This guy will make you happier in 12 minutes
I first watched this a while ago – maybe 6 months – and I still chuckle when I think of it. Shawn Achor talks about happiness. This is particularly interesting to me at the moment, having had a conversation with my 9 year old son about why I don’t watch the news any more. (The...
Needed: a web browser which will tell me what tab is playing bloody music!
I tend to have a lot of tabs open when I’m browsing – often, upwards of 20. I also like to listen to music while I work. I have the sound turned up on my laptop, or I have iTunes (note from 2021: this has not aged well … of course, it’s Spotify now!) going...
The creativity myth
Our understanding of creativity is a myth. I’ve heard dozens of people being described as ‘creative’, having their method characterised as creative, or their work as being somehow more ‘creative’ than someone else’s. Similarly, I’ve read articles on how to engage the creative process, to beat creative block, to become somehow ‘more’ creative. And it’s...
Passwords as tattoo’s / swallowable passwords
I’ve written before about the need for password strength, and also about my love of 1Password – an app for remembering and creating strong passwords - but this, well this is something new altogether … Regina Dugan is the former head of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – and now works over at (Google...
Kurt Vonnegut’s advice on writing
I love pretty much all the writing of Kurt Vonnegut; I think he was a tremendous writer who always had something interesting to say. I stumbled across this blog post today which contains much wisdom from the man himself, as concerns writing. Including these gems: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a...
5 apps that I cannot live without
Okay, that should probably be ‘5 apps that I cannot work without’, but if there’s one thing we know about the web, it’s that we love a bit of hyperbole in a blog post title There are some apps that become so engrained in your every day that oftentimes you don’t even realise you’re using...
Creating e-books from existing web content
This. Is. Awesome. Readlist allows you to create ebooks from existing web content – and have that sent to your Kindle / iWhatever. That’s just going to fit so nicely in with my life that I’m nearly weeping at the thought of it. For example, I spend the morning surfing the internet researching an upcoming...
The most common birth dates – an infographic
Everyone loves a good infographic. This one shows which birth dates are most popular … as you might expect, September seems to be the most common month for birthdays … all that winter time cuddling … predictably, Feb 29th and Jan 1st are the 2 least common dates. Anyway, a nice heat map illustration of...
The Hold On Tight Shelf
Love this great book shelf … currently the favoured solution for our kitchen bookshelves that are causing our current gargoyle bookends an undue amount of stress. (more info. via)
Firefox loses the favicon
This is interesting. Browsers are slowly ditching ‘favicons’ (the little logos that appear in the URL address bar of your web browser), and Firefox is the latest to do so. The reason is that it is very easy to create a favicon in the form of a padlock – giving your dodgy e-commerce site fake...