In a world where everything is owned by a gargantuan commercial entity, RSS is subversive, an act of rebellion. It harks back to the early days of the Internet where freedom and open standards were the future, rather than Big Data, Big Tech, and Big Lock-in.

RSS is a newsfeed than you define. You subscribe to websites and they give you a list of stories to read. How is that different from social media?

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.

I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Many people in the computer industry don’t understand how we got here. Well, maybe not here. Due to the passage of time, it would be how we got to the mid-nineties.

This book [affiliate link] does not pretend to be objective or complete, but talks about both the technology and the people that got us from the invention of transistors to Windows PC. What I love about it is that it focuses on the people rather than the technology, yet still manages to put the technology into perspective. The writing is also very chatty and full of character. So much tech history is stodgy or dull or inaccurate. Empires is none of those things.

My wife mocks me for watching SWAT. Sadly with some justification. It is kind of silly. The main character is supposed to be a heart-throb but – I dunno – I don’t quite see it.

If you’ve not seen it, it’s a police procedural set in the SWAT team of the LAPD. In each episode there’s some disaster or crime that’s being committed that needs the efforts of our heros to resolve. Standard stuff.

Expectations were low. No new hardware they said. New software they said. And yet, even with expectations so low, they failed.

What did we get? In short, nothing that we’ve not already seen from Google or Amazon or Microsoft. Sure, they did it with a bit of flair but, as we know, marketing is all that Apple are about these days. As Schiller said only three years ago, “[Apple] can’t innovate anymore.”

I made the mistake of suggesting that there was a blog to be made from this tweet. This is that post.

People still underestimate the value in (Developer|Operator) Experience when building platforms and honestly it’s kinda shocking to me.

If you want to win mindshare you need to make your tools actually usable. If you don’t want to lose it you need the same.

First: I agree with the sentiment. Maybe not to the same extent as Danielle, but I fight the same battles in my day job. I wanted to say this now because, on reading the rest, you may think the opposite. What follows is an explanation of why this is a common situation. I don’t mean it as a justification.

While I have more than enough books on my “to read” list, I am always up for suggestions. “Code” [affiliate link] came up in a Twitter conversations about computer hardware. I noted that one of my favourite courses from my Computer Science degree (in hindsight if not at the time) was where we went from “What is electricity?” right up to a pretty much fully working CPU. “Code” was recommended as it covers the same ground.

When people say that Twitter is a cesspool of conspiracy and abuse, I don’t recognise it based on my experience. My Twitter timeline is all jokes and geeky chat¹, and that’s where this post takes its cue:

When I started learning assembler, no site ever mentioned what registers were good for. Wish it had said:

CPU talking to a RAM chip is slow, registers are a bit of memory built into the CPU in which you load numbers from RAM, do several calculations, and only THEN write back.

I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking. In about 2005 I bought an iSight, Apple’s relatively short-lived external webcam. It was a beautiful device. Sleek, easy to use and functional.

At least, I think it was functional.

For a device that cost me well over £100 I didn’t really think it through. No one else I knew at the time had a Mac with iChat. Or a webcam.

Before I finally gave in and sold it on eBay I did use it a few times with my then girlfriend (now wife). And it was really nice; like the future. Having grown up with old, slow computers the idea of playing video on them is still slightly magical to me. To have a computer simultaneously record, compress, transmit, receive, decode and display high resolution videos still strikes me as pretty amazing.

I was recently asked to recommend a tablet. I thought my reply might be generally useful, so below is a lightly edited version of what I wrote.

The machine I’d recommend depends. It depends mostly on how much you want to pay and what it might used for. The good news is that, by and large, you get what you pay for. (Corollary: don’t get any of the really cheap ones. Argos, for example, do a really cheap one. Avoid it.)