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9 November 2013

Pi Weekly – MVP, Evolution and My Dream Job

Pi Weekly is an email newsletter I run with fellow Raspberry Pi enthusiast Ryan Walmsley. Recently it occurred to me that for such a small project, it’s evolved a lot since we launched – and that it’s quite impressive that we launched it so soon after the idea came about, and how it landed me my […]

8 November 2013

Fix Ubuntu

Today I saw fixubuntu.com featured on Hacker News. I assumed it was to be yet another rant about why you should use distro X instead of Ubuntu, and how Canonical are ruining it. I was half-right. I clicked the link to see what it was about and found a large box containing a list of […]

Tags: linux, privacy, ubuntu
16 September 2013

Berlin 2013

I’ve heard lots lately about how cool Berlin is — my friend Martin goes there regularly and hangs out in coffee shops working on projects, and he really enjoys the atmosphere and culture around the city. Another friend Sam recently moved here, and he loves it too. There seemed to be a thriving tech scene, […]

16 July 2013

Graham Linehan on Broken Copyright Law

Brilliant video of Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd) on Robert Llewellen (Kryten in Red Dwarf)’s Carpooling show from 2010. He discusses copyright law, ridiculing its problems and desperately looking for a way to get paid to make material and put it out to users in a fair way.

27 June 2013

Announcing Pi Weekly

Two weeks ago I had an idea – to launch a weekly Raspberry Pi email newsletter. I had a think about how it would work and what it would entail. I subscribe to a handful of similar ones for programming topics, notably a Python one called PyCoders Weekly, which is a simple link aggregator with […]

21 April 2013

STEM Raspberry Jam Pilot

I organised an event with the STEMNET (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths Network) team at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), based on the Manchester Raspberry Jam I run monthly at Madlab. The STEM Raspberry Jam was to be a new activity the STEM Ambassador network could offer to schools, so we ran a […]

20 April 2013

Free Software Culture Talk at Manchester Bracamp

Last month I attended the Manchester Girl Geeks Barcamp – affectionately known as bracamp. I did a talk on Free Software Culture, covering the varying definitions of “free” (libre/gratis), the principles of free and open source, why people do it, how development is managed and demonstrated use cases, as well as battle some gripes from a misunderstood […]

24 March 2013

Raspberry Jamboree 2013

Manchester recently held the first ever Raspberry Pi conference – Raspberry Jamboree, held at Manchester Central. It’s been a year since the launch of the Pi, and this event was to review what we did in the last year, and look forward to what we’re going to do this year and in the future. The […]

4 February 2013

Richard III

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III. Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch’s family. Richard was killed in battle in 1485 but his grave was lost when the church around it was […]

28 January 2013

Comprehension in Python

Python is a wonderful dynamic language offering various functional programming features, including standard library modules itertools and functools borrowed from Haskell and Standard ML. Some see it as the best of both worlds as not only can you perform complex tasks with these functional programming tools but you can do it using simple readable code […]