Categories
Rant

You Computer Geeks Are All The Same

‘You computer geeks are all the same’ my  girlfriend said. ‘You get really excited about things at the start, and then lose interest really quickly.’ I’d told her that you, Dear Alvin my coding coaching student, hadn’t completed your personal homepage website, and were now talking about another new thing, data science or something. ‘Mm, […]

Categories
Rant

The world of tech start-ups. A glorious shitshow.

London Tech Day is like London Tech Week, but shorter. Despite this it’s a pretty good day out. Billed as a day for start-up companies, the day to me represents everything that’s good and bad about the technology start-ups scene. A guy in a suit stood on stage and told us about his new company […]

Categories
Rant

Get rich slow & win at universal credit with tech

He is more likely to tell you your account pays ‘two parts of bugger-all’ than UK’s Money Saving Expert.[1] But Australia’s Barefoot Investor is a similar money guru, minus the shoes or tact. The UK’s Money Saving Expert on the other hand, pops up from time to time on the morning ITV telly couch, and […]

Categories
Rant

Choosing a software project

After buying my first flat (a London ‘flat’ is like a US apartment, but smaller, and more expensive) and frantically developing websites and apps for a failing (now failed) technology start-up company, I was made redundant. I suddenly had some free time to work on my own software project, buy some furniture, blog, and stop […]

Categories
Rantweb development

If you were to start React all over again what would you do? [NSFW]

If you were to start react all over again what would you do? This was a text sent to me by Alvin (not his real name) a software tester, wannabie junior software developer, who has studied the basics of coding including HTML, CSS and Javascript. If you don’t know what that sentence means, probably stop […]

Categories
E-learning

Computers For Good

Introducing the Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a deck of cards, cheap enough at £40 to give away to children and designed to help with teaching programming. I grew up playing around on a ZX Spectrum computer at home and a BBC Micro at school.  I remember programming the computers using the BASIC […]

Categories
Short Film

No Script Required

I just discovered that this short film I worked on has won the first round of a filmaka.com competition.  Instead of the usual working behind the scenes I was in front of the camera on this one. The story follows two brothers, and I was acting alongside my real-life brother Alec. We had a story […]

Categories
usability

Possibly The Worlds Most User Friendly DVD Menu

Working on a health education DVD project, armed with DVD Studio Pro, I set out to create possibly the worlds most user friendly DVD menu. DVD menus are often built to be flashy and innovative. Unfortunately this is usually at the expense of usability. DVD menus are inherently unresponsive because each menu must be loaded […]

Categories
Trailer

Christie Comedy Series Trailer (3 min)

In 2008 my brother entered an online film making competition and I helped out. We didn’t win, but we had a bloody good laugh making a series of comedy videos for the web. The trailer video I made along with the whole comedy series can be found on Fimaka.com. I edited this trailer for the […]

Categories
Behind the scenes

Making of Behind the Scenes Video

I filmed, edited, and directed the behind the scenes documentary for the Christie (2008) internet comedy video series (7mins). In 2008 my brother entered an online film making competition and I helped out. We did’t win, but we had a bloody good laugh making comedy videos. And one of our videos did win an award […]

Categories
Motion Graphics

Hop Wheels – 3D Animation (1 min)

This was a university computer 3D animation project back in 2001. The brief was to create a toy advert. I chose to spoof the Hot Wheels toy cars and create a toy car chase loosely influenced my the movie ‘The Italian Job’. The toy car chase takes place on a dining room table via household […]

Categories
usabilityWeb design

www.kayakproductions.com 2008 site

I web designed the www.kayakproductions.com website using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, HTML and CSS. (Update: this website from 2008 no longer exists.) In the process I make it more user friendly and google friendly. As a result it shot up the Google rankings and received a boost in visitors. The original site was in a strong red […]

Categories
E-learningusability

Multi Dance: A foot controlled video game to teach kids multiplication

I have a masters degree (MSc) in making computers user friendly. This is a video I made demonstrating my masters degree project (3 mins). The project was a video game called Multi Dance that teaches children multiplication tables. It was designed to be foot controlled using a dance mat. The idea was to use technology […]