Miscellaneous

Logos in Lego Town

August 23, 2009, 4:31 pm

I love the list of ‘fictional universes’ on Wikipedia. It contains everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The Fictional Universes database on Freebase is even better, as it contains thousands of details about the universes, such as species, objects, and even ethnicities. However, one universe neither site [...]

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Martin Belam (aka @currybet) has written up his guidelines for a corporate Twitter usage policy. Now I’ve never worked for a company with the nous to have any sort of social networking policy (good, bad or otherwise), but in my current role at Rattle, I do advise companies on how they should best behave in [...]

At around midday today we got the results in from the referendum on Manchester’s TIF (Transport Innovation Fund) bid. I got the news first from Twitter, of course, but it then trickled up onto the BBC News website: Voters reject congestion charge. It’s a disappointment for me, as a new Manchester city centre resident. I [...]

I was at BarCamp Sheffield at the weekend, which was both fun and interesting, especially as it was a crowd of people I mostly hadn’t met before. One of the principles of BarCamp is that everyone is encourage to lead a session. At BathCamp I gave a short talk about Lego, and the various fan [...]

GPS on mobiles – what is it good for?

November 23, 2008, 5:48 pm

GPS seems to be becoming more and more of a standard feature on high-end mobile phones. I’ve had it for a while on my Nokia N95, and now N96. The new iPhone 3G now has it, and it’s also included on some of the mobile phones from HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. My question is: [...]

Running a mobile web server on the N96

October 22, 2008, 4:12 pm

So, anyone who follows my Twitter stream will know that yesterday I ran a little experiment on my new Nokia N96 phone (which I’ll review in another week or so once I’ve had more experience using it). The experiment was to install a web server on the phone. I’ll repeat that, because I know it [...]

How the BBC iPlayer broke its URLs

October 15, 2008, 11:00 am

I’ve become a big user of the BBC iPlayer service, even though I already have a pretty sophisticated PVR hard disk recorder sitting under my telly. The crucial difference between the two services is that with the BBC iPlayer, you don’t have to remember to record a programme in advance. It also helps that I [...]

Walking in the Hope Valley

October 14, 2008, 3:31 pm

I’ve mentioned before that I now have a rather nice daily Manchester to Sheffield commute. Not only is it a rather pleasant, relaxed train ride, with plenty of spare seats (most people seem to commute in the opposite direction), but it also goes through some stunning countryside. As you can see from this map, the [...]

This evening I’ll be having my first driving lesson. It was always part of my plan to work towards a driving licence after moving to Manchester, and so now I’m finally getting started. My provisional licence arrived at the end of last week, after a nerve-wracking week of having sent my passport off to the [...]

Peter Jones and 'Own-it North'

October 7, 2008, 12:46 pm

Further to my post a few weeks ago about Dragons Den and patents, I’ve just stumbled across the Own-it North website, via Manchester Digital Development Agency. Their mission is: To provide creative people and businesses based in the North with the relevant knowledge, advice and support to protect, exploit and value their intellectual property and [...]