On Tuesday 17 March I published a first blog post about whether a WordPress-based local community shopping system would make sense in the times of the Coronavirus. The aim was to help the people living in the 40 or so flats in my building through the Coronavirus outbreak – to […]
My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of people doing things like this with their usernames or profile pictures: While a week ago that might have been useful, I am by now not sure it is. Yes, we should stay home. But all my friends, and my friends’ friends, are […]
OK, next up in Jon tries to solve Coronavirus social problems… what about grocery deliveries? My first specification was for a WordPress plugin to coordinate local food deliveries in my building and neighbourhood, which – when coming up with a Minimum Viable Product – is going to start with a […]
I’ve been wondering for the past 24 hours what I ought to do, personally, to help with the Coronavirus response – in my building, my neighbourhood, my city, more widely. I’m healthy and have some skills, but I am not a medical professional. While I might ultimately do other things as […]
I logged into Instagram this morning and the first picture in my feed was of a political friend of mine speaking at a conference. Further down a professor friend has posted a pic of him skiing with very important people. Then there was a friend posting a picture of herself […]
A couple of months ago I had a conversation with two academic friends of mine about why they refused to use any messenger other than WhatsApp. “We just want it to work!” they said. “Well, Volkswagen cars work” I hit back. “That’s different,” they said. But then what about fairly […]
Back almost five years ago I spent a week live blogging from Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship in the English Channel – you can find all my posts from that trip here. Now I am writing this on my way to another live blogging trip – I am going to Charleroi […]
Just under 48 hours ago I spotted a tweet from the BBC’s well known political journalist Andrew Neil – someone retweeted it into my timeline: Germany tonight in its biggest political crisis since late 1940s. Bigger even than UK’s current ongoing political crisis. — Andrew Neil (@afneil) November 20, 2017 […]
(Note: this is not a story about BBC bias, but more how journalists can get caught up amongst the bias propagated by others) This tweet by the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg caught my eye the other day – retweeted more than 3000 times, so it was all over my […]
For the past 8 years I have had the most faithful and reliable travel partner one could ever hope for. But everything has to come to an end. When I arrive in Berlin this evening, the curtain will come down on those years, the end of those hours and hours […]
At 10pm last night, The Daily Telegraph released a story entitled “Easter egg row: Church of England accuses National Trust of ‘airbrushing’ religion out of children’s egg hunt“, written by its Consumer Affairs Editor Katie Morley. The story concerns the renaming of the Cadbury-National Trust Egg Hunt from ‘Easter Egg […]
In mid January I was more or less offline for a fortnight as my laptop had a serious problem (more about that here). Yes, of course I have a smartphone, but I tend to access social media the old way through a web browser, and Twitter through Tweetbot on my Mac. […]
