From the category archives:

Web/Tech

The Chromebook challenge – Update

November 25, 2011

I’ve been promising that I’d give an update on the Chromebook challenge that I undertook a while ago, but one thing and another have meant that I haven’t really had enough time to do it. But, finally, here it is.

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Heaven help me, I’m taking the Chromebook challenge

October 30, 2011

A while ago, I wrote a column for Tap on the differences between Apple and Google’s vision of “the cloud”, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) came down hard on the side of Apple’s. iCloud, as I saw it, was very much the more user-centred version. The iPad and Chromebook represent two different views of the future of [...]

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It’s all about discovery

October 22, 2011

The biggest problem online since the turn of the Century has been that it’s really hard to discover new stuff. Not find stuff: discovery isn’t the same thing. If I know roughly what I want, Google makes it easy to find. But finding things that I might like that I don’t know about yet? Much [...]

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The definition of “being a dick” in comments

September 2, 2011

Martin Belam: I’d define dick-ish behaviour on a news site as including, but not restricted too: personal attacks, using “amusing” clichés like EUSSR and Tony Bliar, making the same off-topic point day after day, being rude and grumpy and unwelcoming to newcomers, mocking other people’s spelling, bullying and hectoring staff and journalists appearing in the [...]

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The unbearable impoliteness of being, online

September 2, 2011

Why do people feel the need to be abusive online? Why do they believe that behaviour which they would never consider to be acceptable face-to-face is perfectly fine when using the Internet? A case in point: these two tweets directed at Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat: Calling someone a “cunt”? Declaring that you’d like to perpetrate [...]

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Google Data Explorer: Why doesn’t Google make more of this stuff?

August 23, 2011

One of the things which you notice watching Google is that they make a lot of stuff. A huge amount of stuff, in fact. And a lot of the time, they don’t really shout about it much. Take this: Isn’t that just brilliant? I can think of a hundred applications of this – and then some.

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Android fragmentation

August 22, 2011

Nick Bradbury, author of the very fine FeedDemon, on learning Android and “the fragmentation thing“: Of course, I can’t write my first post about Android without mentioning its supposed “fragmentation” problem. It is a problem, but it’s mostly blown out of proportion. Desktop developers have always had to create software that works across different OS [...]

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A really nice infographic on petrol prices

June 1, 2011

It’s not often that I spend time playing around with infographics, but I really like this UK petrol prices history graphic from specialist insurers Staveley Head – not only interesting, but also a nice design that gets over the information in a way that’s really clear and simple (click on the image below to go [...]

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Why the spec sheet method of buying a computer is dead

May 25, 2011

Poor Charles Arthur. Charles wrote a relatively simple post asking the question of why the Mac has proved to be so successful lately, out-performing the overall computer market and growing its market share. And in response, he got a 500+ long comment thread in which multiple geeks are arguing over how the specs of the [...]

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