| Title | Description |
| Jargone |
I made a thing. Jargone is a bookmarklet for highlighting jargon words on any web page. The list comes from the Government Digital Service GOV.UK style guide, specifically the plain English and words to avoid sections of the guide, which has this to say about avoiding jargon We lose trust from our users if we write government ‘buzzwords’ [...] |
| Boring 2012 |
I spent today at Boring 2012. Now in its third year, in the words of conference organiser James Ward, Boring is “a day dedicated to the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked.” During the introduction he also told us that this was to be “the most boring one yet” and “I can only [...] |
| Ad blocking |
Having worked in both TV and advertising, I’m intrigued by how easy it is these days for people to block ads online and what it might mean for the near future of online advertising. I recently learned an interesting fact about the popular Adblock plugin for Chrome; it doesn’t just block banner ads as I [...] |
| Turbo Drone RC Quadrocopter ? hands on review |
The nice people at Paramountzone sent me a Turbo Drone four channel remote controlled quadrocopter to review. It’s 36cm across (including the rotors, which are 13.5cm each), making it just about small enough to fly indoors. The 500mAh 3.7v li-po rechargeable battery makes it conveniently easy to get spares; I had the exact same battery [...] |
| Weeknotes 38: publishing stuff |
I’ve been quite busy in the past couple of weeks looking after a small team putting the Government Digital Strategy online. In the words of the policy professionals who actually wrote the words, it was published “as a website rather than published on a website“. This may sound like a small distinction, but it makes [...] |
| My LEGO studio |
Here’s my LEGO studio. The main desk at the front is two metres wide and has two levels; plenty of space to store things I need to have close at hand. On the left of the room are a bunch of fishing tackle boxes, drawers, trays and little boxes which I lift out and place [...] |
| Inky-Linky |
I made a thing. Inky-Linky makes web pages 100% more useful and irritating when printed. It’s a bookmarklet that adds a QR code to the margins for each external link in the page. It came about because I wanted to make it easy to visit a link from a printed page, and also wanted to [...] |
| Some of my collections |
I spoke at the Shoreditch Ideas Club last night, an event that Hugh Garry organises for Shoreditch House. I wanted to explore whether the act of collecting might have some additional extrinsic value beyond the collection itself. It’s also a bit of a confession (spoiler: it turns out that I collect collections) so if you [...] |
| Things riding on things |
For the past month or so, I’ve been trying to make at least one thing every week. This week, while digging through my list of someday/maybe projects, I was delighted to find this little beauty: “website idea: a collection of things riding on other things. Videos of kittens riding on tortoises, etc”. I had originally [...] |
| Slow London |
Things happen fast in London. I wondered what it would look like if it could all be slowed down. I was inspired by Trey Ratcliff’s ‘Stuck in Motion’ technique and shot this on an iPhone 4S at 60fps using SloPro |
