DHL couldn’t deliver pizza if it tried.

I’m fed up with home delivery for things I’ve bought online – why can’t it be more like buying a pizza. Time for a bit of a moan, methinks. Here’s how my local pizza shop works – I phone them up, they tell me how long until they can deliver it, then they deliver it. [...]

Understanding A-level results

I’ve been struggling to understand the A-level results, a provisional summary of which is published by the Joint Council of Qualifications. Naturally, it’s published in PDF format which is a very useful way of publishing data tables… That aside, I can’t see how from the data presented one can conclude that the results represent a [...]

A wifi commons

As I sit here, my laptop can see 7 wireless networks other than my own – I suspect many of them have, like mine, been secured. Here’s a question: what would happen if everyone with password-protected wifi in the UK reconfigured their routers so that up to 25% of their bandwidth was available unprotected to [...]

This feed will self-destruct in 5 seconds

Parcel tracking is a pain. When I buy something online, I’d like the last page in the purchasing process to give me an RSS feed to which I could subscribe to track the delivery – I find reading feeds much less intrusive than email these days. But I don’t want that feed hanging around in [...]