A while ago the Web was in the grip of robots. Take two of the classic web searches (no, not those two, this is a family blog) – consumer electronics and celebrities. I’d be searching for a USB powered keyboard warmer and the latest pictures of Brian Blessed, and all I’d get was a hundred [...]

Much to my relief and much like Pink, I’m not dead. Good day once more, UKFast blog fans. Voice over IP, or VOIP, is quickly gaining popularity. I have my ridiculous Captain Scarlet-style headset waiting at home, in order to talk to people half the world away about our respective brands of reality TV and [...]

An article on Slashdot about some graphics-pen based desktop software called ‘BumpTop’ started me thinking again about interface design (see ‘Welcome to Userville’). But then my thinking started to run ‘well I wrote that post about software design, better think of something else’. I had to think outside the box – literally. Because outside the [...]

So the ‘Google Generation’ (delightful, young people are once again defined by a multinational corporation) are all unabashed plagiarists. Stupid kids! Everybody knows the point of formal education is to learn how to conceal your sources correctly. From high within her ivory tower at Leeds Met University, plagiarism expert Professor Sally Brown is telling us [...]

What’s the best thing that Google’s ever done? Adwords, that’s pretty clever if you’re a businessy type. Analytics, that’s pretty cool if you’re a webmastery type. The search engine itself, that’s pretty fantastic if you’re any type at all (unless you’re in China). But all that stuff is secondary in my mind to Google’s towering [...]

I recently moved home and found myself without a toaster, without an ironing board, without a bookcase and – most irritatingly of all – without a net connection. How on earth would I survive? Reasonably easily, as it turned out. In fact for a while I got used to being netless, just like the protagonist [...]

It’s Friday, it’s sunny, and in between bouts of selectitis I’m writing the UKFast blog. What could be better? Now I realise that most of the time here, I’m either attacking or generally moaning about all sorts of technical things. Not today! Today I shall speak of some of the wonderfulness of modern computers. Good [...]

Books of academic criticism of a certain movement, whether literary, artistic or philosophical, always seem to start with the same introduction. Say you’re reading about abstract expressionism. The intro will say ‘first, what is abstract expressionism? It’s hard to define the movement in any definite way’. You will now feel a little annoyed that this [...]

The rise of the machines continues apace, and it behoves us, puny mortals that we are, to race into a mechanistic state to avoid being crushed under their metallic robo-feet. On a rare trip into the dragon’s den of R&D, June, our head of accounts, was talking to me of this syndrome of robotisation – [...]

This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings – ‘kiss goodbye to your summer’ cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB’s own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There’s a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can’t be bothered putting up an impenetrable, [...]