One Man's Notes

Fascinating how much cars date photos, even after “just” 15 years.


Big fan of the Extinction Rebellion art style.


Yikes. An RPG book I contributed to being offered for £115 on eBay!


I’m so dizzy, my head is spinning…

…because my daughters brought some horrible virus home for me.

This is a weird one. I am feeling very strange.


The guest WiFi at Twitter UK’s pretty good…


Thanks to my daughters, my iPad Smart Keyboard is looking particularly fabulous today…


Easter egg hunt 🐣


And here’s the final image of Adam, a sculpture at the Eden Project, shot back in Spring 2004.


Enjoying working in Pixelmator Photo to clean up some old negative scans:


There was a lot of construction work still happened at the Eden Project back in 2004. I loved these art plants that part screened the construction. Nice hard hat fruit.


Eden Project, 14th April 2004


Talented investigative journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead in Derry last night. I knew her, and was always in awe of her work. RIP, Lyra. And thank you.


Exciting times on the Woodland Trust Osprey Cam. Aila (the female) has been in the nest for most of the day. She’s there right now.


Facebook has finally banned a swathe of far-right hate groups, including the BNP, EDL and Britain First.

Not before time. Particularly glad to see Britain First on the list - they are very good at putting a respectable Facebook face on outright hate and racism.


The Wind in What's Left of the Willows…

Time for a #wilderfuture.

Yes, I am an old tree-hugger and proud.


The price of hedgehog influencers? Salmonella…


Facebook uploaded 1.5 million users' email contacts without permission. Just as well Facebook has behaved impeccably up until now, so we can give them the benefit of the doubt, isn’t it?

Oh, wait. Never mind.


This is a telling piece of reporting from the Irish Times. It’s clear that members of the ERG are starting to concoct conspiracy theories to deal with the cognitive dissonance between their emotional beliefs and the reality of the world.


Interesting that Facebook saw Apple News as a competitive issue:

”The company discussed setting up a new section on the app entirely for news and directed a team to quietly work on developing it; one of the team’s ambitions was to try to build a competitor to Apple News.”


Wow, this is a telling quote:

”But he brightened when he turned to one of the topics that, according to people close to him, truly engaged his imagination: using AI to keep humans from polluting Facebook.”


And there we are:

”To this emotional story, Facebook had a programmer’s rational response”


Engineers versus investigative journalists

From the WIRED piece everyone is talking about:

”Investigative journalists are like pit bulls. Kick them once and they’ll never trust you again.”

I suspect a team full of engineers was ill-equipped for dealing with this sort of journalist. They’re very different from the mainstream tech jouranlists.


I’m a journalist, and one deeply interested in the future of journalism, and its business models. And I balk at paying £250 a year for Tortoise.

So, who is their market likely to be?


The platforms are not the internet

John Naughton:

In reality, the problem we have is not the internet so much as those corporations that ride on it and allow some unacceptable activities to flourish on their platforms, activities that are damaging to users and, in some cases, to democracy, but from which the companies profit enormously.

Couldn’t agree more.


Good piece by James here, pointing out that Assange is a pretty horrible person - but that journalists should probably be defending him against the US charges. The same does not apply to the Swedish rape charges if they’re reopened.