All posts of Ian

Hacking stuff – MAKE: magazine

I’d been futilely waiting to see one of these in Borders, then stumbled across a link on Amazon. I knew that Tim O’Reilly (founder of the insanely good O’Reilly computer-manual empire) had wanted to make a magazine aimed at techno-tinkerers and hackers and I really wanted a look. Seeing as it was only £6 at […]

Paul Graham – two new articles

Paul Graham has written a couple of new high-tech entrepreneur articles: Ideas for Startups and What I Did this Summer. The first is about ‘how to have an entrepreneurial idea’ and the second about their first year running their newly formed young-persons incubator fund (this year they had 18-28 year olds involved). The ‘Y Combinator’ […]

Entrepreneuring and Serenity

Wow, now it’s been a full month since I last posted. Time flies when you’re busy. I’m glad to say that I’ve finished the Government (DTI) entrepreneurship grant that I’ve been working on since April – and not only did the DTI like the report, they’ve also paid promptly. I’ll say more on that later, […]

Brighton Bloggers

I’ve made it onto the Brighton Bloggers site, and I’ve no idea how. Anyone want to own up to submitting me? The tag-lines for the two entries around me read “Diary of a booze hound” and “Therapy is expensive. Blogging is cheap. You do the math.”. Am I the only entrepreneurial geek in the village? […]

Etsy Time-machine

Etsy have come up with a cool toy – more fun to play with than useful though. The timemachine plays an interactive Flash animation of the most recent additions of hand-made goods on the site by its independent sellers. The items fly past from most to least recently added, like you’re flying through a cloud […]

Review: The Island

Hmmm, John had warned me that it was going to be a long film. Clones grown for body parts, a Ewan McGregor (Lincoln Six Echo) with a really bad American accent and a film that was about twice as long as necessary. After about an hour when our good-boy clone Lincoln Six Echo has escaped […]

Site was broken, now fixed

Apologies for the site going a bit wonky over the last few days – all is good again. I bought a bigger hosting package from GoDaddy and in the process they disabled the ‘mod_rewrite’ rule for some reason. This stopped comments, permalinks, categories and posts from working. All is now fixed, sorry for the interruption […]

Review: Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)

Paul Graham has been writing online since before 2000, today he has 45 articles published for free online. New articles now make Slashdot‘s frontpage, quite a big event in geek circles. He published this book last year and it contains 15 chapters, 10 of which are online and 5 of which are new (and probably […]

Two cool businesses

The Business Experiment is rather novel. Take a distributed bunch of people communicating through an internet site, assume that they’re all reasonably intelligent but not necessarily skilled in any one business disciple, assume The Wisdom of Crowds and see if anything coherent comes out. Boot-strapped and open to volunteers. I like. I wouldn’t throw any […]

A dating site that rocks

OkCupid – well, I’ve only just joined so I don’t know if it really rocks – but first impressions are good. First off – you don’t pay – they’ve got a slightly less cynical business model in mind. Second – you develop an online profile based on user-submitted questions – so nothing is predetermined. It […]