Many people say what a great city London is. But it isn’t, and that makes my heart break because it could and should be. Those that live there seem to be desensitised to the harsh reality of the shocking juxtaposition of crime and poverty with opulence and indulgence. I have Read more…
Today is the day of the Big Climate Fightback, an initiative by the Woodland Trust to encourage as many people as possible around the UK to plant a tree to help fight climate change. A Channel 5 special on Thursday, hosted by Chris Packham, endeavoured to raise £150k—enough to plant Read more…
I’ve said before that a computer can never write a song because it has never experienced human emotions such as love and loss. But—and it’s a big but—that’s not to say a computer couldn’t generate music. More than a decade ago, Brian Eno released an iPhone app that could randomly Read more…
My search for the holy grail of text editors, the one app to rule them all, seems to be never-ending. The trouble is that I may be expecting too much from one piece of software—I want an attractive distraction-free editor with enough functionality to write blog posts and novels but Read more…
One of the great benefits of Ulysses is that it saves you from worrying about file names and locations. Everything is just saved automatically. It is magical and modern. But it is not perfect. From time to time you see horror stories on Twitter from people who have lost months Read more…
Being British, I have naturally used the British format for writing dates all my life. But once I started writing and blogging and keeping track of other date-based things in software such as Evernote and OneNote I began to notice a problem. I was creating a page-a-day file in Evernote Read more…
If you like to write in Editor-only full screen view in Ulysses you can have a very minimalist distraction-free writing environment. The trouble is you can have your flow regularly disrupted by having to reach for the mouse and hunt for things in menus. Thankfully, you can minimize that disruption Read more…
If you have read “The Picts and the Martyrs” by Arthur Ransome you will know what the Dog’s Home is. A little stone hut in the middle of a forest where Dick and Dorothea found themselves living for a while. Reading about it as a child made me verdant green Read more…
My new novel, The Planet Baggers, is now available for Kindle. If you are a fan of Douglas Adams or liked Red Dwarf then it could be right up your street! WARNING: contains lots of references to shoes and food replicators! Amazon http://my book.to/PlanetBaggers
If you want to be good at anything in life it pays to use the best tools and equipment you can get. The words “budget” and “value” should not be on your radar when it comes to choosing the tools of your trade. That is why I bought a MacBook Read more…