I've really enjoyed learning from Kathy Sierra's talk "Creating the minimum badass user". It's an hour long, but well worth your time. She covers many aspects of product design, but the quote which really resonated with me was this - Zoomed in - This seems so applicable to many "services" these days. Millions spent on TV adverts, positive reviews, and glossy websites - yet nothing spent…
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Rob Pensalfini has written a delightful blog in which he accuses (or perhaps credits) Shakespeare with inventing the emoticon. He claims that this is within A Winter's Tail, Act I, Scene ii - in the first folio. So, I turned to the First Folio viewer which allows people to see scans of the first printing of The Winter's Tale - in this case, the New South Wales scan. Direct link to scan. The…
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Do you ever sign up for something, forget about it, then get pleasantly surprised when a parcel turns up at your door? No? Just me? Last year, I noticed that the SamKnows website were looking for volunteers to take part in their European broadband survey. The product is the rather uninspiring named "Whitebox". The SamKnows Whitebox is an industry-approved measuring device, designed to measure…
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I recently got a MakeyMakey. It's a sort of ersatz USB keyboard that can be plugged into anything electrically conductive. I blogged about using it to control my Raspberry Pi using fruit and veg. I also blogged about controlling Android using a USB keyboard and mouse via a USB OTG cable. Hang on... the MakeyMakey is USB... Android can be controlled via USB... CAN I CONTROL MY ANDROID WITH…
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I'm not a big fan of NFC. I think it's an impractical technology except in very specialised use cases. Because it's so rarely seen in the UK I don't tend to post about it much. The Boy Whatley recently posted about his new favourite NFC toy - the Nokia MD-310 (catchy name, guys!). That reminded me - there was an interesting use of NFC which I'd seen in Las Vegas. Las Vegas - like most of the …
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I've been thinking a lot about libraries recently. When I was a child I was taken to a library every two weeks and made to check out the maximum allowance of books - that's what having an English teacher for a mother gets you! Once I went to university, I stopped going to the library. Even university libraries are pretty poor for computer science books - and the ability to buy cheap paperbacks …
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After posting about using the Galaxy Note II for a full day of work, someone asked me why I didn't just plug in a proper keyboard and mouse to it. To be honest, I'd never even considered that as a possibility! In order to plug in USB peripherals to an Android device, you'll need a USB-OTG adapter (OTG stands for On The Go). One end plugs into your Android's charging port, the other end is just …
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We've just come back from a lovely holiday in the USA. I'm a fairly seasoned traveller - yet I always find the USA the strangest country to visit. Perhaps its because it all seems so familiar - from the movies and TV shows, and the fact the speak the same language - that the differences seem really bizarre. Here are the Top 5 Weird Things about the USA: Credit Cards During our holiday, we…
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I recently got a MakeyMakey. It's a sort of ersatz USB keyboard that can be plugged into anything electrically conductive. So, I plugged it into my Raspberry Pi, loaded up the Scratch programming environment, and created a fruit and veg interface. See for yourself! The scripts themselves are very simple. The MakeyMakey in its default state, acts like a USB keyboard - so it will send up,…
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Growing up, toy guns were verboten in our household. My brother and I - like most young boys - grew up on a diet on Star Wars, The A-Team, and Transformers. Gun were cool! Our mother would brook no truck with this. Guns were banned. When my brother was given a water pistol as a birthday present from a friend, the offending squirter mysteriously disappeared. (In fairness, we were messy…
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Like a prize idiot, I went to work yesterday, but left my laptop at home. Prat! So, time to put the Samsung Galaxy Note II through its paces. I've had the phone for a couple of months and been really pleased with it. But I sensed that I hadn't really used it in anger. I decided to spend the whole day trying to do my work only using the GN2. And, to make the challenge more exciting - no…
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My schooling of English history covered the 1066 invasion, then jumped to the Tudors, a smattering of the industrial revolution, a bit of the First World War, then a heavy focus on the Second World War whereupon, it seemed, history stopped. As far as I can recall, we learned nothing about the English Dissenters - the radical sects which flourished after the English Civil War. Then As I've…
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