Category Archives: Non-tech

Indonesian Tsunami Relief Effort

I’m not in Indonesia at the moment, but my thoughts are with those tens of thousands of people in Aceh and the rest of Sumatra island, coping with the aftereffects of the tsunami. For those of you wishing to make contributions to the relief effort, one organisation is worth considering: Radio 68H, a network of… Read More »

Building Social Quirks Into Design

At my Mum’s house, and my childhood home, we have this quirk in the kitchen where the dish washer door comes down and pretty much blocks the kitchen entrance. To a designer, or someone carrying a heavy tray past, this might seem like a flaw. I’ve realised it’s not, and that designers, if they’re not… Read More »

An Appeal For Help

Fans of Loose Wire may possibly recall a column I did a year or so ago, when I tried to match quaint English placenames with computer matters, assigning the names to things that didn’t yet have them. Here are a few: chettle (collective n) The debris, such as crumbs, dead insects and lint, that gets… Read More »

A Geek’s Lexicon

By Jeremy Wagstaff from the 1 May 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c)   2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. It’s unsurprising, given the kind of people who design and play with computers, but I’ve always felt there to be a chronic shortage of terms to describe what we actually do with our… Read More »