that canadian girl

Today, we did a gingerbread house competition. In teams, we had to create the most traditional or wildest gingerbread houses. The only rule was that the gingerbread had to remain edible. Everything else was down to each team’s creativity, and we had since last week to think about the theme. Have a look at the [...]

This easy sewing project makes an adorable handmade gift for a new baby in the family.

Over the past year, I’ve been so busy working my butt off; here’s how I relax.

These were so awful that I had to save them for posterity. I’m not easily offended, I’m not a feminist in the least bit but I was truly bothered by these two t-shirt designs. Who in their right mind designed these and thought they’d be funny? The first seems to justify violent abuse and the [...]

Over the past few years, QR codes have been used in various places as replacements for website URLs or to promote products. It’s always felt a little bit naff or unnecessary. Watching TV tonight, BBC Food promoted a specific recipe by using a QR code on screen. A quick scan takes you directly to the [...]

Lately, I’ve been meeting tons of great owners of small businesses with fantastic ideas, boundless enthusiasm and passion for their work. What struck me was how poorly equipped they were, technologically speaking. From working with computers that only booted when they felt like it, printers that had to be coaxed into cooperating and accounting still [...]

Last night, I gave a talk at Cambridge Mobile Apps Group (yeah, it’s a mouthful, I know!) about marketing your own app with no budget. When I arrived at the venue, Tony, the event host, shot over to say hi. With a slightly concerned look on his face, he told me that the room our [...]

In recent months, we’ve printed the Alfred logo on stickers, handy little keyboard brushes and we’ve made our own bowler hats to wear at SXSW Interactive in March. Yet, I think this trumps them all; Alfred user and good friend Zettt created a giant bowler hat in Minecraft and shows it off on video. Even [...]

A few days ago, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to you and I) had a catastrophic failure. The world kept turning, but unfortunately, the third-party collaboration/SVN tool we use was on the affected East USA zone where the issue started on Thursday. It wasn’t until late Sunday night that we regained access to our [...]

So far, 2011 has been hair-raisingly exciting, a bit daunting but a lot of fun. And next week promises to be yet another of those weeks. Like I’ve done for the past three years, I’m going to SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. The biggest twist this year is that I’m not travelling alone, but taking [...]