I know the above statement to be true, thanks to the chap sitting opposite me yesterday on a crowded train from Evesham to Paddington. For no justifiable reason I’d already taken a dislike to him. Then his mobile rang:
Chap opposite: Hello? Yeah… yeah… We’ve just passed through Slough. No friendly bombs, though. Yeah… yeah… I [...]

Kevin is creating a Lego Mindstorms machine. It starts with a pile of your CDs, a mechanical arm comes down and picks off the first one, drops it into your PC’s CD-ROM tray, the tray slides in, the CD is ripped into an MP3, the tray slides out, the arm picks up the CD, drops [...]

Thanks to Paul for the link to some beautiful contour maps. How long does it take to travel from Edinburgh by train? How long does it take to get into the centre of London? Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg of MySociety have produced visualisations of these, with the help of the Department for Transport. [...]

So you’ve arranged a special evening out at the theatre. And there you are watching the play, when out of the corner of your eye you spot a bright, distracting, light. You look across and there’s some guy in the row in front watching football on his laptop. And as you reach over to wallop [...]