james holden

The BBC Homepage gets a makeover

As of a few minutes ago, the BBC has gone live with it’s new homepage.
The new site is an iGoogle type affair with re-positionable content blocks, location specific content and, rather quirkily, a flash rendition of the old BBC clock, which will only be recognisable to those over a certain age.
There was a beta version [...]

Got two mobiles or take photos? You’re being watched!

Apparently having two mobile phones now counts a suspicious behaviour, and people are being encouraged to report anyone they see with two phones to the police.
A new counter-terrorism poster campaign operating in London, West Yorkshire and other areas of the UK urges the public to rat on their fellow citizens for “odd” behaviour such as [...]

Amazing Oscilloscope Trickery

Having mis-spent a significant part of my youth tinkering with electronics, I was the 10 year old boy who wanted, and got an oscilloscope for my birthday. With the scope in X-Y mode and a couple of function generators, you could produce Lissajous figures by sending different waveforms to the X and Y inputs.
These [...]

Reminder: WYLUG Meeting Tonight at 7pm, University of Leeds

Just a quick reminder to everyone that WYLUG is meeting tonight at Leeds University’s E C Stoner building. The meeting starts at 7pm, but the room will be open for refreshments from 6:30pm.
Tonight, we have Dave Fisher and Geoff Richards talking about the OpenStreetMap project.
This has been previously covered at one of the Leeds [...]

The World’s First SMS Enabled Toilet?

Working in the messaging industry, I’ve seen my fair share of oddball applications for SMS, but this one’s taking the, erm…. whatever.

In an effort to curb vandalism, some public toilets in Finland are now kept locked until you text the Finnish word for “OPEN” to a number displayed on the toilet door. It’s thought that [...]

Unboxing an Original 1988 Apple IIc

This lucky chap scored an unopened Apple IIc from eBay and, rather than sitting on it to accrue more collector value, decided to “unbox” it, 20 years after it left the factory.

I find it fascinating how there has been so little change to their approach to the first user experience, right from the “Open This [...]

Google’s Take on the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal

David Drummond a Google SVP has written a blog post suggesting that the deal could have serious implications for open Internet standards.
Image credit: swamp_of_dumb over at fark.com
I’d indeed be worried about services such as flickr and the YUI Ajax toolkit, as well as the enormous proportion of web mail accounts that that would be under [...]