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. Coding Freedom is an […]
Author: MDGreaney
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, […]
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. If it wasn’t for this idiocy, then candidates […]
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. The problem is the difficulty of knowing how much is collected. Would knowing more help us change our daily habits? […]
Update: I wrote this article exactly a year ago, and now MS have revealed that the next OS after Windows 8 will be… Windows 10. the madness continues. Microsoft (MS) are having a tough time of it at the moment. They built their empire on the back of the dominance of the desktop and laptop […]
In this article I’m going to introduce some of the key concepts I think should be considered when building a hypothetical ‘Perfect Computer‘. Some of these concepts are based on the techniques of Steve Jobs, who in the last post we discovered wasn’t an inventor, but had a strong Grand Vision coupled with a terrifying […]
I was about to call this post ‘Building the Perfect Operating System’ but not only would that alienate every person I want to read this, it would also be misleading, as in this case the operating system in question is purely a means to an end. The post is inspired by reading an article on […]
A few friends and I have just started meeting up to shoot the breeze over a pint or two. It gives us a chance to throw some ideas around about any vague topics. It’s part “putting the world to rights” and part chance to listen. The rule is to let people speak, and to listen, […]
Off Book is an amazing series of videos I’ve just discovered from the US network PBS. The videos are short – about 7 minutes – and cover things like design, animation, culture, art etc. I’ll definitely be watching more of them, but the one we’re interested in here is We ❤ Retro Media, where a […]
This post is related to The Perfect OS is Hard to Find from last year. That earlier rant, perhaps unwittingly, was about interfaces. Nnow I’ve realised how everything I though of which defines an OS is down to the colours and shapes it draws on the screen. Or to be more precise, my trouble was […]