Extension to the prototype.js library to let you create "windows" using javascript.
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Interesting video documenting how a drum break from a little-known 60s track "Amen Brother" has been sampled for use in hip hop tracks like Straight Outta Compton, then evolved to pretty much define jungle music, and finally into use in the mainstream in
March 27, 2006
links for 2006-03-27
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Excellent introduction to playing the guitar, giving you the basics and a good background of the different techniques and some of the theory behind things without getting dry or boring. The "Easy songs for beginners" section is particularly good to get y
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Once you've got a few chords under your belt, and want to try your favourite songs, this website has a huge collection of tabs so you'll most likely be able to find some more songs to play here.
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The web developer toolbar is an essential extension for Firefox if you're doing any web development. Now there's one for Internet Explorer too.
March 17, 2006
links for 2006-03-17
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"The following is a list of what I consider the be the best and most helpful AJAX tutorials that I've found over the past year." Maybe I won't need to post any more AJAX tutorials to del.icio.us after this ;-)
March 15, 2006
links for 2006-03-15
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Simple but effective web service to generate sparklines (little word-sized graphs). Also has links to Ruby and PHP equivalents
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The Guardian have just launched their new "blogpaper"? "newsblog"? Whatever it's called, it's their latest experiment into fusing blogging with news reporting.
March 07, 2006
links for 2006-03-07
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Apparently done by Sky TV - a version of The Simpsons opening credits recording with real-life actors. As Monty Burns would say... "Excellent..." Almost as good as when Homer and Bart went all 3D-computer-generated
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More CSS templates
February 22, 2006
links for 2006-02-22
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Free software to recover files from corrupted hard drives
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Step-by-step instructions for developing Firefox extensions. One of these days I'll get chance to write one to let me easily add RSS feeds to Thunderbird from finding them on a webpage in Firefox...
February 19, 2006
February 17, 2006
links for 2006-02-17
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Now that I've got RSS feeds for most of the venues in town, I need something like this to help me decide what to see. It'd save me having to poke around on Google and MySpace to try to find out what the lesser known bands sound like before I decide wheth
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Sweeping the 'net at the minute, and this video shows why LED Throwies look cool. Lots of little packages of battery + L.E.D. + magnet mean you can decorate anything that the magnet will stick to...
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Very cool demo. I think this sort of interaction research is much more interesting and viable than voice recognition. Maybe touchscreens will be how we break the mouse/keyboard stranglehold (via Tom @ plasticbag.org)
February 14, 2006
links for 2006-02-14
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Why do so many creative firms avoid putting prices on their websites? I like this firms approach - offering a set of "design packages" so those of us who assume that getting professional design would be expensive can see that it mightn't be as bad as the
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Suggestions on how to choose the names for your CSS IDs and Classes. Basically, choose names that link to the structure of the webpage (like "branding", or "main-navigation") rather than the presentation of the webpage (such as "banner", or "left-hand-me
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Online tool to let you test webpages "for quality, accessibility and privacy issues."
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From this week's Micro-ISV digest, this is an online version of a book about starting your own business by Bruce Judson.
February 12, 2006
links for 2006-02-12
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Useful little utility to show you which folders on your hard disk are taking up the most space. Would've been very useful when I was looking for all the space that Offline Folders had stolen.
February 11, 2006
links for 2006-02-11
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Historical info about exchange rates and the like. Because every now and then I want to know what the exchange rate was when I sold some shares or something, and I can never find stuff like this
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Interesting questions and thoughts from Dan Hill about the problems with the perfect new-ness of digital interfaces. Would we be able to find our way around more easily if there were barely perceptible changes with use - like how we can find paths across
January 20, 2006
links for 2006-01-20
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The second half of the list contains the real wisdom in my opinion.
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Comes highly recommended from the folks on the Association of Shareware Professionals newsgroups; I'll be working through them over the next few weeks I'm sure.
January 14, 2006
links for 2006-01-14
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Yet more mashups, this time via Troubled Diva. Lots of good ones here; I particularly like "Free Love Child" and "Loves Torn Theme" (Natalie Imbruglia meets Barry White) is superb.
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One of the downsides of working from home is that you're more likely to be at home when the tele-marketers call. If British Gas start another of their concerted efforts to get me to switch back to them, I'll keep a copy of this next to the phone and try
January 12, 2006
links for 2006-01-12
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Good explanation of how the Movable Type templates inter-relate, and how to customise them. Given I've had the current design for mcqn.net for over a year now, when I get some free time I think I'll be perusing this as part of a redesign.
January 11, 2006
links for 2006-01-11
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Detailed look at a few different techniques for implementing tagging, including database schemas to use and example SQL queries
January 10, 2006
links for 2006-01-10
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Neat looking tiny computer boards, about the size of a stick of chewing gum. Not too pricey either, and expandable with networking (ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth), audio, and LCD daughter-cards.
January 05, 2006
links for 2006-01-05
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Discusses some ways to use Ant to help with building PHP (or other) web apps. I'm surprised there aren't more articles like this, as surely it makes as much sense to use version control and build systems with web apps as it does with traditional apps? I
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The solution to my making fresh pasta dilemma when I have something like six egg whites left over, although it may just result in the slow filling of my freezer with egg whites ready for when I "get round to making meringue"...
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Wow! I want one of these floors for my parties. Make sure you check out the Video and Photos page!
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Useful glossary of lots of the common Windows terms (like "About", "New", "Apply", "Dialog box") into an assortment of different languages
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Tips on how to get your important data back from a dead hard drive if you haven't got PeerBackup yet ;-)
January 03, 2006
links for 2006-01-03
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The key draw for me with this blog is the regular "MicroISV Digest" - a regular round up of the interesting microISV (or small software business) -related writings on the web
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Interesting looking collection of free website designs. I suspect it'll be a good source of ideas and bits to crib if nothing else
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Haven't tried these yet, but the fact that they're pretty simple and short means they could be a good antidote to the mid-afternoon slump in energy levels and enthusiasm
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Monitor your hard drives so you'll hopefully catch them before they die (because as simple as restoring things from PeerBackup is, prevention is going to be a bit easier :-)
January 02, 2006
Helping You To Resolve
Happy New Year!
It's pretty typical for people to start the year deciding to do a whole raft of things differently from how they've been doing things in the past. It's not something I partake in much, my mind seems to wander onto "should I be doing X differently" or "am I happy with Y" thoughts at random times throughout the year, and I try to let it run through to a "resolution" then. So my resolving is a rolling item rather than a yearly overhaul, although while choosing my Christmas present list I did decide to try to read more books this year.
Anyway, given that some of my friends have been thinking about making New Year Resolutions (and because an assortment of people have been blogging about such matters), here are a couple of links I've encountered recently that might be useful:
- Momentum 2006 is a PDF file containing a number of questions/exercises to run through to help you better define your goals, and then get started on achieving them. It appears that one of the items in "Step 2" is missing, but that isn't a huge problem...
- And Curt Rosengren has a short quiz to help you decide whether you're in the right career.
December 24, 2005
December 15, 2005
links for 2005-12-15
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Interesting investigations into materials and the like for mobile phones. How might your phone be different if it was made from wood? Or if your phone cover was fabric rather than plastic?
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Find out how popular any given search term has been over the past month (-ish, it's reporting on October's usage at the minute), and get suggestions for other similar searches.
December 13, 2005
links for 2005-12-13
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Not sure how long this has been available, but for a while now I've thought that an RSS feed of news would be a much better way for the alumni to keep up to date with developments than the 6-monthly(?) magazine. (The RSS2.0 feed isn't validating at the m
December 09, 2005
links for 2005-12-09
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At some point in the future, when the price of hard drives has fallen a bit further, I'll re-rip my CD collection to a lossless format (rather than mp3). When I want to do that, I suspect these links will come in handy
December 08, 2005
links for 2005-12-08
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Worth a look if only to see the step-by-step instructions for disassembling a hard drive, complete with lots of pictures
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Things to think about as I develop the help system for PeerBackup...
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The first podcast I've started listening to regularly. A good selection of music and always a few good mashups or remixes.
November 29, 2005
links for 2005-11-29
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Great list of hints and tips to help you get the most out of del.icio.us.
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Handy collection of CSS templates for assorted page layouts
November 27, 2005
links for 2005-11-27
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Loic Le Meur's slides from what looks like it would've been a good presentation on why businesses should blog
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A real shame to hear that Richard Burns has died. Was wondering how he was after watching the end of this year's rally championship the other day, and had hoped he was on the mend.
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A huge repository of projects which use graphical maps and networks to visualize information. Interesting to see how people are looking for new ways to present data visually.
November 24, 2005
links for 2005-11-24
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Lots of links and info about turning an old laptop into a digital photo frame
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Just what it says - a roundup of a load of different Javascript / AJAX libraries
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Nice idea - use the motion of the pedal to power some built-in LEDs to give you better visibility. No SPD version yet, so I'm not sure I can be bothered with yet another thing to change whenever I want to take my bike off-road.
November 23, 2005
links for 2005-11-23
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Just drop this into a directory on your web server to get nicer directory listings, thumbnails of any images, etc. Similar to the way that Windows XP changes how directory contents are displayed depending on the contents. (Via www.gordonmclean.co.uk)
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Cute dogs singing and playing piano but with a serious message about ID cards...
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Scott Adams (he of Dilbert fame) has released one of his books for free as a downloadable PDF. I haven't read any of it yet, but it's going on the pile.
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If only all hybrid cars were like this!
November 10, 2005
links for 2005-11-10
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Could be useful to help measure how my marketing efforts fare...
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Kind of a shortened version of GTD (Getting Things Done). Divide and conquer; make yourself aware of how long things take; then you CAN leave it to the last minute...
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Hosted presentation generation software. Just in beta, but has some nice indexing and linking to help people navigate around your "powerpoint + audio" or "screencast"
November 03, 2005
links for 2005-11-03
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Do you trust trusted computing? A wonderfully made animated short covering some of the issues around "trusted computing"
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The RGB LED projects are rather interesting. Not sure my soldering skills are up to building them though...
November 02, 2005
links for 2005-11-02
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Don't know if it's any good to purchase domain names from, but the "pick two words and we'll generate a list of possible domain names based around those words and let you see which are available" search is pretty useful in itself
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Useful looking software to let you create a flash "video" of using your computer, with little captions, etc. I'm planning on providing some such tutorials for PeerBackup.
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Find out who first sang whatever the X-factor contestants are murdering this week...
October 27, 2005
links for 2005-10-27
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Free wordpress-based blog hosting. I think this is going to replace blogspot.com as my recommendation for people wanting to try out blogging
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I keep forgetting that there are an assortment of add-ons for PHP over here. Hopefully this'll help me remember in future...
October 17, 2005
links for 2005-10-17
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Handy instructions if one of your friends happens to have some backup software that talks to an FTP server...
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Not sure if I'd ever need this, but they've got lots of information about materials and machining methods, plus you can download some CAD software from them, design your own parts, and find out how much they'll cost to have made
October 14, 2005
links for 2005-10-14
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Informative article on what happens when you dial 999 (the UK emergency services number) from Nee Naw, the amusing and interesting blog of a dispatcher for the London Ambulance Service
October 07, 2005
Who's Blogging In Cambridge?
Fresh from his success with the Our Social World conference, Geoff has just launched Cambridge Blogs - a Wiki directory of bloggers here in Cambridge.
So if you're blogging in or around Cambridge, head over and make sure you're on the list. And maybe put your name down for the embryonic Cambridge blogmeet...
October 06, 2005
links for 2005-10-06
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Riser cards! So *that's* what they're called. I've been wondering whether you could get something to rotate PCI cards 90 degrees. Will make my hi-fi separates mp3 player a bit lower when I finally build it ;-)
September 07, 2005
Claiming My Feed On Feedster
No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:6fde87605d6127e5d6bcc6cee55e0921 so that I can add a pretty picture to go with links to my blog on the Feedster links results pages.
August 04, 2005
A Local Conference, But Not Just For Local People
Local blogger Geoff Jones has put together a very interesting looking conference about blogging and business - Our Social World.
The line-up includes a number of speakers I'd really like to see, and it's right on my doorstep.
At the moment, I have no idea whether or not I'm going to attend. The cost is one problem, given that I have zero income at present. The "Why don't British businesses blog?" theme is another issue - there could be useful things to learn, given that I'll be into full-on promoting my business by then, and blogging will be a part of that; but my business is already blogging and my conference-going itch is really the sort of geek melting-pot of Reboot, or Open Tech 2005. Working on my networking skills would also be good, but again there are more cost-effective ways of doing that locally that I've yet to take advantage of.
I might see if I can find out a bit more about it, and maybe even volunteer to help in some way as that'd help prevent my usual wallflower behaviour at such events...
July 07, 2005
A Terrible Day
I didn't get any work done today. Not until this evening at least. I've spent the day watching the terrible events in London unfold.
I did think about blogging about it earlier, but there seemed little point. Anyone reading my blog is bound to have heard about it elsewhere beforehand. And anything I say would just be re-iterating what other have already said. I am surprised at how few fatalities there've been (so far, perhaps). I have been impressed with how well the emergency services have reacted, and generally with how well London seems to be picking itself up and dusting itself down.
It was interesting to discover that most of the people I know in London are bloggers - it was reassuring to tick them off one by one as they posted to let everyone know they were okay.
It's also interesting how much information and communication I have access to. I first heard about the attacks on IRC, and soon after decamped to the front room in front of the TV. The TV was the best source for facts, as they scale better than websites for disseminating information to lots of people. BBC News 24 seemed to do a more responsible job - reporting which facts were officially confirmed, and pretty clearly marking what was rumour - much better than ITN or Sky News.
Instant messenger meant I could discuss events, and exchange facts and rumours with friends up and down the country, and even abroad; and text messaging meant I could find out that my friend in London was okay, although things will no doubt be a bit strange when she got into work this evening at St. Thomas's Hospital (South of the river, so probably not too involved).
And blogs and digital (or even mobile phone) cameras have provided a less filtered, unofficial, but more real view on events. Tom Reynolds has posted about his day, something I'd been waiting for all day, given his job at the London Ambulance Service. I'm sure there'll be interesting posts from him over the coming days. Via Mike, there's a a detailed report from someone caught in one of the tube explosions. And all day there more and more photos have been appearing in two Flickr photo pools for the explosions.
My thoughts are with the victims and their families.
March 28, 2005
No New Ideas
Over a year ago now, I spent some time playing around with some code to scrape the events pages of local venues and build up an RSS feed of what was on. The idea was that I wouldn't keep missing gigs. However, I didn't get it working well enough to release, and haven't had time to play with it further since.
The other day, I discovered Upcoming.org. Admittedly, it doesn't do the scraping of existing websites, it relies on the users entering events; but that's largely to be expected, scraping the websites was the bit I was having most trouble with :-)
The "consuming" events side of things is very cool though - you can see your own events, events being attended by your friends, or events for your area (or Metro, as Upcoming calls them). For example, here's the page with all the events in Cambridge.
Even better (at least, it is once you've gotten into RSS feeds, which you really should...), you can get an RSS feed of events so you don't have to keep checking the website for new stuff. Or there's an iCal feed which you can use on a Mac (I think, not having one myself :-) or with a calendar program like Sunbird to have the events show up in your calendar.
The only problem now is getting enough people to start putting events into the Cambridge bit so I find out what's happening, although I see that Damien has at least been adding the Broken Family Band gigs...
February 22, 2005
Another Random Reality Radio Appearance
When Tom Reynolds was last on the radio talking about workplace blogging I created a link to let him direct people directly to the interview, rather than having to tell people how far into the radio show it was.
Although it's relatively easy to do, it requires a bit of geek hacking so I spent some time looking into how easy it would be to knock up a little web service to make it more user-friendly. And added it to my list of projects to do sometime.
Of course, before I get chance to build the web app, Tom gets himself another radio appearance, this time on BBC Five Live.
So, hand-coded again (partly so I could listen to it easily myself), for the next week here's the link to Tom's interview on Five Live.
January 11, 2005
Photography Sale In Aid Of The Tsunami
As Jo noted over here:
"Cambridge photographer Jean Luc Benazet is selling his collection of prints to raise money for the appeal. He will donate 100% of the profits and his company will match his funds raised. There are some nice Cambridge pics."
I've held off blogging about it until today because for the first couple of days the sale was only open to his colleagues at Citrix.
But now the sale is open to all of us! I'm getting one of the Anfield prints, and a few of the others have caught my eye - not sure if I'm going to succumb to temptation though.
So head over to his website to have a look, and get yourself a cool picture whilst helping the victims of the tsunami.
January 04, 2005
Not Just A Song By The Manics
There's not much left to say is there? Especially with the terrible disaster happening when I was away from broadband internet access and so am blogging about it late.
It's my personal connections that've brought it home to me, rather than the blanket news coverage.
The sister of a friend is out travelling in the area, and for a while they didn't know if she was okay - luckily she decided to move on and missed the tsunami by hours.
Evelyn Rodriguez, one of my regular reads, wasn't quite as fortunate but survived (largely) unscathed and has been providing lots of useful information and stories since. Start reading from her post in the immediate aftermath.
There's another personal report here, and the Guardian has a roundup of reports from blogs.
And finally, in case you haven't yet helped out, here's the link to DONATE TO THE EARTHQUAKE APPEAL.
December 17, 2004
Much Linking
Only about a year after all the super-cool-early-adopter geeks signed up, I've finally jumped on the del.icio.us bandwagon.
For those of you who don't know, del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks system". Bookmarks because it's a way of storing your bookmarks or favourites on the web; so you can get at them from any computer anywhere and you can provide a short description so you've some chance of remembering why you bookmarked it. And social because you can see other people's bookmarks.
That last part doesn't sound very interesting, until I tell you about tags. When you create a bookmark you can specify some tags for that bookmark, a bit like keywords or categories. Then you can search for all of your bookmarks with a given tag, or all of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag - for example, http://del.icio.us/tag/liverpool+football gives you all the bookmarks tagged with liverpool and football.
The upshot of all this, for those of you who haven't rushed off and signed up yourself, is that I've set-up del.icio.us to post any new bookmarks to McFilter. So, in an hour or so (if I've set it up right, otherwise real soon now honest...) there should be a new entry containing my bookmarks. Then each day, if I've saved any new bookmarks, there'll be an entry with the new ones in. There may be some changes to the formatting too, depending on what the entries look like.
If you're still reading, and if the idea has piqued your interest, here's a good, user-friendly introduction. Then you might want to look at nutr.itio.us which makes choosing tags a bit easier when you add bookmarks, and the delicious Firefox extension which gives you some handy new items on your right-click menu if you use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer (and you should). Finally, instructions on getting del.icio.us to post bookmarks to your blog (I'm currently working on how to set this up for blogger/blogspot blogs, so I'll post details when I work it out).
December 15, 2004
The Art In Liverpool Weblog
Now that the Biennial is over, Ian Jackson (he of Biennial Blog fame) has launched a new blog - the Art In Liverpool Weblog. More general in scope, although something tells me it'll still pretty much focus on Liverpool. And art.
Be sure to check out the cool Jaguar sculpture.
December 01, 2004
Cambridge In Having Night-life Shocker
Varsity Online reports on interesting developments in Cambridge's night-life
"Over the course of the coming year, all existing licences regarding the sale of alcohol and public entertainments are being replaced by a new licensing system that allows for the possibility of staying open until 5am, as clubs and bars on the continent do. B Bar, Vaults, Bar Ha Ha and Number 1 King%u2019s Parade are all applying for extended licenses."
Coco's club seems set to close and be reborn (again) as "The Soul Tree", which at least sounds promising, and Po Na Na is due for an extension. It doesn't say whether thats an extension of physical space, or an extension of its opening hours - both would be useful...
October 07, 2004
The People Down There Look Like Ants
-- The Museum of Modern Art: Tall Buildings -- is a superb online exhibition about modern skyscrapers. Twenty-five buildings (or proposals for buildings) from the past decade are represented, including a few of the proposals for the World Trade Centre site in New York, the London Bridge Tower, and the Swiss Re "Gherkin".
The Elephant & Castle Eco Towers is a particularly interesting project, incorporating vegetation into its sustainable construction.
(Via Downtown Liverpool)
September 30, 2004
Hacked Off
Last year, when Hullabaloo wasn't even a twinkle in her eye, Emily was over on location in France, helping a couple of her friends with a film they were making.
Hacked Off, a slasher horror movie, is now finished and will be available to buy on DVD from tomorrow.
I haven't seen it yet, so offer this synopsis in lieu of a review, or just go watch the trailer (smaller version).
September 29, 2004
Little House On The Pier Head
I never program my video recorder. Ceefax doesn't give the Videoplus numbers, and I can never be bothered to set it manually. I don't record much anyway - generally things I'd miss otherwise from being out - so I usually start it recording manually before I head out; the time display is good enough for me to find the programme later.
This does result in my recording all sorts of bits of TV I don't intend watching. Occasionally I catch something of interest, as happened last week when I recorded Newsnight Review before a Gram Parsons documentary.
Among the subjects for review was recently opened art festival in Liverpool, Biennial 2004. Lots of contemporary art scattered across the city. I'll have to see if I can get across if I end up in the North-West for Halloween this year.
I'm enjoying exploring the festival through the semi-unofficial Liverpool Biennial Blog 2004.
September 28, 2004
Let's Hope He Doesn't Need To Put It Into Action
Much better than the Beeb's Dirty War "mockumentary" and vastly more informative than the discussion afterwards, Tom Reynolds explains the London Ambulance Service's plan for dealing with a major incident.
September 15, 2004
Getting Things Done
43 Folders is an ever expanding collection of tips and tricks to help you be more productive. And it isn't just for geeks, the common thread binding the ideas is a system for organizing your life, called GTD.
GTD stands for Getting Things Done, and 43 Folders includes a handy guide to getting started with GTD.
There are some similarities with how I was already organizing things, but I think I'll be cribbing more ideas as time progresses to hopefully get even more things done.
The Guardian Style Guide
The Chicago Manual Of Style seems to be the most cited reference tome for matters such as whether to capitalize, the difference between "complementary" and "complimentary", and whether it is acceptable to split infinitives.
However, it's a guide to American English and is nearly forty quid, so I was most pleased to discover that the Guardian style guide is freely available online.
August 18, 2004
[mcqn @ Uborka] Ade's rap Postcard Response
Dr. Pockless replied to my letter with a scan of a handwritten letter. As I don't have a scanner, I used my wits to come up with Ade's rap Postcard Response.
August 17, 2004
[mcqn @ Uborka] Kings College Chapel at Sunset
This week's theme is Letters. I managed to restrain myself from just posting Eddie Izzard's letters to the Corinthians, and just replied to one of Dr. Pockless' essays:
Uborka: King's College Chapel at Sunset
August 10, 2004
Cumbria - The Art Gallery
Andy Goldsworthy - Sheepfolds is a collection of ephemeral art dotted around Cumbria.
I particularly like this one - is it the screaming mouths of lost souls; or the burrows of a long-lost Lakeland creature? The almost missable qualities of this also appeal: snaking through the reeds like the flightpath of a damsel fly, and the fiery colours of this contrast wonderfully with the muted tones of its surroundings.
August 06, 2004
Huge Pictures
The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator. A superb web app that you give an image, and it gives you a multi-page PDF file containing a big black and white newspaper-style (i.e. made up of lots of dots) version of the image.
Then you can print it out and make a massive poster!
August 05, 2004
How To Be Creative
I held off posting this when it first appeared as it was clear it was going to evolve a little. And then it exploded everywhere. Well worth reading, and be sure to explore the links to more.
Hugh MacLeod's how to be creative.
[mcqn @ Uborka] Unexpected Music
Poetry week this week at Uborka. I don't think I've written a poem since I was at school. However, inspired by the arrival of my copy of the Uborka Mix CD, whilst in the shower this morning I composed Unexpected Music.
Next poem to be released when I'm 45...
August 04, 2004
Maybe Not Today...
Okay, I'm not sure exactly how it would fit into the lounge, so it might not make an appearance at one of my parties for a while, but I definitely fancy getting some of this one day...
July 30, 2004
July 29, 2004
July 22, 2004
July 14, 2004
[mcqn @ Uborka] Freedom
Uborka is into its third phase of guest-blogging, where a theme is chosen for each week, and any of the past guest-bloggers can post about that theme.
The first theme is The Uborka Mix CD. Obviously I couldn't pass up the opportunity to choose a track, so go here to read about Freedom.
June 29, 2004
A Diva Less Troubled
Mike has bypassed his server woes, and is newly double-barrelled as troubled HYPHEN diva.
My blogroll will be updated to reflect this (and many other changes that have been building up) when I get a spare five minutes...
June 21, 2004
For All You Healthcare Professionals
Even the none-healthcare-professionals among you might, as I did, enjoy reading Random Acts Of Reality, a blog from an ambulanceman (actually an E.M.T. but given that I don't know what one of those is... Emergency Medical Traveller? Excessively Maroon Tortoise? Enraged Monkey Troubleshooter?)
And from the medical section of his blogroll, I stumbled upon This won't hurt a bit!: Save the last dance, which pointed me at these two lovely poems.
June 18, 2004
[mcqn @ Uborka] How To... Be A Link-Whore
Well, Uborka gets the scoop. The company now has an official name - MCQN and a website at http://www.mcqn.com/.
The next step is to find out some more about what people want from their backup software, so that PeerBackup is as good as possible, I urge everyone, and their friends, and their friends' dogs to fill in the survey.
[mcqn @ Uborka] Cocktails
Lyle (my co-guest for the week) is now taking drinks orders for this afternoon's cocktails. If you rush over and leave a comment then you can attend the party later on.
June 17, 2004
Don't Know About Egloos, But Eglus Are Cool!
At first glance, I thought that David Weinberger's post on Egloos was about the cute iMac-esque hen houses available from Omlet. But it isn't, it's about a Korean weblog provider, and the omlet coops are eglus.
Still, it reminded me that I hadn't blogged about them, so now I have.
June 16, 2004
June 15, 2004
June 14, 2004
Guest Week @ Uborka
This week, I will mostly be guest blogging over at Uborka. I'll even link to each post from here so you can find them more easily, so go on over and have a peek.
June 08, 2004
Flying Long-haul? Find The Best Seats Here
SeatGuru.com - Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating
(Via ongoing)
Keep Tabs On Your MP
TheyWorkForYou.com is a great source of information about MPs. You enter your postcode, and it brings up a whole host of information about your MP - such as how likely they are to rebel against the party, or how many votes they attend. Plus, you can get an RSS feed of their comments in the Parliament!
And you can search through everything said in parliament since 2001! For example, weblog has been mentioned twice.
More Statistics Than You Can Shake A Stick At
From gay domestic violence to foreign economic espionage... a huge array of statistics.
(Via kottke.org)
June 01, 2004
Lots Of Useful Web Design Info
A List Apart, lots of interesting articles and tutorials about web design. Guess who's building a website at the minute...
May 31, 2004
Photo Links
If you want an image for some CD artwork, or some web design, then there's a vast selection at Stock.XCHNG (royalty-free and cost free) and www.istockphoto.com (royalty-free, and pretty cheap, plus you can upload your own photos and get paid if anyone uses them).
And then if you're using the Gimp (free image manipulation package) to manipulate them, GIMPguru.org has lots of useful tips and tutorials; something you'll need unfortunately, because the Gimp UI is rather unintuitive.
April 23, 2004
Not Even Best At Being Crazy
It's always good to remind yourself that whatever mad thing it is you've decided to do, there's always someone doing something more insane. And blogging about it more. And just getting on with it.
(Via Ben Hammersley).
April 02, 2004
More Political Blogging
I see that Shaun Woodward, the MP who controversially stood for Labour in St. Helens South, has just launched his own blog.
March 27, 2004
Find Your Googlerank
The height of geekdom, I know, but in case you have a burning desire to find out that you're the 111th McEwen (when you're not even in the top 500 Adrians, oh the shame), then the Googlerank Calculator is the tool for you.
March 16, 2004
You Might Not Like Shopping Malls
I don't particularly enjoy shopping malls. I find the controlled environment and climate to be stuffy and a little stifling. However, after reading this interview with the man who perfected the mall, I have a new found understanding of the reasoning behind the design of the mall. The mall is an optimised machine for shopping; a little over-optimised for my liking.
(via Kottke.org)
March 09, 2004
The Cambridge Politics Page
Looks like I won't have any excuse not to vote in the next local elections, as the Politics in the City of Cambridge website gathers links and information about politics and elections in Cambridge.
February 20, 2004
RSS Must Be The Future
If even the BBC are promoting it ;-)
BBC NEWS | Magazine | The really simple future of the web.
February 16, 2004
Promoting The North-West
Political activism through blogging. Is it a new force in politics, or just the replacement for micro-scooters?
The Necessary Group are hoping for the former, as they are promoting blogging as a tool for people to get involved, and also linking to Meetup.com. Shame they haven't embraced the format for their own website, surely an RSS feed could keep the campaign fresh in people's minds?
Doing some investigation, I found this report which claims that "[a]wareness of government policy for the English regions was very low, with around 50% across England having heard nothing of government proposals."
I'm not surprised. I can't even find the whitepaper about devolution in England (Your Region, Your Choice) on the government's website - the site it was on seems to no longer exist. Google was a little more fruitful, finding the aforementioned report, along with a white paper explaining the implications for the North-West. Nor have I been able to find any details of the "official Yes Campaign" mentioned on the It's Necessary FAQ or a No Campaign.
From what I've read so far, I'm largely in favour of a regional assembly for the North West. Not that I'll have any say in it, seeing as I don't live there anymore. The entrepreneur in me, however, feels that it would be more beneficial to narrow the North-South divide through innovation and commerce; get back to what the North West did best when it was leading the industrial revolution and succeed, if necessary, despite government help.
February 10, 2004
CDs Ripped? Check. Next Step DVDs...
BYTE has a basic HOWTO for ripping your DVDs and converting them to DivX in the article Building Your Home Video Jukebox (paid subscription to Byte required).
I'm not as into my films as I am my music, so it'll probably be a while before I can stream movies around my home network...
January 21, 2004
Joi Ito Promotes Better Blogging
Joi Ito's Web: Writing style and blogging gives some links to articles covering common mistakes made by writers and suggestions for ways to improve.
I have read them, but I can't guarantee a noticeable improvment in the quality of postings on this blog...
January 19, 2004
Next-gen Taxi Services
It seems that location-aware services are starting to gain some traction. Zingo is a taxi service in London which will route you through directly to the nearest black cab when you phone for a taxi, so hopefully you'll get a taxi quicker.
I wonder if it'll route you through to the same driver when you phone back half an hour later to find out where they've got to...?