Like a gazillion others, I quickly jumped in the DrawSomething bandwagon and had a good laugh at my total lack of artistic talent. It’s simplicity does have an immediate appeal and is good fun. $200M can’t be wrong, right? Because it’s so simple and because, initially at least, it’s a lot of fun, you can easily see who it spread virally so...

They often say that the pen is mightier than the sword and, yet, there is very little jail time associated with carrying a biro in your pocket. Recently I was wondering if the same can be said to be true of that which is written online. In the past I’ve written about scale free networks in relation to the Internet and you can see how anything written by a big...

There must be at least 7 other blog posts on the internet claiming to hold the secrets of software development success. Well, here it is, number 8. One of the very few benefits of being an old git is that you’ve been doing the same thing for long enough to know that there is very little different as the software industry fuels itself with faddish changes of...

When people look at my Archos 504 these days, it usually gets the same reaction “What on earth is that thing?“. To which I reply “It’s my MP3 player”. At which point they are even more bemused “…but, but… it’s, erm… HUGE.” “Yes” I reply politely “I also use it for...

Back in the early 90′s there was much to celebrate. Aside from being thin and having hair, the TV was full of things to keep any self-respecting pseudo-intellectual happy. The ultra-cool obviously watched Twin Peaks. Still a classic and hasn’t aged at all. The more thoughtful and romantic were glued to Northern Exposure. Obviously, being intent on being...

It is a little known fact that Angry Birds was invented in the 1970′s by two small boys in the barren urban landscape of Wester Hailes on the outskirts of Edinburgh. How do I know? I was one of those boys. The other, Stuart Douglas, is so far behind the mobile device times that he thinks Angry Birds is a Jimmy McGovern reaction to something involving Nerys...

You may have asked yourself how I made the iPad backgrounds that I have posted herein. Maybe not. But I’m going to tell you anyway. I used Google’s Picasa. I have all my photos organised in Picasa, so that makes things easier, but you don’t need to have your photos imported for this to work. It’s a very simple three stage process. 1. Pick a...

My keen eyed reader will have noticed that I recently mentioned my first tentative steps towards a new novel. Being far more of a techy than a writer, I obviously spent far more time worrying about how to organise the writing process rather than doing much writing and thinking. Clearly I could have repeated my previous process, write in Word and backup via FTP to...

In these cold times, thoughts turn to the warmth of the summer and, perhaps, travelling about Europe in a banger. If you’re feeling cold, why not think about signing up for a banger rally across Europe. Both the Sucata Run and Sucata Split are open for teams to register. In the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to do both and, as my reader will know,...

How about this for blatant search engine whoring? Well, in my defence, I was putting some of my photos as backgrounds on my iPad wallpaper, so I thought, why not share with the world! I’m like that. Sharing, thoughtful etc. Now, to be honest, I can’t really decide what works best as an iPad wallpaper, so I’ve tried a bit of a range of things to try....