Category: Uncategorized

  • Competence can fuck off

    I learn that Photoshop is thirty. The small revelation that goes with this information is that I’ve been using Photoshop for thirty years. That’s more than half of my life…

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  • Destroy Bitcoin. Smash the mining rigs

    I first published this at Medium.com, where it’s become my most popular post. It’s a disaster. There’s no point messing around. Let’s kill it now Bitcoin (and its many mutations…

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  • Podcasting—the platform battle

    UPDATE 2026. When I updated this post in 2022 I concluded I’d got it completely wrong about who would wind up dominating podcasting. Now I’m not so sure. UPDATE 2022.…

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  • Podcasting—welcome to the symphonic era

    This is not about the 90% of podcasts that are still three people at a table talking about something. Nor is it about all those podcasts that are basically a…

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  • 11 essentials for the modern podcast

    This is one of a short series of posts about the evolution of podcasting. The first one’s about the new wave of ambitious, highly-produced storytelling formats – I’m calling it…

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  • Who is Trump?

    A little Benito Mussolini, some John Gotti and some George Wallace. Plenty of Charles Lindbergh too, of course. But mainly he’s Rufus T. Firefly.

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  • Seven things I learnt from the British Library’s Magna Carta show

    The British Library has a terrific, totally absorbing show about Magna Carta – which is the cornerstone of world democracy or a sort of baronial shopping list weirdly granted in…

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  • In praise of friction

    Install Privacy Badger. It’s a plug-in from the EFF that blocks the nasty stuff that web site owners silently insert into your browser – tracking code, cookies and code from…

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  • The electro-mechanical sublime

    I visited the quite amazing Museum of Pinball in Paris last weekend. It was a revelation. The pinball machine (‘Flipper’ in France) represents some kind of high point in pre-digital…

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  • Uber’s bubble

    So it turns out that Uber isn’t just a neoliberal bulldozer, dismantling restrictive practices, labour codes, tax regimes and all that – according to this article at ValleyWag, it’s also…

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