There’s been a quotation making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook since the announcement last night of bin Laden’s death, though it’s been misattributed to Mark Twain and misquoted to boot: the real quotation, by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, is (with the line before it that improves it) “All men have an emotion to kill; [...]
I was thinking today that not much about the technology giants has changed. If we look at say, February 2009, Twitter was this ‘microblogging’ service that only a small number of people used that the wider population didn’t really ‘get’. Facebook was growing steadily but a lot of people had privacy concerns Gmail was the [...]
Last Saturday I went along the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition and was once again impressed by the scope and individuality of all the projects at the exhibition. One that particularly caught my eye was this one by James Eggers, measuring the mood of Twitter: My name is James Eggers, Iʼm an Irish student [...]
A while ago I waxed lyrical about GoodReads. I’m having to revise my opinion. On such websites, it’s often quoted that the wisdom of crowds comes into reviews. If a book has 198,973 ratings on a 1-to-5 scale, well it must be pretty accurately rated, right? True, but somewhat irrelevant, because when you read a [...]
Learnt this trick from the ThisIsMoney blog — how to see where your Euro note is from. On the back, the serial number -and specifically the first letter of that serial number- will tell you where the note is from. I have a German fiver in my wallet. So, where’s your note from? Germany – [...]
What seems like a fairly innocuous and simple question has a long answer which is often hard to articulate. It’s one that I get asked a lot, in school or at events and so on. To be better at articulating my views and improve my writing. To share news (the original reason Trust Tommy was [...]
I wrote the article about Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes last weekend, and didn’t know that he’d be named TIME’s person of the year this week. TIME has a great article on Zuck at that link, and they’re spot on later in the piece:- He approaches conversation as a way of exchanging data as rapidly [...]
Later Edit, 3pm GMT — Wow, TIME name Zuckerberg as Person of the Year 2010 Creator of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes, talking about Facebook, the new movie, new announcements and also, the Winklevoss lawsuit. Unlike the movie, CBS were very conscious that their audience were not tech enthusiasts (a nice [...]
There seems to be some confusion over what a ‘PC’ is when people talk about them. I’ve seen tech articles that read “Should I Get a Mac or a PC” or “Pros and Cons of Laptops Versus PCs” A ‘PC’ is a Personal Computer defined as “a small digital computer based on a microprocessor and [...]
I was is Barnes and Noble yesterday looking in the tech section looking for a good tech magazine. They didn’t have one, so I ended up buying WIRED (which I don’t really like after their sensationalist “The Web is Dead” article). It got me thinking that there aren’t many good tech magazines out there and [...]