So a while ago I got one of those little pink MacBooks. It’s a grand piece of kit and a significant upgrade from my 2010 vintage 11" air. This is roughly my twelfth mac since 1987, I guess that makes me count as an old-timer…

Dear Jeff, I’d like to add my voice to those who have already contacted you about the referendum result. Like many I’m deeply upset at the outcome. I am heartbroken by the consequences; both immediate — the rise of xenophobia, the economic and constitutional uncertainty, and long-term — the loss…

I like trains. Actually it’s not so much the trains, it’s the railways. Where they go, the possibilities of getting to places, the routes and the bridges and the tunnels and the view through the window on the ever changing landscape. It’s also the people and the conversations and the…

Look! Here’s a video of me talking about Boardcam at Bettakultcha in Manchester — and going into the whys and wherefores of it. My previous post about Boardcam (now known affectionately as Chris) mentioned that it would be rather nice if the image could be cropped down to remove…

… my GCSE tech/electronics project was the “Wonder Waterer”. It was solving a real problem. My family normally went to France for the best part of the summer, and plant maintenance during this time was a genuine problem for us. We’d come home to at least one tray of desiccated…

At the end of the last post about my BoardCam project I had a semi-working setup. My home brew thing was producing live-ish photographs of our whiteboard which we can access from our phones when out of the house. Unfortunately that included pictures at night when the lights were out. …

This is probably blatantly obvious, but the Internet of Things is not really about the Things. Startups are not really about whatever product or service they are making. They are about the money, and changing the behaviour of people in order to extract money from them. That money could come…

So we have our low-tech whiteboard and want to turn it into a Thing. Our core requirement is as follows: I want to be able to see the board when I’m not in the house. That should be pretty easy. All we need is a webcam pointing at the board…

Running a household is an exercise in project management. At least, that’s how we see it. I (Sam) am a software engineer and my wife (Sarah) is a nurse, so both our professional lives are all about getting shit done — and finding good ways to get said shit done. …