Hardware I miss from my old Android phones


The HTC Dream G1 - it has a pop up screen which reveals a keyboard, a trackball, and several physical buttons.

I've been using Android since before it was released in the UK. When I was working at Vodafone, I got a pre-release HTC device with an early version of Android on it. I've been pretty much in the Android ecosystem ever since. Recently, I treated myself to an upgrade - a Pixel 8 Pro. The […]

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Book Review: Hacking Capitalism - Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money by Kris Nóva


Book cover showing a hacker. She sits in front of multiple monitors.

I was saddened to hear of Kris Nóva's untimely death a few weeks ago. I had her book "Hacking Capitalism" on my eReader for several months, but hadn't got around to reading it yet. Never put these things off. The book is a complicated but fitting legacy. It absolutely showcases Nóva's ideas, ideals, and potential. […]

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Book Review: Kill It With Fire - Manage Ageing Computer Systems by Marianne Bellotti


Book cover showing a dumptster fire.

Computers, eh? Leave them for five minutes and they become obsolete. Leave them for five years and they become legacy infrastructure. How do we deal with a tower of "quick fixes" which are older than Moses? What strategies do we need to stop teams going mad as they try to upgrade a Spitfire into a […]

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Bryan Adams lied to you


A white plastic desktop phone with QWERTY keyboard and a video screen.

I'm always interested in when anachronistic technology pops up in the media. Whether it's Kelly Rowland trying to send an email using Excel, or people in spaceships developing film photographs, or futuristic moonbases which use BS 1363 plugs - I just love it! So, I was watching that absolute banger of a tune "When You're […]

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Let's track footballers' heart rates!!


Photo of a football match. The striker's BPM is a high 150, the goalie a more leisurely 75. Original photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonker/8603265115/

I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the […]

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That costs the same as five nurses!


Pamphlet for the New National Health service.

Tom Dolan has an excellent blog post which touches, in part, on comparative cost. If you're working for, say, a TV company - then you know exactly how much an hour of TV programming costs on average. If you want to do something like build a website, it's quite natural for people to evaluate its […]

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People only want their technology to do three things


Old Nokia phone showing an area code.

Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them! This was a common complaint we heard back then: "Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing - calls, texts, and..." And... […]

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Fragile Technologists


A pet cat typing on a computer keyboard.

Picture the scene. You're in a pub and order, say, a cider or a cocktail. The local pub bore pipes up "What are you drinking that for? Real men drink..." and then names a brand of generic, piss-weak lager that is his substitute for a personality. He's the same guy who insists that "real men" […]

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Zeno's Paradox and Why Modern Technology is Rubbish


Robot faced Mark Zuckerberg is wearing a VR headset - it digs painfully into his smiling cheeks.

Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 […]

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The Modern World


A router with lots of fibre optic and ethernet cables plugged in.

This is a little story about standards, technology, civilisation, and the modern world. I know it is tempting to only talk about the various ways technology disappoints us, but sometimes it can be quite magical living in the future. A few week ago, I took a trip to a foreign country... I waved a rectangle […]

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