I have a habit of revamping my website every few years. Since starting on Blogger some ... 19 years ago I've moved between platforms and redesigned the layout several times over. This time I decided to go for a static site build, which means not requiring managing WordPress plugins and updates, or...
Cambridge-based hosting company Mythic Beasts — long-time friends of Raspberry Pi people and products — launched a unique service back in 2016: Raspberry Pi hosting, what they call their "Pi Cloud". When I developed the first version of piwheels, it made sense to make use of this service to...
I was back in Cardiff for PyCon UK recently and gave a talk on a BBC project I've been working on, called Live Highlights. I'm not doing as many conference talks as I used to – this is my only one of the year! I spoke about how we prototyped an idea and built it up to be used in audience-facing...
I've now completed my second full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. Another year working from home; the team officially moved into BBC R&D; and I was promoted to senior engineer. In 2021 I worked on: mosromgr, a Python library for managing TV and radio running...
Following the success of my article The surreal experience of my first developer job, which made it to the top of Hacker News for a whole day, I was invited to tell the story on the excellent podcast Client Horror Stories. The video is available on clienthorrorstories.com: Thanks to Morgan for...
For the last few months in BBC News Labs, I've been working on various projects involving extracting metadata from running orders for BBC programmes such as Newsnight and the R4 Today programme. Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol for communications between newsroom...
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents' if I moved...
Dave and I just did a release of GPIO Zero, our Raspberry Pi GPIO library. It's been over 18 months since the last release, and as well as plenty of small bugfixes and corrections to the documentation, there are a few nice new features too. The highlights: Rotary Encoder Multi-segment displays,...
PyPI, the Python package index, provides a JSON API for information about its packages. This is essentially a machine-readable source of the same kind of data you can access while browsing the website. For example, as a human, I can head to the numpy project page in my browser, click around and see...
The Jupyter project started out as IPython and the IPython Notebook. It was originally a Python-specific interactive shell and notebook environment which later branched out to become language-agnostic, supporting Julia, Python and R – and potentially anything else. IPython is a Python shell –...
I've now completed a full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. It's been an odd year, obviously, but we've been cracking on with all kinds of projects – finding new ways to help journalists do their jobs; innovating around user experiences in news products and...
For some time, Python has had support for managing virtual environments. Python 3.3 even added the built-in module venv for creating environments without third-party libraries. There are a number of different tools Python programmers use to manage their environments and the one I use is...
The best tool is one that helps you learn! I've enjoyed participating in Advent of Code for the last few years. It's a series of daily Christmas-themed coding challenges throughout December, and it's great fun. https://adventofcode.com/2020 I post my solutions in Jupyter notebooks on...
Ever wanted to know how many visitors you've had to your website? Or wanted to know which pages, articles or downloads are the most popular? If you're self-hosting your blog or website, whether you use Apache, nginx or even IIS (yes, really), lars is here to help. Lars is a web server log toolkit...
structa is a hidden gem. It's one of many great utilities created by Dave Jones. It's a command line tool for analysing JSON files. Sometimes you need to inspect the structure of a large nested JSON file, and it's too unwieldy to work out what kind of data it contains. structa is perfect for...
Last time, I did a video tutorial introducing Anvil, a web-based tool for building web apps. Today I have a new video in which I build a new app in Anvil, and then deploy it to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi, to make use of some Raspberry Pi specific features. This app features a grid of information...
I've had a blog since 2006. I started using Blogger — Google's 2003 acquisition — allowing 17-year-old-me to publish my thoughts and share my adventures with the world in my own corner of web space at blogspot.com. I can still log in to my blogspot account and see the old posts – although it...
Anvil is a web-based tool for building full-stack web apps with nothing but Python. It's great for building demos, prototypes, web forms, CRUD apps and all sorts of interactive applications. The Anvil app builder is probably the most enjoyable developer experience I've ever had. Its autocomplete is...
One of my essential tools for working with code and data files is meld. It's a graphical diff tool, so if you've ever used diff and struggled to make sense of the output, meld is here to help. This is a brilliant description from the project's website: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool...
Issue #91 of the official Raspberry Pi magazine, The MagPi, has just been published and it features an interview with me, about my time at the Foundation (and a bit before), letting the community know what I'm moving on to at the BBC. You can buy or download the issue here: Issue #91 Here's what...
A few months ago I was looking through questions posted to the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange site. If you're not familiar, Stack Exchange provides Q&A sites like Stack Overflow for specific areas, such as particular programming languages, technologies or other topics. And while observing the erratic...
Just a quick note to say I'm leaving the Raspberry Pi Foundation to start a new role at the BBC. I've been at Raspberry Pi for over six years, and it's been great. I'm excited to join an innovation team called BBC News Labs. They find new ways to solve problems with technology, making lives easier...
The piwheels project provides pre-compiled Python packages for Raspberry Pi users, saving them considerable time and effort. I wrote about piwheels a little over a year ago - I remember Red Hatter Jeff Mackanic telling me at ATO 2018 how impressed he was with the project. Back then, piwheels was...
Mythic Beasts is an awesome hosting company based in Cambridge. They host the Raspberry Pi website, including the Raspbian archive and download images, and like to make sure we eat our own dog food by hosting the website on new Raspberry Pi hardware for product launches. Pete Stevens of Mythic...
Today the Raspberry Pi 4 is released, featuring a new 1.5GHz Arm chip and VideoCore GPU. It brings some brand new additions to the board: dual-HDMI 4K display output; USB3 ports; Gigabit Ethernet; even multiple RAM options up to 4GB. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a very powerful single board computer and...
Last week I covered terminal multiplexer byobu, and this week's tool is quite similar. Terminator is a single-window split-screen terminal multiplexer that allows you to send identical keystrokes to all terminals at once. This means you can SSH into any number of machines, and run the same...
Byobu is a text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer. If you've ever used screen, it's similar but more modern and more intuitive. If you SSH'd into a Pi or server, ran sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade for example, and lost your internet connection while it was running, your command...
Today I'm sharing three tools for checking your internet and LAN speed: speedtest, fast and iperf. speedtest speedtest is an old favourite. It's implemented in Python, packaged in apt and also available with pip. You can use it as a command line tool, or within a Python script. Install it...
The deadsnakes PPA lets you install multiple Python versions on your Ubuntu system, so instead of only having just the Python 2.x and Python 3.x that comes with your distribution (18.04 comes with Python 3.6, and 2.7 is available), you can install older or newer versions, from 2.3 (!) to the latest...
Have you ever used pastebin websites like pastebin.com to share snippets of code, data or text? Did you know you can publish a file from your computer or a Raspberry Pi to a pastebin site with a single command? Install pastebinit: sudo apt install pastebinit Mac users can install with...
I use SSH constantly. Every day I find myself logged in to multiple servers and Pis (both in the same room as me and over the internet). I have many devices I need access to, and different requirements for gaining access, so as well as using various SSH/SCP command options I have to maintain a...
I'm not sure whether logzero took its name to fit in with the series of "zero boilerplate" libraries like pygame-zero, GPIO Zero and guizero, but it's certainly in that category. It's a Python library that makes logging straightforward. It makes logging as easy as a print statement, which is a...
I was recently introduced to ranger by Dave Jones. It's an incredibly handy terminal based file navigator that's written in Python and is available in Debian, Raspbian and Ubuntu. Ranger allows you to navigate your filesystem using the arrow keys on your keyboard: up/down to select files in the...
I've decided to take a leaf out of Les's book and post about a new tool every Tuesday! From now on I'll be sharing short weekly posts introducing a tool I've enjoyed using – mostly software stuff usually related to open source, Python, Linux, Raspberry Pi and so on. I've set up a new blog...
It's become customary for me to summarise what each new GPIO Zero release brings. This one's been a long time coming. It's been a quite while since our last release (a whole year since the last point release and 18 months since v1.4). I mostly attribute the lack of development to the launch of...
I've been lucky enough to have been able to attend (and speak at) two great Python conferences – EuroPython and PyCon UK – (almost) every year since 2014. I've been to EuroPython in Berlin, Bilbao and Rimini, and this year it came to the UK – specifically, the beautiful city of Edinburgh. I...
One of the great things about the Python programming language is PyPI - the Python Package Index, where third-party libraries are hosted, available for anyone to install to gain access to pre-existing functionality without starting from scratch. These libraries are handy utilities written by...
"Hello world" is the beginning of everything when it comes to computing and programming. It's the first thing you learn in a new programming language, and it's the way you test something out, or check to see if something's working because it's usually the simplest way of testing simple...
Got an old Raspberry Pi lying around? Hate seeing ads while browsing the web? pi-hole is an open-source software project that blocks ads for all devices on your home network by routing all advertising servers into nowhere. What's best is it takes just a few minutes to set up. pi-hole blocks over...
The recent announcement of the latest release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop x86 image alongside Raspbian Stretch for Raspberry Pi included mention of a GPIO expander tool, which was followed up by another blog post explaining how it works and how to use it. Since it uses pigpio to control the GPIO...
I have attended and spoken at the EuroPython conference for the last few years, and this time I focused on physical computing with Python and Raspberry Pi, including GPIO Zero, Picamera and the Sense HAT. The slides are on speakerdeck and you can watch the video here:
Databases are a great way to add data persistence to your project or application. You can write data in one session and it'll be there the next time you want to look. A well-designed database can be efficient at looking up data in large datasets, and you won't have to worry about how it looks,...
Twitter is a wonderful communication and social media platform. It has everything: breaking news, political opinion, humor, celebrities, entertainment, special interest chat, and, well, anything. Individuals, companies, departments, projects, and more—really anyone or anything—can have a...
While preparing for a workshop last week, my colleague Marc and I started brainstorming ideas. One of the ideas I came up with was to use the mini joystick on a Sense HAT (a sensor board add-on for the Raspberry Pi) to remotely control a robot using GPIO Zero's remote pins feature. I soon...
The title may have given away the article contents, but feel free to read on pretending you don't know the ending. Background: I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I do a lot of Python stuff on Raspberry Pi. I presented this project recently in a lightning talk at EuroPython. Motivation:...
It's been a while since the last GPIO Zero release, so it's with great pleasure I announce v1.4 is here. Upgrade now on your Raspberry Pi: sudo apt update sudo apt install python-gpiozero python3-gpiozero Or on your PC: pip install gpiozero Why on your PC? Run Python code on your PC to remotely...
There's much more to managing a project with git beyond just committing code and working with branches. GitHub-Driven Development is a process that will help you organize and manage the progression of a project on GitHub, although much of this could be applied to other systems, such as GitLab, as...
The Raspberry Pi computer can be used in all kinds of settings and for a variety of purposes. It obviously has a place in education for helping students with learning programming and maker skills in the classroom and the hackspace, and it has plenty of industrial applications in the workplace and...
My review of the Google OnHub router, and some tips on setting up advanced options like port forwarding. While in the US for a trip in October, I decided to pick up a Google OnHub router, which is only available in America, and has since been superseded by Google WiFi, also only available in...
Earlier this month, I spoke on the Python track at FOSDEM 2017. My talk introduced the Raspberry Pi as a tool for physical computing and IoT to Python programmers in the free & open-source software community. I talked about the Raspberry Pi Foundation's mission, our education programmes, introduced...
Over the last four years, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a great deal of effort into optimizing Raspbian, its port of Debian, for Pi hardware, including creating new educational software, programming tools, and a nicer looking desktop. In September, we released an update that introduced PIXEL...
During this Christmas break I decided to have a go at implementing the card game Uno in Python. It's a fun and simple game for all ages, and the rules are easy to pick up and follow – but there's quite a challenge in implementing the rules in a program! I spent a few hours over a few evenings...
I recently attended All Things Open, an open-source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, run by Red Hat. I was invited by my friends at opensource.com – and it was a great opportunity to meet the team and some of the moderators, columnists and contributors. #ATO2016 pic.twitter.com/Tdk8wqzWcB —...
I was invited to give the closing keynote at PyCon Russia, which took place in Moscow in July. It was my first visit to Russia – and I had a great trip. Today I am mostly being the Raspberry Pi Community at @PyConRu pic.twitter.com/U88J1rcMNZ — Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) July 3, 2016 I travelled...
One year ago today, I started the GPIO Zero project. We now have a core team of three (Dave Jones, Andrew Scheller and me). There have been 587 commits, we've released four major versions, and published a book. The library has great coverage of GPIO devices, and contains features I never even...
Today the MagPi team released a new publication: Simple Electronics with GPIO Zero. This 100-page book takes you from the basics, like lighting an LED, all the way to building projects like an Internet radio using the GPIO Zero Python library. This book is available as a free PDF, but you can...
Did you know you can adorn your Raspberry Pi with HATs? Of course we're not talking about hats like people put on their heads, but rather HATs: hardware attached on top. These are add-on circuit boards and accessories that add functionality to your Raspberry Pi. You can, of course, use the Pi on...
GPIO Zero is a Python library I created to make physical computing on the Raspberry Pi more accessible, particularly for use in education. Read more about it on raspberrypi.org, or about how it was created in an article on this blog, GPIO Zero: Developing a new friendly API for...
One of the most exciting starter activities to do with a Raspberry Pi is something you can't do on your regular PC or laptop—make something happen in the real world, such as flash an LED or control a motor. If you've done anything like this before, you probably did it with Python using the RPi.GPIO...
I was sad to hear the news of the death of Ronnie Corbett. I've always been a huge fan of The Two Ronnies and much of the other work the duo had done both together and individually. Within moments of the news breaking, tributes such as photographs of four candles and fork handles, and links to...
I contributed to the 2015 Open Source Yearbook, created by opensource.com, which you can download as a PDF or view the individual articles online. It comprises: 6 creative ways to use ownCloud – by Jos Poortvliet, ownCloud community manager 10 tools for visual effects in Linux with ...
The original Raspberry Pi went on sale four years ago, and more than 8,000,000 units have shipped since then. Raspberry Pi computers are used in schools and universities, in factories and other industrial applications, in home automation and hobby projects, and much more. Today the Raspberry Pi 3...
Back in 2013, inspired by PyCoders Weekly, a great Python email newsletter, I created Pi Weekly, the same sort of thing for Raspberry Pi. Each week I curated a collection of links to news, projects and articles from the Raspberry Pi community. Its subscriber base grew steadily and within a few...
For about the last 3 years, the de-facto method of accessing physical components via the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins has been a Python library called RPi.GPIO, created by Ben Croston, who originally built it to control his beer brewing process. Despite its humble beginnings in a personal hobby...
Starting today, shops and newsagents are stocking a computer magazine called The MagPi, and as a world's first, this magazine comes with a free computer—literally stuck to the front cover. It's the newest Raspberry Pi release, called Pi Zero. This computer also goes on sale around the world for...
Last year I was invited to speak at PySS in San Sebastian, Spain, and I met a great bunch of guys: the conference organisers Alex, Oier and Borja. We started a project called pyjokes (one line programmer jokes / jokes-as-a-service). I gave a 5 minute lightning talk at PyCon UK last weekend telling...
I now have a monthly column on opensource.com – a brilliant website for all things open source. I'll be writing articles about Raspberry Pi – particularly its use in education. My first piece was published last week, covering the Astro Pi competition – we're sending two Raspberry Pis to the...
Last month the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the second generation of its affordable single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. I've been working at Raspberry Pi for over a year now and this is the fourth product launch I've been involved with: first there was the compute module for...
Last December I started my job at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and this time last year, having just completed my first month, I wrote my review of 2013 and all the events which led up to that move. Here is a round-up of all that's happened since then. Talks & Conferences This year I gave my first...
In the last two months I've attended and spoken at five Python conferences around Europe. EuroPython – Berlin I submitted a proposal to EuroPython in Berlin for a talk explaining what the Raspberry Pi Foundation are doing in education. Luckily it was accepted and I got to go to...
I drove 4,500 miles across America visiting schools, universities and hackspaces telling people all about Raspberry Pi. New York City to Salt Lake City, the long way around Read all about it at https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/bens-mega-usa-tour/
Back in February at the Raspberry Jamboree, my colleagues Carrie Anne, Clive and I were interviewed by the Linux Voice team about Raspberry Pi's views on computing education. Linux Voice is a fantastic new free software magazine which was funded by a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo at the end of...
While I was in Manchester, I shared an office with two guys, Sam and Scott, who ran an animation studio called Saladhouse. Me being me, I used to talk about Raspberry Pi all the time – and my enthusiasm rubbed off on them both. Scott ordered a Pi kit from Pimoroni and once used it to display some...
This year I've learned lots, run events, helped mentor young people, contributed to open source, engaged in much community activity, made and developed some strong friendships and built myself a new career. OH Digital I began this year working as a web developer at OH Digital, having started there...
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...
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 Linux commands,...
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...
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...
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 short...
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...
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...
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 day...
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...
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...
Last month I attended Hack Manchester – a 24 coding event as part of the Manchester Science Festival, held at MOSI. Having only arranged to team up with Mike, we ended up joining two guys Shaf introduced us to, his colleagues from the BBC, by the names of Jack and Tom. The four of us formed a team,...
This weekend I attended the fifth (my third) PHPNW annual conference. As a member of the local PHPNW user group and community, I volunteer as a helper which involves getting delegates registered, getting the speakers to the right place and making sure everything's running smoothly. Starting on the...
This weekend was Barcamp Blackpool – held at the Norbreck Castle Hotel in North Blackpool. It's the fourth event they've run since it kicked off in 2009 – and the second I've attended. Last year was great fun but I only stayed for the day – this time I stayed the night before and the night after,...
Last Wednesday, 26th September 2012, two friends and I took advantage of the rainfall and headed to the River Irwell in Bury to paddle from Nuttall Park to the Burrs Activity Centre. Upon arrival at the park the rain began again, and as we approached the bank to put on, the water was extremely...
I've now hosted four Raspberry Jams in Manchester. I posted about the first and second, here's a summary of what went on at III & IV. The August Manchester Raspberry Jam kicked off when Kat opened up the Madlab and I gave an opening talk about what had been going on in the news in the Raspberry Pi...
I did a backflip off a rock in to a river on a kayaking trip one day. My friend Leif took this picture using my cheap point-and-shoot camera, he somehow managed to capture this perfectly. The sky is photoshopped but the rest is true. Original here. It was on the River Lune in the Lake District...
Like a lot of other Ubuntu users, when I installed Ubuntu 10.10 I hated the new desktop environment Unity. I wanted to get back to the Gnome desktop with the Applications | Places | System menu where I knew where things were, I didn't feel comfortable with the silly oversized icons on the left, and...
This scene from Beavis and Butthead Do America makes me laugh every time. Next time you hear a sentence ending in a preposition, try to correct it in your head. Not out loud, you'll get something thrown at you.
I've now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas,...
This trick was inspired by Brian Suda who I saw speak at Whisky Web. Take a string, any string. Hash it using MD5. Substring the hash to get a 6-digit hex code. Take a look at what colour that hex code represents. A really simple, really cool way of generating seemingly random colours, that can...
I just read an article on BBC News. All quotes are taken directly from that article. The link is at the bottom of this post. Norwich City kit published on internet by boy ahead of launch When I read this I imagined the boy in question had illegally obtained pictures of the new kit, and posted...
I've just been to Whisky Web, a language-agnostic web conference in Edinburgh organised by a group of local tech guys. It's the first one they've run and it just came from the idea they had to get a bunch of web folk together for a fun conference and social gathering. Held in the heart of the...
The BBC wrote about Hack To The Future on their Research & Development blog, including a short video featuring their coverage of me explaining my nontransitive dice session! Also some screen time with Sam of Manchester Girl Geeks (who gave a brilliant keynote); Tom Crick (Cardiff...
So you have some data. Let's say it's a record of the number of instances of some things. Let's say it's the number of movies you own, grouped by the year they were released. Let's say you have those data in the form of a dictionary in Python, like so: years = {2000: 2, 2001: 9, 2002: 10, 2003:...
Today I participated in Maths Busking as part of the Science Festival of Leeds. "What is Maths Busking?" I hear you ask. Maths Busking is a street performance of mathematics whereby the buskers demonstrate mathematical ideas and engage the public in thinking like a mathematician in the form of a...
Here's an amazing video from Bret Victor about how some software tools he built allow him to see change immediately upon editing or writing code, how he can control the value of variables with sliders where moving them up and down renders the output accordingly, and many other features we'd all...
So I'm sitting in my office, bashing away at my keyboard, when a small parcel arrives on my desk. I wasn't expecting anything, I'm new here so it wouldn't be work-related, it wasn't just a letter but a small parcel containing an object quite clearly in the third dimension. Who on Earth would...
Don't Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association beginning in 1992. The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as "MC Double Def DP," was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. and produced by cooperation between the SPA,...
Yesterday was XP Manchester's XL event – a Saturday coding session of pairing, katas and a team bot tournament hosted at the MadLab. I managed to persuade Kris, a friend I used to work with, to come along – it's his first experience of this sort of thing, so I'm really glad he got introduced to...
The ternary operator is a shorthand way of writing an if/else statement where a particular action occurs in both cases, but the value associated with that action depends on the condition stated. For example, the traditional if/else construct (C/Java/JavScript syntax): if (a > b) { result =...
This is a guest post I wrote for the IMA Blog – Dr. Darren Dancey: "Maths – There's an App For That!" This North West regional talk was delivered by Manchester Metropolitan University's Computer Science lecturer Darren Dancey, whose teaching specialisms include programming and artificial...
This is an extended version of an article I wrote for MSOR Connections magazine – which you can read online During the final year of my combined honours degree in Mathematics and Computing at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) I received an invitation to a two-day Student Mathematical...
On Sunday morning I was at my computer, surfing the web and doing some programming. I kept an eye on Twitter, noticing that Dave Gorman was tweeting about the radio show he was broadcasting at the time (Absolute Radio). The theme of his show was people's odd routines & rituals; things they do all...
Blogger have announced that they will be discontinuing their FTP service, which means that users will no longer be able to publish to their custom domains. This severely affects me as my blog is powered by Blogger and I publish via FTP, which means I will have to come up with an...
Some friends & I decided to make the most of the snow by heading to the Lake District for a midnight mission up Helvellyn one Friday evening in mid-January. I was due to return to Manchester from spending the Christmas holidays at home, and as the mountain passes over the peak district from...
The X-Factor winner has won the Christmas Number One every year since 2005, and it would have been the same this year if it hadn't been for one man. A guy called Jon Morter decided he was sick of seeing people being spoon-fed what music they should like by Simon Cowell so he set up a...
A short film produced by Paul Maunder of Northern Parkour, based on the music video for Michael Jackson's Thriller. We rehearsed the dance routine for a long time and threw together the script and filmed the other bits at some training sessions.
They say that you can learn more from two weeks in the Alps than you can kayaking a whole year in the UK. I can vouch for that after 3,298.7 miles, 8 countries, 13 rivers, 5 mountain bike trails, 2 rafting trips and half a day at Fontainebleau. Miles and I set off from Sheffield at about 1pm on the...
I've been blown away by so many things Google have done so far this year (and it's only March). They've done loads of work on Gmail which has incredibly made it even better; Gmail was already the best webmail service around, and it's been making life easier for millions of users all over the world...
Two weeks ago I received my new HTC Magic smartphone - it's powered by Google's open-source operating system, Android. This means the source code for the system the phone runs on is freely available to download, which means any developer can write their own applications and tweaks for Android...
I've had a weekend full of training, which followed two days of programming with parkour training in the afternoons, and today is my rest day. Thursday I went out training as a break from Java; Friday I met up with my good friends Gordon & Scott for some afternoon parkour in the sun; Saturday I...
I've had a hectic week this week trying to get all my assignments in. I had a MATLAB assignment due in on Thursday and a Java one due in today. The MATLAB one involved two questions: the first was a banking system which calculated interest and mortgage payments; the second was an animation of a...
I'm now on Twitter. If you're one of the people who have heard of Twitter and you're terrified that it will be the new Facebook which is the new MySpace, then please calm down, this is not the case. No-one is going to leave Facebook to join Twiter, they are not the same thing. Facebook...
I decided I needed a new website template so I made one. Much better, don't you think? It's compliant with W3C Web Standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1) and I'm even using PHP to render it using Server Side Includes, as well as a PHP email form on the contact page. I've learned so much these...
I did quite a bit of kayaking in January; in Wales, the Lake District and more locally in the North West of England. I think the first one of the new year was the Dee in Llangollen in North Wales, which I did a few years ago while doing my 4-star course. I was incredibly excited when we first got...
This is the new parkour documentary. It was produced by two good friends of mine; the legendary Paul Maunder and written by the Chairman of the British Parkour Coaching Association, Dave Sedgley. This is truly the greatest parkour documentary we have seen to date, in terms of its content (the words...
Being part of the most active Scout Unit in South Yorkshire, I was strongly encouraged to participate in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme and given every opportunity to complete each section of it, with a decent amount of effort. I worked through the Bronze in my first year when I was 14, went...
I'll try and be quick because I'm mega busy at the moment – got a massive week ahead of me and time is precious but I'm trying to keep up the whole 'frequent blog post' thing I've mentioned in the last few posts so here I am writing this from my brand new ASUS laptop which I set up last night. It's...
I was asked by the chairman of the canoe club if I would like to attend the BCU whitewater student safety seminar with him and the vice chairman, being a fresher who is keen to commit to kayaking and to the club and likely to be seriously involved in the club over the next few years. I jumped at...
I'm now at the end of my third week of university. I've moved away from home and now live in halls of residence in Manchester, which is a completely new experience for me. I can cook and generally fend for myself but it's still very different from being at home. I'm having a wicked time out...
Yesterday was officially my last parkour jam in Sheffield. I'm moving to Manchester next Saturday so I told the guys that it would be the last time I'd be training with them all before I go away to uni, and we had a great day of training in Sheffield, starting at the university and working our...
Last week you saw the revival of the Sheffield Parkour Diaries. This week I'm bringing you a parkour special edition of the recently-revived diaries with episode 15, edited by yours truly. It contains 90% parkour and just 10% silliness and promises to be entertaining and inspiring. This is a...
Trace is a Parkour gathering in the peak district organised by Jason Matten and Dave Sedgley. The first proper one was last year (Trace Gathering 2007) and we had a smaller one the year before called the Northern Parkour Gathering 2006. I came back a few days early from my trip to the...
I have just returned from a WVU Summer Trip to the Pyrenees! The Pyrenees are the mountains that border France and Spain – we were on the Spanish side, staying at a lovely campsite in the picturesque town of Torla in a valley on the outskirts of the Ordesa National Park. My journey there was rather...
Pi – An irrational constant used to represent the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, symbolised by the greek letter Pi, approximately 3.14159265358979323846264338327 (not rounded) Pi Day – A geek holiday held to celebrate the mathematical constant Pi, observed on March 14...
The Winter Runaround is a Scouting competition for 14-25s where teams of 4-7 travel across South Yorkshire by means of public transport with pre-purchased travel passes, with the aim of competing bases at Scout headquarters all over the county in order to earn points. The Bone of Contention is a...
Googlewhacking is a game of finding two words which, when entered into Google, return a single result. The words must exist in the dictionary (these are underlined in Google) and must not be in quotes - so Google simply searches for pages containing both of these words. If there is only one result,...
It all started with an email from Jamie Coulson. He asked if I could set something up to film parkour for his programme, Inside Out, for the BBC. I told him about the (then upcoming) Trace Gathering and he was very interested, so I arranged with Jason Matten, the organiser, and arranged for Jamie...
I'm currently sat in a pub called The Eagle, it's round the corner from King's College Chapel of the University of Cambridge, I'm waiting for the food we just ordered. I'm writing this blog post on my new mobile phone. Damn right – I'm on Blogger on my phone. I love technology. Anyway, here's...
For those of you who don't know, Lisses is a suburb of Paris and it is where Parkour began. David Belle, the founder of the French discipline, lived there and began to develop the art of movement from his background in gymnastics, athletics and martial arts. Me, Danny and Scott met up in Sheffield...
Danny and Paul went on their Lisses (France) trip last week and had promised to leave me a sign of some sort that I would see or find when I go next week. Danny told me that he had left something written on paper in the tunnel part on the Dame Du Lac, and that I would have to know where it was to...
This week, Fieldhead Campsite in Edale in the Peak District held host to 115 or so traceurs for the Trace (or TRACEur) Gathering 2007. An absolutely brilliant few days of hanging out with over a hundred people who live for parkour – camping together, talking about parkour, and training in the most...
On Thursday afternoon I received an email from Luke Markey from TT, who was meant to be standing in for Daniel Ilabaca to present the parkour films and do a talk on parkour at ShAFF – the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (Daniel couldn't make it as he's currently filming in India), anyway, Luke...
I went to Wales for a weekend in half term with the WVU Network. I summited Snowdon (the highest mountain in Wales) for the first time, which was great, even though it is a bit touristy. Photos: And here's the video:
Saturday 3rd February - training and filming in Manchester with Hat Trick Productions for a Channel 4 programme called 'A Slice of Life', which is not a programme about parkour, rather it is made up of sections, parkour being one for them. I'm not sure when it'll be broadcast, I'll keep you...
Here's a video I made purely using the content from my msn Recevied Files folder. It mainly consists of parkour, tricking and kayaking. The song is 'Polkarama!' by Weird Al Yankovic (sent by Sam Oakley). That was fun to make. There's some weird/funny stuff I've been sent in my time...
Sam Doyle got us the licence to do 'rope training' on the viaduct at Millers Dale, so we took the chance to have a go at abseiling off the side and towards the river. Miles led the evening and him, Burdy, Bob and Batley were in charge of belaying. The Millers Dale Viaduct abseil. MS...
This weekend I've been on the Apex Challenge, which is a competition for teams of four (this time in Castleton in the Peak District) where the teams involved have to navigate through a large geographical area racking up points from taking part in various activities at bases set up all round the...
Had an absolutely brilliant time in Manchester this weekend. Will, Dez and I saw Motion City Soundtrack at the Manchester Academy, and they totally rocked, supported by OK Go, who were pretty cool too (they even did a dance while we were waiting for MCS to come on!) After the gig finished, we...
I just signed up to the Organ Donors List. Now, if I die, the UK Transplants Organisation have permission to use all my organs and tissue. Isn't it great!? It's something I've always wanted to make sure I was on the list and all that, but as is always the case, I never got round to it. This...
This is just a video I made up of some clips from training yesterday morning on Rother Valley. I was just on this little playground doing some precisions and stuff, and using the bars and that sort of thing, and decided to test the camera out. I haven't used video editing software before, so this...
Well, I'm in New York, New York. I frickin' love this place! Times Square has to be the coolest place I've ever seen in my life. I haven't got time to write up what I've done so far, so I'll mention a few; today I went to Grand Central Station and the Morgan Museum, I've also been up the Empire...
Thursday in Sheffield It's Thursday night now, I'm about to go to bed ready for tomorrow's day in the Peak District. Today was a brilliant day of parkour; Will and I met up with Jin, Jason and two other traceurs from Cambridge, we trained from 1:00pm till about 8:00pm, it was fantastic. The four of...