3 Jun 2026

I hate this

But does it matter? I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before about […]

29 Jul 2025

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. You […]

13 Jan 2025

Where is my patriotism?

Come, love of country, fill my heart… I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag on […]


  • The Economist on migration

    I’ve just finished reading The Economist’s blockbuster survey on migration. More very good work developing the newspaper’s line on the liberalisation of migration as a benefit to both nations (receiving…

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  • Touring Machine

    Via Matt, I learn that Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Dutch computer science pioneer, recently deceased, achieved in his lifetime two citations in the OED – for first use of the words…

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  • Architects and housing

    The orthodoxy is that the last time professional architects were allowed to design housing on a large scale in Britain they did more damage than the blitz, snuffing out historic…

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  • Azeem Azhar is out of control

    Azeem is developing his BBC GPL idea slightly more quickly than I can read all the words. For the time being I’ll just link and trackback to shut him up.…

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  • Break up BT?

    Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos’ latest report ‘The Politics of Broadband’. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of…

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  • Information about energy

    Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for…

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  • Fireworks therapy

    So after two or three hours running up and down the garden in the fine drizzle, lighting fireworks of every variety (including some fucking enormous roman candle bundles about the…

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  • edemocracy spiked!

    Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally…

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  • The downtown music scene after 9/11

    I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about…

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  • What passes for entertainment round my way

    If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn’t been washed into the river by the already torrential rainstorm here in the burbs, you might catch our garden fireworks…

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  • An Open Source BBC?

    Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC’s role in the post-crash Internet. I’m a busy man – I’m nearly forty and…

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  • Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide

    One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the…

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