Blog

The Living Room: Gavin Clark documentary

25 February 2023

Back at the end of the nineties, I liked a band called Sunhouse. Their first and only album was called 'Crazy on the Weekend'. I liked the album because it was about a set of experiences that were outside both of my own comfort zone and outside the usual radius...

Read more

A Brief Appreciation of Buddhist Geeks

09 July 2022

I started listening to the Buddhist Geeks podcast, presented primarily by Vincent Horn, about five years ago. I just want to briefly acknowledge and appreciate the role of the Buddhist Geeks podcast as not just a great resource in itself but also as a fantastic gateway node to a bunch...

Read more

Nature and Technology in Chapter 19 of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

20 November 2020

I've been reading and thinking about Nature and Technology for years, and one piece of writing that has really stood out and inspired me is Chapter 19: Online in The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. The Outrun records Amy Liptrot's return to her childhome home in Orkney at the age of...

Read more

Deep relaxation and yoga nidra

22 March 2020

In 2005 I had pneumonia, and spent the next five years having about five chest infections each year. Some days I would have to come home from work and have to just lie down for half an hour in order to continue with my day. Sometimes, that half an hour...

Read more

The First GFN Shrewsbury Event: the Biodiversity Data Hack

31 January 2020

Good for Nothing Shrewsbury ran its first event, Bringing Shropshire's Biodiversity Data to Life, on Saturday 25th January 2020. The idea for the event was to bring together Shropshire biodiversity, technology and data experts, to work together on the following brief: Shropshire has plenty of biodiversity data, but it’s in...

Read more

Holochain

16 May 2019

I'm very interested in the Holochain project. I'm interested from three different angles: The fact it starts with People First rather than technology or data or economic value The extent to which the project is based on Learning from Nature The way the design of the project has No Single...

Read more

Nature and Technology

22 March 2019

It's easy to think about Nature and Technology as opposites. On a day where I've spent all day starting at the screen, they certainly feel like opposites. The colour and complexity of the natural world feels very distant. My head is full of binary logic. Nature feels a bit like...

Read more

Adventures in Meditation: Using Headspace

12 October 2017

I started to meditate about three years ago. Starting to meditate was definitely one of my better decisions. I started by using Headspace (www.headspace.com) Looking back, I think Headspace was a really good place to start. It gave me a basic meditation pattern that I still often use now. I...

Read more

In Praise of Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith

22 June 2017

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith (https://adactio.com/). It made me fall back in love with the web and with making things for the web. It took me back to my first proper job, in 1998, when CSS was still considered a highly questionable technology choice. I...

Read more

On 'Retromania' by Simon Reynolds

10 July 2011

Simon Reynolds’s “Retromania” has really got to me. Its thesis is that we’ve entered a stage of pop music where nothing new really happens. The period of pop’s primary production is over: we’re just pick and mixing from the vast repository of old music. Now, its an argument that’s been...

Read more

Why I love 'The Birth Mark' by Susan Howe

21 February 2011

I love The Birth Mark because of its fierce combination of intellect and emotion. Most contemporary literary criticism I’ve read, and I’ve more or less given up in recent years to be honest, values the intellect far more highly than emotion. The writers have been taught to be so painfully...

Read more

Why they should have closed Six Music

10 July 2010

They should have closed Six Music because young people today have far too easy access to tasteful music. Because of this, they don’t have the enriching experience of being deprived of tasteful music, like we did. We suffered poor music most of the time, and we became strong, better people...

Read more

The Empty Mailbox

10 July 2010

Twenty years ago I spent a year studying abroad at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Nineteen years old and homesick, I would wander down every day, sometimes a few times a day, to the mailboxes at Taft Hall where I was staying, and open my own little mailbox,...

Read more

Work/life balance

04 July 2010

In an attempt to retain some work/life balance in my blog, here are some pictures of our allotment at work. To be able to disappear behind the tall conifer hedge that separates the allotment from our offices at lunch time, and do some lazy weeding and watering, is a luxury...

Read more