If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Have you got an iPhone? Then buy The Independent Guide to the iPhone. It’s the first time I’ve actually had my name on Amazon. The last book I wrote made it onto the site (and it’s still there today [...]

I had a somewhat romantic notion that when I move I’d be as green as I could with my energy consumption. Central to that idea was solar panels, photovoltaic cells and a small wind turbine strapped to the chimney. They’d provide at least some of the electricity I’d need.
Proper logs in the grate would heat [...]

I like press releases full of stats lists. Yesterday’s came from Hotmail, which is celebrating its 10th birthday by sending is an iced cookie the size of a manhole cover, and the news that:
In 1996, 56,041 people signed up for the first Hotmail accounts, roughly the size of Taunton in Somerset.
1 billion emails are [...]

After weeks of backwards and forwards letter-writing with Sky, we turned to the web and the ‘Instant Answers Online’ tool. Simple question - how do we look at our bill online? Sky wasn’t so sure:

We tried several variations, but it was no more helpful than the telephone support centres, the letters we’ve sent or received [...]

London Grid for Learning is, according to its own site,
‘…a consortium of the 33 Local Authorities which provides a filtered broadband connection, network services, a common learning platform, online content and support communities for all schools across London.’
So, basically, schools across our nation’s capital trust it to mediate on their behalf, blocking out nasty sites, [...]

Moo, a British start-up masquerading as an American printing house (Dollar pricing, you see), does only one product. But it does it well.
These funky little calling cards have your own photos on one side, and your details on the back. Anything you like so long as it’s six lines or less. The pictures come straight [...]

I came out of the tube at Liverpool Street this evening and walked straight into the middle of an enormous flashmob. The whole concourse was filled with people dancing, silently, to the music on their iPods. Thousands of them, on both levels, while around the edges businessmen in suits asked each other (and the police) [...]

There are plenty of Stingray-inspired puns floating around today in the aftermath of Steve Irwin’s death by stingray sting.
Is the BBC is going one step further to show the event itself, or just incautious with its buttons and words?

I’ve not had any spam for weeks. Now normally that would be a good thing - nobody likes spam - but it does make you wonder what else isn’t turning up.
So, today I switched hosting companies. Not entirely hitch-free, since they emailed the login details to the new account, which meant that to access them [...]

Working in PR. It’s not all parties, lunches and chasing up journalists’ lost luggage. Someone working in just that industry dropped a mouse in the post to me this week, along with a piece of specially-commissioned research designed to show how important this vitally exciting new product actually is.
‘Computer mouse overtakes partner and pet as [...]