Earlier this year, I had to spend a week or so with a 2004 vintage feature phone. For connoisseurs, it was one of the early 3G models from LG that 3UK launched with. This was an interesting experience. The first thing that comes to mind about it was that simple wasn’t simple. iPhones are simple;…
Read More I want one that just makes calls: no, you don’tSo, I’ve been having a war with my exciting privatised energy vendor. Again. We had a chat about this in this post on think-of-a-number prices, but another opportunity came around. The day before the monthly direct debit payment went out, a letter lands saying that they’ve just doubled, yes doubled, the amount. Thanks. Anyway, of…
Read More Reading Gambetta and Clausewitz in an emerging low-trust societyOK, a bit of Lobster. Two things have happened recently to up my tuit on the project. First, I learned that Drew Conway of the Zero Intelligence Agents blog has given NetworkX the ability to generate a force-directed graph in d3.js, which you can stick right in a web page. Second, I’ve been reading the…
Read More Project Lobster user storiesA couple of things. For a start, I’m not all impressed with this “let’s see if Iain Duncan Smith can live for a week on JSA”. Of course he fucking can; he owns his home, he pays his bills on monthly direct debits, his fridge is probably full, and if he’s any less daft than…
Read More In which IDS eats out of his fridge for a week and straight to the LordsYou think Liam Fox and whatever “G3” is stopped? Think again.
Read More FoxThis new piece in The National from Jamie Kenny is genuinely fascinating but sadly paywalled. One of the most interesting phenomena of the Arab Spring was the role of football fans in the front line, firms like the Ultras White Knights, who had copied British terrace subculture in loving detail and then weaponised it as…
Read More Gerremonside, Shijazhuang!