After my post about the Wattson I started poking around with the idea of more homebrew electronics. In particular the homebrew ambient orb (another one made a with PIC) seemed really cool. While reading about that particular marvel I found out about the Arduino.
The Arduino is an open source prototyping board. The system is powered […]
Small but significant thing that’s making my life easier. Stuart pointed me at Ensymble a Python script which uses x-platform libraries to do a number of key Symbian development related tasks.
Most importantly Ensymble can sign SIS files and create SIS files from pyS60 scripts. Since it does these with open Python libraries you can run […]
So what I’ve been dying to talk about for ages is finally in the open. Yahoo is going to be an OpenID 2.0 provider. This news is big. On 30th January Yahoo will make their OpenID provider a public beta.
We, of course, have a developer page about OpenID. It’s a bit basic right now, but […]
This is not the sort of thing I often blog about, however this product really struck me. Fluidform (in Austria) are selling these beautiful beech bowls shaped like a map contour. I love this idea. I was thinking I’d like to buy one centred on where I proposed to my wife. Maybe when I have […]
The trains were essentially exactly the same as the GNER service, except they have uglier branding. However the Wifi is free to everyone, not just first class. Given that it cost my wife and I only £20 more to travel by train than the cheapest of the cheap (Megabus) I am very pleased. Half the […]
Christmas time at my parent’s showed very well the reasons behind the success of Nintendo’s Wii and I also believe several other modern products like the iPod, iPhone and Tivo.
In our family Christmas is held at my Grandfather’s. He sits in his armchair and presides over the goings on of the younger folks, being 94 […]
Wow. I haven’t posted anything for over a month which is a big break for me. But I just had to write a quick note about this. A post from August on the Pipes blog just arrived in my feedreader talking about the ability to extend Pipes using Web Services. I can’t express just how […]
Cathy made an interesting comment to me recently. We were talking about reading and she was complaining that reading an English book took days compared to hours for a Chinese one of the same length.
I was thinking about this. It seems like is because Chinese is much more information dense language. There are tens of […]
A bit later than the rest of the world I dusted off the video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in conversation at the D5 conference. I found it really interesting that neither Bill Gates or Steve Jobs mentioned any start-ups at D5. I realise that anything they say would probably inflate the stock price […]
One of the nice things about Macs is the ability to drag and drop stuff anywhere and it just figures out what you meant. I use iMovie to create training videos of presentations at Yahoo. Part of that means overlaying slides on top of video.
The obvious thing to do would be to drop the Keynote […]
So I signed up for Mosh to check it out. One of the first things I did when I landed was take a look at the interface. There were some interesting entires in the tags section.
Why is it that within 24 hours of anything being released on the internet someone is trying to use it […]
I had an interesting conversation earlier with Neil and Steve. We were talking about how companies treat small discrete markets and how that affects their larger markets.
My example Google is that have Ad Sense rolled out to many many markets. While many of those markets probably don’t generate much revenue individually as a group the […]
Wow. Stonehenge is an amazing place. It could be seen as just a pile of rocks but it’s so much more. Rosemarie and I took a coach trip with a private viewing a month or so back. Just us and 50 or so of our fellow discerning tourist.
Walking around the circle, being able to touch […]
I used to think PHP was just for half-arsed programmers who didn’t know how to use a strongly typed language. However I’ve been using PHP to write one of Europe’s busiest web sites for a year now. PHP is simple but effective in a lot of ways. I still find things that are really tough […]
Bubble Generation Strategy Lab have an interesting piece on The Death of 1%. While they credit this to Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz, they explain the idea that the 1% contributor rule will die off. Their suggestion is not that 1% of people contribute it’s that people contribute to the few things they really care about.
This is […]
One of the things that really really bugs me about my N95 is that when I’m listening to music on the tube and the wire gets tugged and the connection between the headphones and the phone is lost for a second the phone switch straight to the speakers at 100% volume.
Since Nokia is trying to […]
I’ve been a Vegan around two and a half years now. A lot of people ask me how I do it. The main secret also works with a lot of other things. Being a Vegan takes 30 seconds. 30 seconds when you buy your food, 30 seconds when you hold on to the will power […]
So, I have to be honest. I fucked up. I had some server trouble, and I did keep blogging. For a while. Then I stopped. And in my shame I didn’t want to admit I’d stopped. And the gap between posts got larger, and larger.
Lifehacker had a great post about how Jerry Seinfeld motivates himself. […]
After a very frustrating period while my hosting provider did a bunch of random maintenance stuff the blog is back on a new server. I’m going to be looking at making some changes though. After talking with Marco about the way he does his blog, and David about his life stream ideas I’m going to […]