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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...