Ok, so you’re all gonna say, “should have got an iPhone“. Maybe so, but I couldn’t be arsed changing provider and, for the most part, my HTC Touch HD is a very capable phone. It does everything I need. I’m used to Windows Mobile so the messaging, emailing is good, web browsing is really nice and the camera is great. OK, so I can’t...

At risk of being accused of the geekiest blog post ever, I give you a very good punt at the title. (Although this is perhaps more autobiographical/social history than full-on tech gunk.) In the beginning there was only silence. As an 11 year old boy I sat at the my ZX81 and black and white portable TV* and played Quicksilva Scramble (all hail @zoupdragon) in a very...

Thirst for content can, from time to time, expose a lot of bland nonsense. There are sites/content authors that mistake lists of obvious blurb for content. We all know who they are, I don’t need to name and shame (the list would be too long). A large part of the reason for this is the democracy of access. Many sites make it very easy for people to become...

StumbleUpon has, for many years now, been my way of finding new, interesting stuff on the Web. The stats today show that I have ‘Stumbled’ over 25000 times. It solved the problem of getting stuff you might like ‘pushed’ to you and removed the need to go looking for anything specific. StumbleUpon always said that the more you rated the more...

There has been a lot of Twitter-chat today about the change that was introduced by Twitter that stopped people seeing ‘@’ replies from people who they weren’t following. There was a lot of moaning and groaning throughout the day and later news suggested that this was perhaps a scalability/performance issue. Now, I spend a lot of my time dealing...

So you want to start a company. Good for you. No, seriously, it will be good for you. Although there will inevitably be times when it will feel exactly the opposite. At the very beginning, the immediate problems are obvious “I need product, I need customers, I need an office, I need MONEY” and for the most part these are the things you do need and should...

So, you have an idea for a business or product. How do you come up with a name? Here’s a few tips. 1. Pick a word you like and look it up in a foreign language. There are many online dictionaries for this. Look for something memorable, that has an obvious hook and no obvious pronunciation problems. Start with the basic principles you are after, get a thesaurus...

It’s good to be optimistic. And I love people with great drive and belief. But there is, unfortunately, a limit on how far a wave of optimism can take you up the beach before sucking you back into the shark-infested depths. My problem, as has often been pointed out, is that I see reasons why things might be difficult far brighter than why they might work....

Everyone moans about it, but you can’t get away from it. People use PowerPoint a lot. And, for the most part, the issue isn’t with the tool itself. It is far more to do with how people use it. I’ve been suffering this for too many years now, so this is a small attempt to make my life better my hopefully sitting through a few less dismal...

Who knew I’d find a valid(ish) reason to use that word. Hopefully I’ve not stretched it too far.* For a good few years now I’ve been giving most of photography away online for free. I now have well over 300K downloads from two sites alone. People often say to me “you should charge for those, if you got £1 a time…” etc. And my...