Hackday - Group Solar Forecasts


Screenshot of the demo page. A street is covered in solar panel icons.

Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams […]

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How to present at a hack day


I go to lots of hack days and hackathons. Some are big corporate affairs, some are boutique community events. They all have one thing in common - Geeks suck at giving demos. You have 3 minutes to convince the judges - or your peers - that you've built something brilliant. How do you do that? […]

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NHS Hack Day


NHS Hack Day Logo. For geeks who love the NHS.

It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the […]

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Rules for Cooperative Poker #JanJam17


3 playing cards on a table.

This is a sort of poker variant / group solitaire which can be played either competitively or collaboratively. These rules were thrashed out at the Oxford January Games Jam. I think it is original - but there are literally thousands of card games, so it is hard to tell! As I've mentioned before, I love […]

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Introducing CAVE TEAM - a new board game #JanJam17


I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission. I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset […]

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Extreme Medicine Hackathon


Occasionally, I get some really interesting freelance gigs. It turns out there's a rising market for conference hack-days. New company Digiotology paid me - and several others - to participate in a hackathon based at the Extreme Medicine Conference in London. Conference goers could attend lectures, visit exhibitor stands, and come discuss their needs with […]

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Shakespearean HackFest


On Saturday, I attended the Shakespearean HackFest organised by HiCor / TORCH at Oxford University. I'd like to discuss the hack our team created and how the event differed (in a positive way) from other hack days I've been to. The Event On arrival at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, I was automatically assigned to a […]

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Why Can't Google Afford To Pay Its Startup Mentors?


So Google Ventures is swinging in to London Town, dragging one hundred meeeeeellion dollars with it. Wow! What a way to reinvigorate the European tech scene. All that cash is sure to filter its way down into the economy. Viva la trickle-down economics! Or, not so much. Earlier last week, I was asked if I […]

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Hack Da Police (and other emergency services) #UKBLC14


Big banner for Blue Light Camp 2014.

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. I've just come back from an amazing BlueLightCamp 2014 - held in the splendid offices of the Ordnance Survey. Themed unconferences are nothing new - but I think this was one of the first that I've been to focussed on […]

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3D Printed Letter Press


Rewired State have just announced "End Of The World Hack" We know the earth is about to be bombarded with solar flares and magnetic storms of varying ferocity on July 4th, 5th and 6th 2014, by which time the infrastructure of the energy and communications networks will have been completely decimated across the entire planet. […]

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