A few weeks ago, I received an email from Twitterfeed’s founder, a chap called Mario. In unnecessarily jolly prose, it announced the demise of the service which turned RSS feeds into Tweets and recommended moving to dlvr.it or Buffer. We’re writing to let you know that Twitterfeed wi …

This recent video by TheBreakingBit amused me. The incredible creativity that has gone into creating languages that ar, let’s face it, a little bit silly is staggering. A favourite effort of mine that is missing from this video is Damian Conway’s fabulous CPAN module Lingua::Romana::Pe …

I have a strange fascination for digging out old pieces of footage about the future. I don’t know why. Here is a particularly bleak version of how the future was to be, as foreseen in 1969 by BBC Tomorrow’s World presenter James Burke.A man in a business suit arrives at work. Wande …

I recently chanced across a truly wonderful talk by Guy Steele, one of the creators of the Scheme programming language. He gave the talk at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference, but it touches on some timeless themes in communicating with computers.The talk focusses on the need for us to build languages …

I have a thing about old clips non-technical folks talking about the intertubes. Witness, for example The Kids Guide to the Internet from 1997. Here is a great piece from the archives circa 1994. I love the idea that @ is the about symbol. And that you don’7 need a phone line to …

The other day on hackernews, this video was posted of Imperial college’s Bob Spence demonstrating the APL computer language. Some of what is being shown is all too familiar, though the analogue nature of the computer interaction is decidedly steampunk. Despite the steampunkiness of …

Snarkasm, aka @wendy_ferguson on Twitter suggested this telling video, which is a 1967 glimpse of the home office of the future.Cheesy lounge jazz and anachronistic gender politics aside —the husband will arrange the financing of the wife’s purchases — the content is rather …

My new favourite video is this historical document, circa 1997. An almost unbelievably straight, white bourgeois American family espouse the virtues of cyber surfing in virtual reality.Whilst the outfits and the tech are certainly amusingly anachronistic, what the film really reminded me …

Here is a collection of my favourite videos visualising sort algorithims in different ways. They range from the possibly quite useful, to the slightly trippy to the hilarious. Enjoy.Everything makes sense now, right?_H_Bubble Sort vs Quicksort with a …

I am not usually one for petitions, but I like the video that 350.org have made for their Climate Name Change campaign. It makes the point and takes the piss at the same time. Sure, it is a little US-centric, but replace Michelle Bachman with Nigel Lawson and … well, you get the idea. …