Richard's blog

Airpods are the most comfortable bluetooth headphones I have tried. Over the winter months I tried earphones by Sony and other brands. After months of experimenting I came back to the airpods.  With the Sony WHR 1000 earpods there are a number of issues. The first is that noise cancelling changes noticeably. Several times I …

A popular refrain is that “the user is the product” when speaking of networks like Facebook and this refrain should not be valid. The user should be seen as the primary investor. We invest our time, we invest our social network and we invest our attention. We invest anything from minutes a day to hours …

Mewe is like all other social networks were in their early days. In the early days it’s all about building a community, it’s all about privacy and it’s all about putting the user above commercial interests. Several years down the line they often shift towards trying to survive and even thrive if possible. As I …

Last weekend I watched hours worth of slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I've had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when …

When we first joined Facebook it was filled with chronological timelines kept active by university friends. At that time algorithms did not affect what we saw or how frequently and there was a sense of community. In the last two or three weeks we have heard a lot about Cambridge Analytica and other companies because …

A few months ago, before the winter months came I was happilly flying the drone up to four times a day. At the time I was running their old app and it worked flawlessly. You turned on the remote, turned on the drone and then you connected to the wifi hotpot and within 30 seconds …

At the beginning of the year I said that I would prioritise book reading over Social Media because I feel that the disconnect between reader and audience has grown to such an extent that you benefit more from reading books than Facebook and Twitter Timelines.  Reading So far this year: Abandon : A book about …

Earlier this week Google decided that it would shift from subsidising narrowcasting content makers to favouring "broadcasters". This was demonstrated with their shift towards rewarding content creators with higher requirements. In order to be a youtube partner, you need people to have viewed 4000hrs worth of content and have over 1000 subscribers. A few years …