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. […]
A couple of weeks ago my MacBook Pro would not boot. On the first day of a week-long business trip. Damn. A laptop borrowed from a friend saw me through until I got home and I could take the time to re-install everything, and restore all my files from backups. […]
I’ve read too many pieces seeking the reason why Trump managed to become US President. There is no single reason. There are many overlapping and even sometimes contradictory reasons. Here are 25 I’ve come across, vaguely organised so they build upon each other. Decline of the mainstream media (Joshua Benton / Nieman […]
tl;dr – if you’re looking for a portable, battery powered, wireless card reader for use on holiday, this is an excellent gadget. It’s especially good if you use an iOS mobile. I’ve just returned from a 3 week trip to Central Asia. Throughout this trip I knew that I and […]
Bernd Hüttemann earlier pointed out to me that the mood section of the Facebook app for iOS has a mood “in favour of leaving the EU” but none in favour of remain. I scarcely believed it! But now I have checked and it is true. I am using an iPhone […]
The deadline to add people to the electoral register has passed. The campaign is entering its final straight. Those of us caught up with the debate about the referendum see an end in sight after months of spending dozens of hours thinking and writing about nothing else. But up to […]
“Social media is overhyped” a friend said to me in a social setting yesterday. “Look at the Arab Spring – it failed!” I agree with the latter part – what happened at Tahrir Square (and how people came to the square), and indeed Gezi Park, would seem to indicate the […]
My MacBook needed a bit of a spring clean, so I decided to wipe it, reinstall Mac OS, and then re-install all my apps. Rather than just restoring apps from a backup I wanted fresh installations of all of them – easy enough for things like Firefox and Skype that […]
The German tech and politics conference re-publica has been going a decade now, and the tenth edition (in its third and final day today as I write this) is supposed to be about reflection. I’ve been to eight editions of re-publica – I was first a speaker back in 2009 […]
Danny Yadron in The Guardian today wrote a piece entitled “Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?” that, via a conversation with Mathieu, drove me to write this piece. For Yadron’s alludes to an issue that has not been afforded much attention during Twitter’s current woes – namely the very […]
Today Twitter turned its Favorite* function (with its star symbol) into a Heart – as the company explains here. This met with a lot of criticism from regular Twitter users, perplexed by the new function. Here are a few example tweets from Anne Roth, Armin Wolf and Patrick Jackson: These […]
So, having taken apart the behaviour of European Commissioners on Twitter earlier this week, the critique has poured in – most of it to me personally in private, and some of it on Twitter. In this blog entry I am going to examine each main avenue of the critique, piece […]