Writing: 2003
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Richard Herring on his new watch
The [Timex Ironman digital watch] comes with a box about the size of a pack of playing cards that…
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Jame Oliver’s new site
I just helped set up Jamie Oliver’s new-look weblog, er, I mean diary. It has a fantastic cookery question and answer section.
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Its true
Greil Marcus quoting John Humphrys in the Sunday Times quoting Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots…
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Ideas Bazaar redesign
I’ve just done a redesign and build of the company’s website, which I found enormously satisfying.
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Vito, Michael and Henry
In ‘The Believer’s September 2003 issue, Jim Shepard compared the “honourable” morality of the gangsters in Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ films with the destructive selfishness of those in Scorcese’s ‘GoodFellas’, and, all too briefly, likened the latter to the world of Enron and Bush’s government.
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Statement of a Photographic Man
An excerpt from Henry Mayhew’s 19th century ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, in which a photographer describes one of the many scams he pulls on people with this new technology.
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Marching
Yesterday’s Anti-Bush march, and thinking of ways to make such protests have a larger impact on those who don’t take part.
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Action Energy
I spent a couple of weeks copying and pasting text into the redesigned site. Even though it has a content management system.
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Extendaword
The project I’ve been working on recently, a word game for the Financial Times, is finally launching.
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Semi-public events
Wondering how to create a distributed calendar system for inviting friends along to events without showering them with emails.
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Moneydance
A personal finance application for the Mac (and Windows and Linux) that seems to work. Yeah! Rock’n’roll!
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T610 calendar having problems with winter
The Sony Ericsson seems to screw up appointment times in its Calendar once British Summer Time ends…
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A question
If you insure your CDs, what is it you’re actually insuring?
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Teachers
“There’s only one thing I hate more than a sore loser.” “What?” “You.”
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Felicity on ITV2
In the dead of night, ITV2 is airing the best US teen angst drama.
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Geolocational link dump
A collection of URLs scavenged from two months’ worth of unread Geowanking mailing list emails. Maps, wikis, GPS, Flash, RSS, RDF… the usual.
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Delancey and 2nd St
Eddie Morton, ‘The Sound of Vaudeville’, and my photo of his neighbourhood.
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Changing jobs
The Guardian’s special report on changing jobs, and how great it is to hear about people making the break…
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Looking as cheerful as any man could do…
“I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn; and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.”
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The Caretaker
John Peel played a track by The Caretaker earlier this evening. It’s good stuff and you can…
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Sunsets and shared experience
Other peoples’ photos of Wednesday’s London sunset show how much richer the online world can make the real world. Hurrah!
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McSweeney’s vs They Might Be Giants
“Quirky” pop duo and self-absorbed literary quarterly… a recipe for embarrassment. Or maybe not!
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Linklogs are taking off. Again.
Ooh, excitement! Some people think “linklogs” are taking off! But, of course, they’re nothing new — Jorn Barger was doing it waaay back.
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“I wish he would pull my hair again”
A friend of mine in the US has started posting excerpts of her diary from when she was 12 to her weblog. “I want to be Joey’s friend … I wish he would pull my hair again.”
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Bloglines’ blogrolls and the real world creating friends
You can now include your “blogroll” direct from Bloglines. And I ramble about why some people feel like closer “friends” just because they’re physically nearer.
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Hiragana and Katakana practice page
I’ve made a page to help people (like me) practice their Japanese alphabets.
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Online autobiography tools?
Is there a market for a simple tool that would allow people to easily document their lives? No, not weblogs; something geared towards the past.
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Link-only weblogs aggregated on Haddock Blogs
Haddock Blogs now has a separate list and RSS feed of a few other “link logs” or link-only weblogs, or whatever you want to call them.
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Sensible RSS feeds for “link logs”
Looking through RSS feeds of various link-only weblogs, I realised they all had entirely different formats. So I’m trying to work out why people do what they do, and what (I think) they should do.
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Imperial Rome’s high density living
In Rome 2,000 years ago, most people lived in apartment blocks five to six storeys high.
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Dinnerladies
Nancy Banks-Smith on the canteen sitcom, and why Stan should be in ‘The West Wing’.
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Family Tree
I’ve just drawn up the (partial) Gyford Family Tree.
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Viewing iChat logs
Logorrhea is a simple and free application for browsing and searching your iChat logs.
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Underground Britain
Fascinating information, photos and floorplans of underground locations around the UK, particularly the half of the site devoted to old cold war bunkers.
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Greater London Industrial Archeology Society
Their bi-monthly online newsletter is an amazing collection of wide-ranging background info on everything from bricks to the distilling industry.
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Awesome commercial use of XHTML/CSS
Ryan Carver has built a site for Lee Jeans and describes how its CSS and XHTML 1.0 Strict are achieved. Very impressive. Plus a couple of web page validator type things.
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Douglas Coupland interviews
Two interviews with Coupland on the launch of ‘Hey Nostradamus!’.
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Farmers’ Market
Stoke Newington Farmers’ Market and occasional second hand book sales. A perfect Saturday morning.
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Bill Nighy
“There is nothing lonelier than being on stage in pantaloons.”
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Heading south for the winter
My sister’s making an unusual career move…
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Ella Guru
Heard their song ‘On a Beach’ on Late Junction last night and it was good.
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Gigantomachia
I’ve had my first real play with TypePad, and got a new site up and running that isn’t a weblog.
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Wired UK employees
Most Wired UK staffers are missing from the roll call on the website of Gary Wolf’s book, ‘Wired: A Romance’, so here they are.
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Eudora 6, inching slowly forward
Eudora 6 has been released. An improvement, but it’s falling still further behind the competition. It wouldn’t take much…
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This week’s culture
This week I’ve seen Douglas Coupland talk and I’ve heard ‘Newsnight: The Opera’. I missed Gillian Welch and Burning Man.
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Bloglines
I’m loving the online RSS feed reader which is replacing NetNewsWire Lite for me.
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Colours
I’m no good with colours, as you can tell, but here are two simple yet handy things that…
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iCal time zones
iCal has almost exactly the same problem with time zones as Movable Type. If you travel iCal will change the time of all your appointments…
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Movable Type time zones
Weblog entries should have their own time zones, rather than be stuck with the weblog’s default that you can never change, even if you move from one continent to another.
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Post boxes
Red post boxes all over the web. Hurrah! Buy them (and phone boxes) for your garden! Yay for hobbies!
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David Lynch on sheds
Sheds are apparently fashionable right now but David Lynch was way ahead of the curve. He likes sheds.
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Telegraph poles
Telegraph poles are often marked with their owner, size and date. More details here…
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Updated Haddock Blogs
A couple of updates to the Haddock Blogs script, mainly including the full item descriptions in the feed, where available.
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Summer playlist
A selection of tunes from Greil Marcus’s ‘Mystery Train’ that make for fine heatwave listening.
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Pre-client spam filtering
After trying the very nice Knowspam.net I’m left uneasy by the whole idea of challenge and response spam filtering.
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What are the chances of that happening, eh?
Brian Eno documentary on BBC 6 Music.
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Three web widgets
Three generally unnecessary JavaScripty things that you’ll probably never need, but they’re pretty good solutions if you do.
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Open mapping
Some folk in a German city have generated a set of freely-available mapping data, because authorities in Europe don’t release such information.
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Essex signposts and milestones
A great site of photos of signposts and milestones around Essex. No, it’s interesting.
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T610 dimness
The Sony Ericsson T610 is indeed lovely, but that review was right about the dim screen.
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Great ‘24’ review
A good review of ‘24’ in ‘Sight & Sound’.
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Encoding with LAME in iTunes revisited
There’s a much updated version of the iTunes-LAME Encoder.
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Removing languages
I’ve reinstalled OS X and found a handy utility for removing all the unnecessary language files afterwards.
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HTML is for grown ups
Why HTML is both easy and hard, and two Internet Explorer bugs.
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Doonesbury via RSS
I made an RSS file that links to this week’s ‘Doonesbury’ strips.
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And Nancy Banks-Smith too
Finally, the civilised world can relax. The Guardian’s top telly reviewer is now tracked by Byliner.
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Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus’s ‘Real Life Rock Top Ten’s, once at Salon, are still going over at City Pages. Yes!
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Freelance charging
How much does a freelancer need to charge to equal certain full-time annual salaries?
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Birkenstock
The Guardian’s lack of research, Birkenstock’s new range of shoes, and my fashion dilemmas.
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Getting there, slowly…
Six months in and only 3,000 or so days left to go with Pepys’ Diary. At current rates…
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Domestic geeks
There is an emerging tradition of geeks analysing how to perform certain domestic tasks with the most efficiency.
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Hire me!
I’m looking for freelance or contract web building and/or designing work. I comment my code!
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The Mapmakers
I just finished reading The Mapmakers (Amazon US, UK) by John Noble Wilford which was wonderful.…
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The Big Brother universe
Swapping housemates between different countries’ ‘Big Brother’ houses. It’s fantastic, really!
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Revamped Haddock Directory
I’ve rewritten and redesigned the Directory. NEW! IMPROVED! STILL GREEN!
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The Believer
McSweeney’s new mag can now be shipped outside North America. Hurrah.
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Arthur Brown, 1914-2003
Distant Christmas memories of the Essex historian, who died in March.
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Life as a 19th century fire-eater
Part of Henry Mayhew’s interview with a street fire-eater is fascinating, but not for the weak of stomach.
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We’re all reporters now
Webloggers should respect “off the record” briefings… just as companies should be aware their employees might be well-read webloggers.
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Smoke: A London Peculiar
Issue one of a low-key and enthusiastic little zine about London.
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Social sausages
Social software and social capital at The Wonk Foundation; cocktail sausages; Microsoft missing the point; getting bored at talks; and how men in suits rarely live up to TV’s portrayal.
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Buy comics NOW!
Fantagraphics need you to buy some comics to help them out of a nasty hole…
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As the Apple Turns
Even better than a Mac rumour site.
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Especially lovely Richard Herring thing
“I wondered how many thirty-something overweight men were spending this glorious bank holiday night eating unpleasant, artery clogging fried food, before returning to their flats alone. I thought it was probably 29.”
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The all@ rite of passage
The journey from fun start-up to grown-up company is marked by one obvious rite of passage: the taming of the company-wide mailing list. Getting rid of the jokes and amusing URLs may be inevitable, but handle it wrongly and you’re in trouble…
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Auntie Phyl’s fruit cake
The recipe, handed down through the generations. Burp.
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Fly away UpMyStreet, be free!
uSwitch buying UpMyStreet; whether there’s anything left to be “saved”; webloggers as primary news sources; missing people.
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So, it’s over
Rate it “10” Phew.
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Someone’s having fun…
Samuel Pepys has just arrived in the Netherlands.
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Soon, it will be over
It was just one of those days, of salvation and loss.
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Cartographic Congress Show and Tell
Notes from the event — lots of internet mapping, GPS and RDF.
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Once in a lifetime offer! Employ today!
Not one, but two wondrous web talents are available for work. Hurry along, don’t miss your chance!
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Eudora 6 beta fights spam
There’s a beta version of Eudora 6 out for Macs (Windows coming soon). I’ve been using…
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Snow crash
Is this car art or wank? You decide!
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Paris photos and Kyupi Kyupi
Photos and strange art from a recent long weekend in Paris.
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Learning biotech
I want to know something about biotech, but I know nothing about anything.
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Two reasons to avoid using Safari with Movable Type
If you use Movable Type and Apple’s Safari web browser you should probably read this before you do what I just did.
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Toy shop
Once upon a time there was a magical toy shop. And it’s still there today.
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Set beats-per-minute in iTunes
A handy thing for tapping along to MP3s and setting their BPMs. The world’s gone wonderfully mad.
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EtCon photos
I’ll shut up about the bloody thing soon, but until then, here’s the handful of photos…
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Home and catching up on EtCon
All the Hydra collaborative session notes are now together online, and some of the presentation files too. And more about Hydra.
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EtCon day 3
More good stuff: How Google stays good, nanotech and tiny devices, lots of collaborative notes.
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EtCon day 2
Alan Kay’s amazing Squeak, Clay praising Pepys’ Diary, Stewart Butterfield on games, and too much more.
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The first day of EtCon sessions
Surviving a migraine, I managed to catch some sessions that ranged from fascinating to “oh my god, who are these people!?”
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Another day in San Jose
We got a lovely reception when we arrived to register at Etcon on Tuesday morning. The lady with…
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Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad
Lots of slow travelling around Silicon Valley as friends gradually colonise the area.
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Walton from the air
Aerial photos of Walton-on-the-Naze and the town’s beautiful backwater.
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Heading to EtCon
It’s all very last minute, but next week I’ll be attending the O’Reilly Emerging…
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Byliner RSS feeds
Read your favourite writers from around the web via RSS. And read about the cunning caching method involved.
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More UpMyStreet
Coverage of the continuing UpMyStreet administration and analogies for Administrators.
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Haddock Blogs problem
Sorry about the flood of Live Journal entries — they seem to have changed all their URLs. Hopefully it’ll be OK from now on.
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London tours
You can do tours of the old hotel at St Pancras and the Freemasons’ Grand Lodge in Covent Garden.
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Tax-efficient giving
How to maximise your charitable donations for the benefit of both you and the charities.
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UpMyStreet Falco
UpMyStreet, my employer, is up for sale.
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Geo-encoding UpMyStreet
UpMyStreet is already geo-encoded in a way of course, as almost every page contains specific…
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What’s that? It’s a CV!
Gissa job!
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That summer feeling
With British Summer Time looming this weekend I wondered whether I’d need to change the…
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Do as Cal says
Cal has a great article about writing robust PHP. Specifically, making it less vulnerable to…
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Questioning time
What he said. Last night, unable to find anything on TV that wasn’t about the war, that…
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Ethical ISAs
Options for saving money that aren’t going to make the world even worse than it already is.
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“New!” markers in Movable Type
A method of marking entries or comments as new since a user’s last visit.
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New old photos
Photos of Madrid, Chamonix, Philadelphia and Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex.
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Happy birthday Wired
Wired is ten years old. Gary Wolf writes about what things were like ten years ago. But nothing in…
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Big bag of words
A guide to talking like a gamer, an online language journal, and a language weblog.
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Internet Explorer’s font size strangeness
Wondering why Internet Explorer resizes fonts that are specified using ems and percentages very differently.
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Changing Movable Type archive URLs
A quick way of changing your Individual archive URLs without breaking links.
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Road geeks
Celebrating geekery in an unexpected area… Chris’s British Road Directory.
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Testing font sizes
An attempt to find out how to size my fonts so that everyone can read them.
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I’m now available in French!
My ‘Introduction to weblog terms for weblog readers’ has been translated.
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Creating a 1980s virtual world
Chip Morningstar’s entertaining and still relevant 1990 essay on building and running ‘Habitat,’ a mid-80s online multi-player game.
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More Newton fun
Pointing to a summary of what’s happening on the Newton, five years after it stopped shipping.
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Babies galore
Ada, Aasta and Oskar.
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BBCi’s accessibility report
The BBC publishes a great report on their own sites’ accessibility. But in the non-accessible format of PDF. Doh!
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Broxtt’s blog
This week a few of us at work have been giggling quietly while creating a fake weblog for our…
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Micro marketing
If you live in Barnet or St Albans and want to learn to draw or paint then you need Insight. I…
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Sieving spam on the Mac
Using SpamSieve to filter email: 98.9% accurate.
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I’ll give them a word burst or two…
Accpording to the New Scientist it might be possible to track societal change by monitoring the…
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Aqua on Windows XP
AquaXP.com is devoted to making your Windows machine look like Mac OS X. There’s a distinct…
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Books read and to be read
Lists of books I’ve read each year, what I’m reading now and what’s sitting on…
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HotWired archives
A conversation on The Well about HotWired of old prompted me to Google for the remnants of the…
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Decent UK TV guide
A really simple telly guide, at last.
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Protesting the war in Estonia
My sister sent me this photo from a friend of a friend in Estonia and says: In Tartu the defence…
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The best thing about Movable Type 2.6
From the changelog: Changed all visible instances of blog to weblog in the system and in the…
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Giving and the Jhai Foundation
For me it’s finally time to start giving.
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Dawson’s Creek has a cast of one
The kids of Dawson’s Creek are actually identical clones sharing a single personality.
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Pepys Diary traffic statistics
If you’re as fascinated by the spread of memes as I am you might find my brief report on…
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Removing evil image links from Movable Type
How to free your Movable Type screens from those awful menus made out of images.
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Felicity
Wondering why ‘Felicity’ isn’t watched by anyone but me.
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Using a British/UK Windows keyboard with an Apple Mac in OS X (2)
Outdated instructions for using a British Windows/PC keyboard with a Mac.
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Byliner is reborn
Byliner, my site that lets you keep track of when (some of) your favourite writers publish new…
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How many Americans own passports?
Investigating the often quoted, and always varying, statistic that “only x per cent of US citizens own passports.”
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The stationary city
Waiting for a gridlock-sparked revolution in London.
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More weblogging friends and Trackback confusion
More friends start weblogging and why Trackback makes no sense whatsoever.
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Yay for Rosie!
The Rosie Butler Ideal Man Application Form is now closed.
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My x and my y
I’m all geo-encoded now.
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Gadget bag
Where I have travelled back in time to make it easy to find a particular bag.
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Thayer’s Pork Pies
I shared my latest batch of flapjacks around the office today and in return got a slice of one of…
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Interview on BBC Radio London Tuesday lunchtime
I’ll be on the radio.
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Flapjack
I’ve been experimenting with making flapjack and the current batch is a winner. Here’s the recipe…
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Laser Squad by email
A great time-drainer of my youth returns to haunt me.
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Hello Byliner!
An embarrassing, but relieving, u-turn.
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Validation tools
Two handy things: Checky, a Mozilla validation plug-in, and Amaya, the W3C’s web browser.
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Mexican food and restaurants in London
Originally wondering why the few Mexican restaurants in London are unfortunate tequila fests, rather than tasty taquerias. Now a summary of Mexican eating options in the city.
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Akufen
Last week the New York Times had an interesting article about about the most underrated albums of…
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They all start blogging in the end
My friend Ted has just started a weblog. He lives in Santa Barbara, makes films, writes film…
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Bye bye Byliner
One of my websites, Byliner, is closing down after three years, 50,000 stories and 4,500 writers.
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An introduction to weblog terms for weblog readers
Explaining terms such as weblog, permalink, RSS and Trackback to people who are new to weblogs.
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More Pepys and me
Slashdotting isn’t as fearful as it once was. Radio is very exciting. My voice is OK.
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“They both hated DLT”
Snippets from ‘The Nation’s Favourite: True Adventures of Radio 1’, an extremely gripping read.
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It’s all gone a bit Warchalking
The growing snowball that is interest in the Pepys’ Diary site. Although snowballs don’t take long to melt.