Archive for January, 2006

Disused Underground Stations

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

While researching some links for my previous post I came across this Wikipedia entry about an abandoned tube station. I always thought disused Underground stations were a movie “myth”, but it turns out there are quite a few of them! [Wikipedia]

Londinium!

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

All the travelling I did last year gave me a new determination to explore more of my own country, and especially London as when you live in a place it is very easy to dismiss tourists and completely miss the reasons they have come to visit! Some fun things I have done recently: Premiership football […]

New Microsoft Office Interface

Wednesday, January 25th, 2006

Being a non-technical publication, the BBC News website has an insightful look (and live demos) at the new user interface in the forthcoming version of Microsoft Office. (The short version for the video-challenged amongst you is that the traditional menus are out, replaced with “ribbons” of buttons which appear to be context-sensitive toolbars.)

Examples of Bad Design: TfL ticket machines

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

There is hopefully a special part of hell reserved for those that inflict stupidly bad design decisions upon us. Take, for example, the decision by the makers of the machines that allow one to top up their oyster card to require the process to be terminated by the user presenting their card to the machine […]

Nokia v Sony-Ericsson

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

Nokia mobile telephones have a reputation for being the best on the market, but for a long time they didn’t produce a phone with all the features (tri-band, bluetooth and GPRS) that I required and so I had bought (Sony-)Ericsson phones. Recently I noticed that the Nokia 6230 does have all these features and given […]

I think this merits a new version number

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

There’s been a lot of headlines about Web 2.0 recently, and at least one person has asked me: “What does all this 2.0 stuff mean exactly?”. With the dot com “bust” still a recent memory, a lot of people have proclaimed it more Internet-hype—and there is no denying the 2.0 moniker is pure marketing—but if […]

Digital Radio

Sunday, January 8th, 2006

The January Sales are a wonderful thing: yesterday I picked up a Ferguson R116D DAB digital radio for half price at Dixons. I’ve been considering a digital radio for a some time. Some people claim the quality is lower than FM and punters would be better off listening via the Internet, or using a Freeview […]