I have just bought a new Media Center PC to connect to my TV and amp. It has been a major headache trying to set it up the way I want so I though (after finally getting it to work) that I would impart some advice. My Setup TV – LG 42LH7000 Surround System – [...]

This post is about using TimThumb to create an on-the-fly, greyscale image thumbnail of the first image in a post and use jQuery to fade in a colour version on top creating a nice effect. Let me also say that this is not in-depth and is not for beginners as I’m not going to walk [...]

While reading an article today in my feed reader (which still says I have over 1000 — great) I saw someone displaying their mouse movements over the course of a day. I had seen these before but something was different with this one as instead of a traditional heat-map over a browser, this showed it [...]

My main concern with any kind of legislation regarding internet monitoring and privacy issues is that they are decided without full understanding of the technologies and people involved. There is simply not enough debate about it. The fact that this has been rushed through the troubles me greatly but is not at all surprising regardless [...]

For those of you who don’t know what Avatar is, have you been living under a rock? …at the bottom of the ocean? …on another planet? Avatar is the latest (and apparently greatest) film directed by James Cameron. You may remember him from such other great films as Titanic, Alien and Terminator. Currently he has [...]

Recently I had a bad experience with Virgin Media when I moved out of my last house. There was some fine print that meant when I upgraded my broadband, they actually just started a new 12 month contract (even though I’d been with them for 2 years). They then sent me a bill for the [...]

Recently there has been a lot of press about new standards coming in across all aspects of the web. HTML5 and CSS3 offering us many new features and some not-so new ones but making them standards to which everone can adhere to (I’m taking to you Microsoft).This coupled with the recent release of Safari 4 [...]

Recently I have been taking a course provided by the W3C on mobile best practices designed to give the participant the best ways in which to design for mobile. Topics covered are things such as graceful enhancement and graceful failure, designing specifically to allow access on various mobile browsers and adding enhancements to the site [...]

“Yeah I’m a web designer” That response to a question about your chosen career path used to lead people to think that you live in your parent’s basement, wore square glasses taped together, wore your trousers too high, were bad with girls and were generally a massive nerd. Oh how times have changed (for some). [...]

I have been looking at lot recently at portfolio designs and ‘creative’ websites and wondered whether I should be trying to compete with them. Compilations such as ’30 Fresh and Inspirational Portfolios With A Twist’ from Smashing Magazine are fantastic as portfolio pieces and happen to be portfolios which seems to be a perfect combination. [...]

During my final project ‘Webit’ at Ravensbourne I learned the difficulty and value of adequately presenting ideas in a way that is easy to understand for the masses. The initial  presentation idea was to have a super-real representation in a real-world scenario and show how Webit would be used. Sounds perfect until I tried to [...]

Today is the final day of preparation for the New Designers exhibition tomorrow. This includes finishing the website http://raveinteraction.com and picking up the trump cards. That’s right, we have trump cards. The theme of the show for Ravensbourne Interaction is ping pong. We have a ping pong table, 600 ping pong balls, 15 paddles, 1000 [...]

With New Designers coming up rapidly there has been much fretting about who is doing what and who is designing what. With myself and a few others being on an internship at Samsung it has proved hard to keep things consistent. After much arguing through many emails I have decided to defer my vote to [...]