As a I was trawling through the statistics for this site, I noticed how popular my post about creating rounded corners with The Gimp is. I mean, I knew it was popular, it is the post with by far the most comments on this blog, but I did not know it outperformed other posts by … Read More

After predicting in 2004 (without naming names) that tools like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla might become popular CMSes … they did! In 2010 and 2014 I followed up with articles exploring which of these tools had become popular and how they described themselves over time respectively. Re-reading these articles makes me realise how quaint the … Read More

An interesting side-effect to the introduction of the GDPR, the latest EU privacy law, was that (for Europeans at least) several American websites improved. Instead of a dazzling and confusing cornucopia of banners and clickables, the sites of USA Today and NPR refocused on their stated goal, i.e. journalism. See here for two examples: and … Read More

The introduction of the European privacy act known as GDPR seems to have caused a flurry of work in the web development business, but oddly and unfortunately enough I seem to have been immune to this development. So I decided that I would go through the process of improving one of my own websites, just … Read More

(An Experiment and a Fantastically Boring Tale.) In 2011 I bought 50 pens in an attempt to stem the constant trickle of pen disappearances. Like matching socks, ballpoint pens have this obscure, almost life-like ability to get lost just when you need them, and this seemed to be a good reason to buy way more … Read More

Here is one for the books. This is a graph of the so-called ‘reach’ that my roller derby photography page has on Facebook. Reach means: how many people have been exposed to my photos. (In an earlier blog post I explained why I have a Facebook page in the first place.) Every dot represents the … Read More

The things you want to get better at you need to consume and you need to practice. Consumption of photography can be done, amongst a great number of other ways, through the consumption of photography magazines. Problem #1: when people say “photography magazines”, they mean “camera equipment magazines”. You know the type, left page is … Read More

I have two work computers in my home office—one a desktop PC and one laptop—and I thought it would be nice if both had access to the same set of files. Late 2016 I looked a little into setting up my own file server, but in the end I went to a store and bought … Read More