For years I have been fighting a losing battle with friends – trying to make them see that the choices of the tech they use should be similar to how they choose what food to buy, or how to travel – namely that there are ethical values bound up in...
Technology
Back in the summer of 2011 I had a bit a tricky conundrum. I needed to get from Bow in East London to Camden in North London avoiding the riots that were happening at that time. And ideally I needed to make the trip by bike. And a community had...
When Twitter pulled out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton of course took to Twitter to respond: Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain. You can run but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments,...
Out of the window of the train just north of Brussels you can see the poster pictured here – Niet panikeren, organiseren it says. Don’t panic, organise in English. The past few days a slightly alternative slogan has been on my mind. Don’t whine, organise! We’ve had Sarah Manavis writing for The New Statesman...
Looking back it was a pretty good dozen years in many ways. From when I started using Twitter for EU political purposes early in 2009 until it all started to go wrong throughout 2022 I managed to achieve a hell of a lot on that platform. But it was based...
This blog has been running 17 years, and a good 14 of those the blog has been powered by WordPress. But in that time not only how I write has changed, but the way WordPress organises everything has changed a fair bit too. Back in 2008 I was coding the...
I’m not going to get into a discussion about whether what Musk is doing to Twitter is by accident or by design. All I know is that Twitter is, at the time of writing, a network I no longer want to be a part of. Since Musk’s takeover in October...
Years ago I used to run a little parody account on Twitter. Nothing major, nothing dangerous – just gently joking about a European Commissioner. The bio even said it was a parody. And then, from one day to the next, the account disappeared. No warning. I contacted Twitter’s support to...
As a very heavy Twitter user, for years I was a fan of Tweetbot on iOS, an independent Twitter app made by Tapbots. Using an independent app made sense as I could configure how everything would display according to my needs, rather than Twitter chose that for the sake of...
A Twitter thread by Jeff Jarvis caught my eye yesterday. “I far prefer blogs to email newsletters & podcasts” Jeff wrote, and I agree with him. I mused about why this was over my morning espresso. I pondered further during a cable internet outage at lunchtime. And now, when I...
I had to move flat in the middle of the Coronavirus lockdowns in Berlin and one of my aims for my new workplace in the new flat was that it would all be set up as well as possible for webinars – as a massive part of my work life...
For months this blog has been beset by a problem. Every time I upload an image I would receive the error: Post-processing of the image failed. If this is a photo or a large image, please scale it down to 2500 pixels and upload it again. Scaling it down, or...