news
Here’s a brief diversion. On Twitter, I learn that Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council in South Wales have spent £190,000 on a set of three dormice bridges designed to allow the rodents to cross a new major bypass [...]
I’m going to spend 10 minutes on the 13th November being interesting. About Lego. On the same day, dozens of other people are also going to be interesting, about topics as diverse as sidesaddle riding, feral children, American baseball scorekeeping and cake. This isn’t just a random occurrence, it’s part of an event called Interesting North, [...]
TechCrunch has an interesting report about how Bill Gates has been speaking at a conference in Lake Tahoe called Techonomy about the future of education. His central thesis was that, in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to get a better further education using the web than you could simply at a single University institution. [...]
This video is pure Lego porn. If you can get over the somewhat cheesy intro, this is actually a pretty compelling pitch for a new lego set which lets you build London’s Tower Bridge. The designer in the video is Jamie Berard, who used to be simply an adult fan of lego (an AFOL, in [...]
If there’s one thing that’s starting to annoy me in this election build-up, it’s the constant speculation over who-would-do-what if there’s a hung parliament. If you watch the press conferences of any of the three main political parties, you’ll see journalist after journalist asking more-or-less the same question [...]
Hello. I’ve just updated the design of my website/blog. It’s something that I’ve been tinkering with for ages, and so actually having made the changes live feels like a minor achievement in personal getting-round-to-it productivity. [...]
Last week I wrote about part 1 of the mini-project I’ve been working on called My Life As An Object. That part is over now, and we’re half-way through part 2. Before I talk a bit about that, I should just say that I thought the first week went pretty well. Greg did a great [...]
We launched a new mini-project at work yesterday. It’s called My Life As An Object (named by me in crass-TV-documentary-style), and the aim is to take museum objects and give them a ‘life’ online. I say ‘life’, because what normally happens when museum objects get placed online (or ‘digitised’, in museum parlance) is that they [...]
Since late Thursday night, I’ve been distressed. The news, first leaked in the Times on Friday, that Mark Thompson is planning wide-ranging cuts at the BBC as part of a “strategic review”, is deeply distressing. According to the leak in the Times (now more or less confirmed), this will include cutting the BBC website by [...]
Phil Gyford is doing a news project. He’s just written up day one. The project’s aim, in his words, is to: spend the week writing an online news website … I’ll probably spend the week reading a lot of existing news and re-writing, quoting, linking, summarising it all … all being well I’ll publish the [...]