This summer I took part in a fantastic new project called Stories of our Lives. Over four Saturdays, the project teamed up volunteer writers with members of Chorlton Good Neighbours, a longstanding community group for older people in south Manchester. The mornings were spent talking and sharing memories, and in the afternoon the writers composed vignettes attempting to capture those memories. The project was fun, fascinating and a real challenge. On both days I was able to make it, I finished the morning thinking This will be easy! They’ve given me so much to work with!, and the afternoon wondering how in the world I was meant to capture so many memories in so few words, let alone with anything like the charm and wit of the original telling. The stories have been compiled into a book, which is being launched at 2pm on Saturday 14th December at Chorlton Library….
Blog
There are some things that it’s next to impossible to remember, like the fact that ‘separate’ only has two Es in, the fact that I don’t have milk in my tea, and which way round longitude and latitude are. At least, I find it so: I accidentally put milk in my own tea sometimes, and the other two are particular weaknesses of mine. Latitude-wise (whichever -wise that is, I can’t remember), the problem is that most mnemonics aren’t very good. They encode something like ‘north to south’ or ‘west to east’ – for example, ‘lat’ rhymes with ‘flat’, and we naturally think of lines from west to east as flat. But are we remembering the line along which latitude is constant, or the line along which it varies? I can never remember. For a mnemonic to work for someone as thickheaded as I can be, it has to indicate that…
Colemak UK layout for Windows
This is a super-boring post that I’m uploading solely for the benefit of people who might be Googling for this specific thing in the future. If you don’t know from the title that this might be useful to you then there’s no point reading further. I’ve put together a Windows Colemak layout for UK keyboards, available here so that other people don’t have to go through the faff of doing it themselves. This won’t remap caps lock to backspace; I recommend SharpKeys to do that easily. It does, however, set the shift key to turn caps lock off when pressed, so that if you somehow end up with caps lock on you don’t have to change layout to turn it off again. This layout is different to the one you get if you just use Microsoft’s custom layout tool, because it will update keyboard shortcuts too. This might be a…
‘In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which […] we cannot read?’ asks David Cameron. Well, yes. In the spirit of mild defiance, here’s my newly-created public PGP key, which you can use to send me emails David Cameron cannot read.
Alex Through the Looking Glass – Alex Bellos
I promise I don’t only read books that Katie gives me. ‘How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life’: you have to admire the attempt to make inevitable title for the sequel to Alex in Numberland make sense. A more pedantic author would have gone with Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alex Found There, but then again, a more pedantic author would probably have written a more tedious book. Personally, I would have gone with Do the Fucking Maths, but that’s tenuous even if you place the stress where you need to. Alex Through the Looking Glass seemed to be perfectly pitched for someone with my level of maths education. If this is intentional, it’s an absolute disaster. I got a good maths A-level without too much difficulty, but was sufficiently baffled by parts of my further maths course that I outright failed a paper and got an overall grade…
The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell
Not about the streets of London. The Knowledge attempts to summarize the essentials for ‘rebooting’ civilization after a global catastrophe. About three chapters into The Knowledge, I went to a picnic for science communicatiors and played a game of Kubb1 with the author that lasted so long it seemed entirely likely that civilization would have collapsed by the time we finished. Late in the third hour, despite some valiant cheating by Dr Dartnell, we lost. The whole experience rather took the edge off the book’s sense of scholarly authority. But it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it. Dartnell’s explanations are clear and succinct in that way that not only makes new material easy to understand, but makes reading about things you already know strangely enjoyable. And the premise – that this is a world-rebuilding manual for the survivors of a global catastrophe – is a compelling framework for the reader…
‘Dan and the Dead Boy’ in The Fiction Desk
My story ‘Dan and the Dead Boy’ is in the latest Fiction Desk anthology, There Was Once a Place, along with thirteen other new stories.
Will I get sued if I put ‘pho’ in this title?
My local Vietnamese resaurant has a brilliant name. It’s called Mo Pho. I’m not that into Vietnamese food, and while I’ve enjoyed every meal I’ve had there, I think their brilliant name has brought me more pleasure than their food. But it might not have that name for much longer, because piddling behemoth Pho thinks the world is too stupid to tell the difference between this little café and their Leeds-bound empire. I’m annoyed by this, but I can’t help but find it all quite funny, too. Pho’s real problem seems to be that, instead of thinking of a distinctive name, they have just named themselves after what they sell. They’re a pho shop, so they called themselves ‘Pho’, and now they’re upset that other people who sell pho have the nerve to put the word ‘pho’ in their names. Imagine a world where KFC had left ‘Kentucky’ out of…
iCaster: Turning iPlayer into podcasts
Wouldn’t it be nice if the huge number of radio programmes on the BBC iPlayer were also available as podcasts? Well, too bad. They’re not. You get the BBC’s arbitrary selection of their programmes, and that’s it.
I’m forever missing episodes or series or getting annoyed that I can’t reliably listen on my commute, so I decided to rustle something up to pull BBC radio programmes into my podcast app. I call it iCaster, because it seemed the obvious thing to call it.
A restraining order for @grauniad
My stupid Twitter bot, @grauniad, got its first complaints during the last couple of months. One of them expressed frustration that whoever was behind the account persisted in mangling the Guardian’s every tweet despite the result manifestly not being all that funny. This critic was under the impression that some poor fool was running the account by hand and was still incapable of coming up with anything amusing, a misunderstanding that I think is far funnier than anything the bot has ever tweeted.