This is a retropost. It was written in 2022, but published later. Well, that was the most bizarre day. A few days ago, Amanda Brock - the CEO of OpenUK - asked if I'd be on a podcast. I agreed, and offered up my office's media studio for the recording. Then she asked if it was OK if Bruce Perens came to record an episode. Errr... OMG, yes! So I got to spend 10 minutes showing Bruce around the GDS office, gushing about how much open source stuff we did - then got to watch him record a…
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I am incredibly gratified to be in the running for Geek of the Year 2010. Thanks to The 405 for picking me as one of their favourites. You can check out the other entrants on Facebook - don't worry, you don't have to vote for me! You can also find GeekOfTheYearUK on Twitter. …
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A quick report on OpenTech 2010 - the London event for geeks interested in Government data, openness and generally doing good things with tech and data. Copyright Matt Jones used under a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence. I attended last year's event which inspired me to create my "VoteUK" service for the 2010 general election. I had considered doing a talk about the trials and tribulations of using open - and not so open - data. Instead, I gave a more…
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Having moaned that my TARDIS was too full, I set on a quest to find another. The cardboard one I had appears to be the last of its kind - but I did manage to snag this beauty on eBay. It's a Panopticon '93 Officially licensed TARDIS - similar to this one on RetroTrader. Click to embiggen images. It's a little scuffed, but nothing a lick of paint can't fix. Of slight - very slight - annoyance is that it's a fraction too shallow to hold standard DVD cases and have the doors tightly…
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My eye has been caught by a stunning new gadget - the Immortal Video Eye Gear. Head mounted 3-megapixel video camera. Seamlessly embedded within a pair of innocuous looking sun glasses. At £250, they're not cheap. While battery life looks good at 2.5 hours, they can only record one hour of video. No method of playback means no deletion, so you're stuck until you can find a laptop. No expandable memory. Would it have been so hard to take microSD cards? Regardless of any shortcomings, ta…
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I'm a shameless Doctor Who geek. I loved the first episode of the new series. But I wanted to point out a (minor?) plot hole in the episode. Slight spoilers here, so wait until you've seen the show. Towards the end, the Doctor is having a stand off with the Atari. He's discussing the planet Earth and asks... Is this world protected? The Atari play a montage of various baddies the Doctor has seen off including the Silurians / Sea Devils!) - but take a look at these three images. Ood Ev…
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This is one of the longest and geekiest posts I've done. It's a work in progress. All comments and abuse welcome. #hashtag – As long has there has been a way to search Tweets* people have been adding information to make the easy to find. The #hashtag syntax has become the standard for attaching a succinct tag to Tweets. The Twitter Engineering Blog That's all well and good, but as I discovered yesterday, without standardisation the ability to search falls apart. I'm not talking about w…
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