Hi. My name’s Martin, and I procrastinate.
[Muted applause]
Look, I’m even doing it now, while trying to communicate with you about a technique I’ve employed to try to curb my procrastination!
A Very Important Job
Somewhere, a man in a room is carrying out a job of utmost importance.
The man in the room has seen the future, and understands how dangerous it could be. His job has no ending, just the infinite delay of that dangerous future.
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It’s the 21st Century: get over the “You’re the Product” fallacy
It’s time to ditch the idea that, when not paying for a service, we’re the product.
Tim Cook (billionaire chief of Apple) brought it up again in September, and recently Mark Zuckerberg (billionaire chief of Facebook) got a little angry with the accusation.
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The End of Content?
Everyone loves a good apocalyptic prophecy. The latest is in regards to ‘Content’, that slippery concept allied to ‘Creatives’, trashing a couple of basic grammatical rules in its attempt to escape too-close a reading.
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Gabriella E. Colman – Coding Freedom
Funnily enough, I finally get around to reading Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom, and she pops up on the next episode of the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast! I do love a good coincidence, especially when it tells me there’s a new book out: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
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Do this, or Linux on the Desktop will be out of reach forever
The temptation to name each New Year the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ became so regular in the mid 2000s that it evolved into a metajoke. If magazines and websites still do it, it’s with tongue firmly in cheek. Every now and again a Raspberry Pi comes along and a few eyebrows guiltily rise, questioning, hopeful.
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Purpose Over Profit
Is Wikipedia more useful than the Encyclopedia Britannica?
It’s a difficult question to answer, with many ‘depends’. But there are a couple of factors which say that it is:
- It’s free to access;
Qualifying for elections
Here’s a little thought experiment about less-than-free elections. I know we love the concept of letting everyone vote, letting everyone have their say in who runs the country. But the thing that frustrates a lot of voters, and hamstrings politicians, is the idiocy of the general public.
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Promoting Personal Privacy – a software idea
Privacy in the digital age: We can argue whether or not we should be concerned, but there’s no question that the amount of private data that companies collect on us should be carefully thought about.
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The Five Whys of What You Do
In Warren Berger’s book Glimmer he talks about the Five Whys concept of the design company IDEO. It boils down to asking yourself ‘why’ you do something, and then asking ‘why’ you gave that answer, to the tune of five times.
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