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Year: 2012

  • Overheard: Unappreciated social

    Last week I was at a conference with a large number of national and international businesses. Following some breakout sessions I was standing behind three delegates from Phones for you in the lunch queue. It appeared they had been to a session about Social Media and were rather unimpressed with what they heard. Delegate one:…

  • I am Tom Steel

    I’ve recently built a new “home” page to link my online appearences together – this blog, my photo site, LinkedIn profile and twitter account. You can find it at iam.tomsteel.co.uk and there’s a link in the header of this blog. I’ve played about with a bit more CSS3 with text shadows and also used some media queries…

  • Silver mist shout out #MASO

    Here is a clip from Friday 26 October’s 6 Music breakfast show where Shaun Keavney reads out some middle aged shout outs. This one is for a trip to Horsham Market to see Great British Bake Off stars SarahJane Willis and Cathryn Dresser: Download mp3: 6Music MASO

  • There are no “regular results” on Google anymore.

    Google search results are always customised to some extent, a study by competing search engine ducksuckgo has reported. The study involved 131 volunteers conducting the same search from around the US and other countries and sending screenshots of their results. The users, who weren’t signed into Google, did Google searches for the three chosen politically-themed terms — “abortion,” “gun…

  • Pretend to be a pigeon and Smart Suitcases.

    Here’s two unrelated pieces of technology which caught my eye today.

  • Tour of Britain 2012

    The Olympics and Paralympics may have ended a few weeks ago, but that didn’t stop some world class sport from touring the country. The Tour of Britain ended yesterday, and I went to see stage eight pass through Cranleigh from Reigate to Guildford.

  • A bit of blurb about photobooks

    I was approached recently to review a book printing service by Blurb. I don’t normally write reviews on this blog, but when they offered to pay for me to print a book and weren’t interested in seeing my review before it was published, I was intrigued and the opportunity was too good to resist. I’ve…

  • Now using web fonts

    I  wish I’d tried using web fonts ages ago. I’ve just changed the site to use Rock Salt for the header and Open Sans for the rest of the text. If you’re building websites and not using web fonts, do it now. Just don’t add too many to your site or you’ll slow it right…

  • Alphabet flash cards

    I want to create an inspiring bedroom for my new daughter, and while at Whitechaple art gallery a few weeks ago I saw some nice looking alphabet flash cards for sale – “My favorite things” by San Francisco designer Lorena Siminovich – nice and big with clear print, good illustration and printed on a sturdy board – They’d look…

  • Apple, patents and ideas

    There’s been a lot of commentary about Samsung’s $1b bill for infringing Apple’s patents, and I’ve found the whole case rather depressing – the patent system seems to have been abused, with examples such as slide to unlock. But it’s the attitude behind the lawsuits that is perhaps most disappointing. In 1996 in a PBS documentary…