As I mentioned, I’ve just come back from a wedding in Madison, Wisconsin. I have never been to Madison or, indeed, Wisconsin before. I live in London; for the record, that it is London, UK, not London, Ontario, or any other London.
Anyway, I’ve just logged into my Facebook and there’s an advert (presumably because I [...]

Via Tom Watson, I’ve found out about the Show Us a Better Way project. The idea is very simple; I quote from their website:
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated
I have three entries.
Entry the first: Free our bills! The wonderful MySociety.org people [...]

For all the problems that have affected the XO laptop (the piece of kit produced by One Laptop Per Child, formerly the $100 Laptop), it seems to have opened up the possibilities of a generation of small, highly-portable computers. Asus have come out with the Eee, Dell have released images of their offering and HP [...]

I’ve added some social bookmarking buttons to the blog; the ones on the right are for the whole blog and if you look at an individual post (by clicking on its title or where it says ‘permalink’) you’ll see buttons for that particular post.
The code for this script comes from a particularly good website called [...]

Let us say that you bought a tube of toothpaste. You’d probably be pretty annoyed if the toothpaste company insisted that you used their toothbrushes. Equally, if you bought a toothbrush only to find that you were only allowed to use the toothbrush company’s toothpaste, you’d be a bit peeved.
That’s one of the objections - [...]

Tom Watson links to a fascinating article on Rolling Stone magazine’s website about the deleterious effects MP3s are having on the quality of music, both in terms of fidelity and whether it’s worth listening to at all. The article, which is worth reading in full1, essentially says that people want to make music with more [...]

I put an image in this post that gives a visual representation of the front page of my blog. While everyone seems to find it pretty, not many people knows what it represents, so here is an attempt at an explanation. It may help you to have this image open while you read the below.
When [...]

This is the Blog of Dave Cole in graphic form, from aharef.info via Tom Paine via Matt Sinclair.

You can make your own for any website at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/. I particularly like the unfolding effect when you put in ‘http://news.bbc.co.uk’ as the target.
What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and [...]

One of my readers (hello, Dennis) complained when I saw him last that I write too much about computers and open source, so this is my reasoning behind why using open source technology is not only a good idea but really quite important.
In the nineteenth century, a debate arose in the locksmithing community about whether [...]

Someone forwarded me a list of the twenty-five worst tech products of all time from the US magazine, PC World. AOL, RealPlayer and Windows ME are all there. They publish various other (quite amusing) lists. OK, it’s pretty geeky, but they raised a smile.
Top Ten…
…Worst Web Sites1…Most Annoying Windows Features…Worst Viruses…Most Annoying Tech Products…Worst PCs [...]