obsolete
Am I daft, or was the Apple iBook G4, 12″ screen, the least annoying computer of my experience?
Read More obsoleteJune 2009
yet more roads
Another On Roads thing is the special role of the North; indeed, as he points out, it’s the construction of the M62 that made the North of England a sensible geographical construct rather than an awkward stereotype that uneasily combined Lancashire and Yorkshire. And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the…
Read More yet more roadsslip inside this (giant distribution ware)house
After the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny’s, my own thoughts on Joe Moran’s On Roads are inevitably coming. I didn’t know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for…
Read More slip inside this (giant distribution ware)houseon my radio
OK, so there’s the magic army vehicle project that spent more on powerpoint presentations than Drayson managed to spend buying several hundred actual vehicles. FRES, as it is known, started off as the British half of a US project that ended up being the Future Combat System, a pharaonic lashup of vehicles, radios, computers, and…
Read More on my radioadmin: opentech
It’s that time again: OpenTech is next Saturday. I’m not presenting anything, which will leave me more time to argue about random things in the ULU bar. But I’m especially keen to do this with readers, and anyone who’s interested in the political uses of Asterisk, starting out with Ardour, which I’ve just installed, and…
Read More admin: opentechtatty
Brilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful. In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA’s Social Brain about “the dark side of “nudge””; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people’s decision processes into ones that are more rational,…
Read More tattyspam
Arbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn’t surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically…
Read More spamsome MPs considered beneficial
Lynne Featherstone MP: for workers’ representation, against managerialism, for Iraqi employees. WIN. More seriously, I’m increasingly convinced by the argument that the fundamental driver of the economic crisis is the falling labour share of national income. This was J.K. Galbraith’s take on the Great Depression; despite the roaring 20s, wages had been flat for years.…
Read More some MPs considered beneficialtoo many right-wing meetings
OK, so I got no takers for this prediction. My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi. Not surprising, really. But what I didn’t expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP,…
Read More too many right-wing meetingsLoonies 2.0
What is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out? And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for…
Read More Loonies 2.0