There's a football manager game I got for my birthday when I was nine years old: FIFA Soccer Manager 97. I spent countless hours playing it as a child, trying to win the league, the cup or just avoid getting the sack! Two years later I got a newer manager game with better graphics and more...
Last Summer I wrote about building my own static site generator called Beemo. I went on to use it as the generator for a few other websites I manage, and made a few enhancements along the way. Beemo Recently I had the idea to use lars (a web server log analyser written by Dave Jones) as the...
I have a habit of revamping my website every few years. Since starting on Blogger some ... 19 years ago I've moved between platforms and redesigned the layout several times over. This time I decided to go for a static site build, which means not requiring managing WordPress plugins and updates, or...
For the last few months in BBC News Labs, I've been working on various projects involving extracting metadata from running orders for BBC programmes such as Newsnight and the R4 Today programme. Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol for communications between newsroom...
There's much more to managing a project with git beyond just committing code and working with branches. GitHub-Driven Development is a process that will help you organize and manage the progression of a project on GitHub, although much of this could be applied to other systems, such as GitLab, as...
I recently attended All Things Open, an open-source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, run by Red Hat. I was invited by my friends at opensource.com – and it was a great opportunity to meet the team and some of the moderators, columnists and contributors. #ATO2016 pic.twitter.com/Tdk8wqzWcB —...
I was sad to hear the news of the death of Ronnie Corbett. I've always been a huge fan of The Two Ronnies and much of the other work the duo had done both together and individually. Within moments of the news breaking, tributes such as photographs of four candles and fork handles, and links to...
I contributed to the 2015 Open Source Yearbook, created by opensource.com, which you can download as a PDF or view the individual articles online. It comprises: 6 creative ways to use ownCloud – by Jos Poortvliet, ownCloud community manager 10 tools for visual effects in Linux with ...
For about the last 3 years, the de-facto method of accessing physical components via the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins has been a Python library called RPi.GPIO, created by Ben Croston, who originally built it to control his beer brewing process. Despite its humble beginnings in a personal hobby...
I now have a monthly column on opensource.com – a brilliant website for all things open source. I'll be writing articles about Raspberry Pi – particularly its use in education. My first piece was published last week, covering the Astro Pi competition – we're sending two Raspberry Pis to the...
Last December I started my job at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and this time last year, having just completed my first month, I wrote my review of 2013 and all the events which led up to that move. Here is a round-up of all that's happened since then. Talks & Conferences This year I gave my first...
This year I've learned lots, run events, helped mentor young people, contributed to open source, engaged in much community activity, made and developed some strong friendships and built myself a new career. OH Digital I began this year working as a web developer at OH Digital, having started there...
Last month I attended the Manchester Girl Geeks Barcamp – affectionately known as bracamp. I did a talk on Free Software Culture, covering the varying definitions of "free" (libre/gratis), the principles of free and open source, why people do it, how development is managed and demonstrated use...
Two weeks ago I received my new HTC Magic smartphone - it's powered by Google's open-source operating system, Android. This means the source code for the system the phone runs on is freely available to download, which means any developer can write their own applications and tweaks for Android...
