Diary of a mad man
Procrastination
Talk about fun or random stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else
Kickstarter
03 May 2012
On yesterdays trip to the LondonSkate we ended up talking about Kickstarter. On getting home I had a browse and thought I would share the 12 kickstarter projects that I really like and hope to see a lot more of…
There is so much I could say about pretty much every one of these projects. If you haven’t checked out kickstarter yet then go, have a poke around.
Virgin Money Press Junket
11 Jan 2012
Back in December 2011 the Virgin Group did a very obscure blog post asking for bloggers, tweeters and YouTubers. Needing a good excuse to get out the (home) office nowadays I figured an evening out would be nice.
Yes, I know this is free publicity for them but hey, if I’m going to publicise any large corporation then I can’t think of anyone better than Virgin (comments in the box below please)! Virgin Money Giving were very helpful to us when organising the Goodwood Roller Marathon.
Anyway, the evening was very nice, free soup, got to say hello to Richard Branson and treated to a 270 degree projection on three sides of a courtyard building. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to move back far enough to get it all in frame and had to shoot in portrait which isn’t ideal but you get the idea :-p
You can see the professionally shot video (from across the street I may add) here.
Maybe still not as good as the Gadget Show projection though, that had more 3D 
Everything is a Remix
02 Mar 2011
If you haven’t already seen it I would encourage you all to check out Kirby Ferguson‘s excellent video series Everything is a Remix.
I have been helping Kirby source some of the video footage and edit some of the reference material that he has used which has been a great honour.
Parts 1 & 2 are embedded below but do keep an eye on his site for parts 3 & 4 as they come out later this year.
Dave Cornthwaite and his Aquaskipper
27 Aug 2010
This week the adventurer Dave Cornthwaite made the following request…
If anyone can record TV, I'm doing a spot of Aquaskipping with Richard Hammond on CBBC, Wednesday 25th @ 17:!5. No CBBC in Paraguay, sadly
@DaveCorn
Dave Cornthwaite
Always interested in what he was up to next (Dave was the first person to Longboard from John O’Groats to Lands End) I set the TiVo and whacked it up on YouTube a few days later for him and others to see…
BTW, does anyone know the piece of music used in the middle of this video? Pirates of the Caribbean?
N.B. This is a backdated post as I take some of the things I have been doing elsewhere on the interwebs and add them to this site 
The Gadget Show project onto Marble Arch
07 Jul 2010
After many tweets from Jason Bradbury that something was going to be happening this evening at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park we decided to check it out. OK, we were up there for the LondonSkate anyway so it would have been rude not to!
“#gadgetvader” turned out to be a projection onto the side of Marble Arch to promote the new series. They were selling it as 3D, it really wasn’t but still impressive…
I filmed the entire thing on my phone (HTC Desire) which Jason then borrowed for a photograph with the Sun! It was fun to see my marshals vest and arm holding my phone in the entire official Gadget Show footage too.
N.B. This is a backdated post as I take some of the things I have been doing elsewhere on the interwebs and add them to this site
Ducklings in Theale
27 Apr 2010
The advantage of having a lake next to your office window is you can setup a tripod on the windowsill and film the ducklings…
… I took some static pictures too …
N.B. This is a backdated post as I take some of the things I have been doing elsewhere on the interwebs and add them to this site
Beware of vouchers that expire
07 Jan 2008
I just wanted to warn people that if you got any vouchers for Christmas to be very careful about checking the date when they expire. I was shocked to find that vouchers I was given for my birthday expired less than four months later with no chance of a refund. Lost money and not just lost but they have the money for providing nothing!
Perhaps it is my fault for not reading the small print. I don’t get narked by many things but this has really gotten to me and the service was appalling. So much so that I have set a website to try and warn others (and make me feel a bit better). You never know, it may do something!
I have no problem with vouchers expiring, companies have to do this, prices of the experiences they sell will go up etc. however having a voucher that expired in less than four months with no other option is ludicrous in my opinion!
Update: The website worked! A very irate company got in touch and offered me a refund! I have now removed the link to the site that was in this post.
Silicone valleys, Germanium hills…
31 Dec 2007
Some things stay with you forever and I would like to think that the following little poem helped shape me. You see, the first computer I ever played with was the family Archimedes 310 and way before I had ever even heard the term “hacking” I was poking around in some of the library files trying to see how things worked. One of the first library files I looked at contained the following poem stuck in the middle of the code! I still don’t know who wrote it so I’m going to credit the author of the library. Surprisingly I can’t find this poem anywhere on the internet!
Silicone valleys,
Germanium hills,
Digital journeys,
And virtual thrills.Greetings, O hacker,
Feeling unwell?
Microchip tracker,
Welcome to hell.Jon Ribbens – DoggySoft
The next big thing
17 Mar 2007
I’m always looking for the next big thing however my father always tells me that you don’t want to be the first to do something, you want to be the second. It’s true too, I can’t think of many original conceptors that are still doing their ideas. Those that have made a go from it have mostly been through selling the patent however in this modern Internet world it’s very difficult (although not impossible) to patent an idea.
Take Google, not the Google you see now but the original startup Google. They didn’t invent the idea of crawling Internet websites, Digital had done that years earlier with Alta Vista. Google was however the site/company to launch the concept to the masses!
So… if I want to be the next Google, what exists out there today that I could improve on?
Prisons give inmates mobile phones
18 Dec 2006
So let me get this right, prisoners have been smuggling mobile phones into prisons to keep in contact with the outside world (although I dread to think with who in the outside world), fair enough, it’s going to happen but now they are actively giving prisoners mobiles phones. Now I’m not too worried about the calls (although I can see a few problems there!) but almost every phone nowadays has a basic browser (even WAP) let alone MMS messaging etc. There isn’t much you can’t do from a phone nowadays and well, if they can’t do it then it’s just a phone call away! Why not just give them broadband and and be done with it!
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