Tim Dobson

Reflection #1 on Byron Review

14 April 2009

Parents are worried their children will not be able to tell the difference between Reality and Virtual Reality (in a game or online). – Byron Review In actual fact, the children grow up knowing the different expectation in social behaviour for the two different environments where as the parents never have. —Tim Dobson – a […]

Cheating and Collaboration

22 March 2009

"Games teach that failure is not bad, and collaboration is not cheating – the opposite of what is taught in school." — Alice Taylor

Serial Entrepreneurs

11 February 2009

"All entrepreneurs are serial. Otherwise you stopped being an entrepreneur and now just have a job. Or are a millionaire." — John Leach

HOWTO help children imagine they are at home *OR* HOWTO setup a home computer like they are at school (for adults)

3 December 2008

I recently spotted a message to the BECTA Safetynet Mailing list from Miles Berry and Terry Freedman. The message mentioned how they are doing a presentation at BETTS conference in January (apparently some big education conference thingy!) and since they are doing it on What are your kids learning when you're not looking? where they […]

Real World DRM

15 July 2008

Ben Griffiths wrote to the Open Rights Group discussion mailing list a few weeks ago: I want to share a DRM story. I was in Curry's in Plymouth a couple of weeks ago. A man was arguing loudly with one of the staff, his ten-year old daughter in tears at his side. From what I […]

I got drawn!

3 June 2008

I have been spending time recently on the #teenlug IRC channel talking to various interesting people, some of whom, I was slightly surprised to find, were from relatively close to where I live. One of the people there, LeesyKate by nick, offered to draw a picture of me using the GNU Image Manipulation Program and […]

How to write a really simple IRC bot

6 May 2008

Noah Slater of semtard vapourware fame recently demonstrated to me how to write and extremely simple IRC bot in shell scripting. The bot below is extremely simple, it simply identifies itself, joins a channel then sends a message to a channel. If you are interested in using IRC bots, you may enjoy Phenny, which has […]

David Cameron champions "Open Source Software"

3 May 2008

David Cameron, the UK Conservative party leader, has stepped in to champion Open Source Software. As an active member of Manchester Free Software Group I would prefer he used the term Free Software instead of Open Source, however it is extremely interesting he has taken this issue to heart. With Labour having only made a […]

397 A4 pages later…

22 July 2007

So after telling myself I wouldn't even bother looking at Ms Rowling's latest novel, I completed it this afternoon, less than 18 hours after I acquired it, though prior to that I had read the first chapter, before coming to the conclusion that I might as well read the rest of the damn book, though […]

Shooglenifty

11 June 2007

Shooglenifty are a rocking Edinburgh based celtic fusion/hypnofolkadelia/acid croft band. Last year at Towersey folk festival I saw them live – they were awesome; people were crowd surfing; you just couldn't stop dancing. This band is probably the most energetic band I have ever seen as well as the one who can make the most […]

Why I wrote this Site

30 March 2007

Many people I know, now have piczo sites which, despite the fact that some find them wonderful, with millions of animated flashing “graphix”, I hate them because: The “graphix” slow my computer down (look at you CPU % on task manger when you are on one) so I can’t do anything else at the same […]

CMS upgraded!

3 March 2007

Fantastic! This website has been online what? less than four days and already I’m learning how to upgrade it – in theory the security has been compromised As reported here on Slashdot, From Slashdot: “The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software WordPress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to […]