Author: Matt

  • Feeling Gassy: Keyspan Energy Website Pain

    Like most people, I’m a big fan of being able to quickly and easily manage my utility bills online and the good news is that now pretty much every major utility lets you do this. Where things get a little bit less happy is in the design and execution of these websites. Generally they seem…

  • Laser Graffiti

    Graffiti. The ‘scourge’ of modern society, and of my spell-checker. Well society need fear no more, with this amazing laser guided graffiti projector. Beautiful in its simplicity – you just point the project at a building, callibrate it and then ‘draw’ directly onto the building with your laser pointer. Genius. [Thanks to Boing Boing]

  • Web 2.0 Release Forms

    This month’s Radar magazine has an article about the ‘Prisoners of youTube‘ – all those poor folk who suddenly became famous because someone posted an embarassing video of them online. Since most of these clips are of the ‘Funniest Home Videos’ variety the people involved are generally pretty upset, since they had no idea they…

  • Social Flow

    I’ve been re-reading the excellent Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience again and I highly recommend you all do too. In it, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes his research into how people get into ‘flow’ states, that is states of enjoyable activity where you immerse yourself completely in what you are doing and stay deeply focussed.…

  • "Cannot delete folder" deleted

    Having done a bit of file re-org on my laptop I found myself stuck with a folder which, though empty, could not be deleted. Windows kept saying “Cannot delete folder” apparently “another person” was using it. After re-booting my machine the problem persisted, which is not a good sign as a reboot will normally kill…