Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

I received an email this weekend from Mike Jones, who I met at Barcamp London last year, informing me of a set of slides I should take a look at. The slides were from an @Media 2007 presentation given by Andy Clarke, the mastermind behind Stuffandnonsense.co.uk. @Media is one of the world’s foremost and well received web design conferences.

What was extremely fascinating about this presentation was that our Afrigator was mentioned and displayed on a massive projector in front of a packed conference venue. What he specifically said (15 minutes and 6 seconds into the presentation) when the Afrigator slide was displayed was “Is this sh%t important?“. Now if that isn’t enough to entice you to have a listen to the presentation, nothing will. (more…)

I’ve always been interested in trying out Flock, the “social web browser”. Up until now I haven’t though, so I thought it was time to head on over to the Flock website and download the latest version. I’d seen the website before and was very impressed with the simplicity of it, good use of typography coated in nice shades of blue.

To my shock and horror when returning to the site I was presented with this:

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I’ve been busy, as you may have noticed from the complete lack of posts. I’ve spent far too much time behind my laptop, probably getting more of a tan off the lcd rays than the sun outside. I am starting to think summer ain’t coming this year.

The only thing keeping me relatively sane is Lastfm, a social music community website. I’ve been using Lastfm for a while now, off and on though, never exploring its potential completely. Up until now I have found it’s usability a bit complicated. For a new user it is hard working out what is the difference between a playlist and a radio station, why you can only play 30 seconds of a song sometimes, yet the full song other times, and why you need to use the stand alone player as well as the website. (more…)

I’m hoping some photographer gurus read my blog and can advise me on what lens I should be looking for if I am after a tele lens for my Canon 350d under 250 pounds. I specifically want to use it for sports and wildlife photography (wildlife is something I very rarely see over here in London, apart from the occasional park deer, and garbage-eating fox, but something I want to cater for when i get back to South Africa) so I suppose it needs a quick focus speed and good image stabilisation (without having to pay huge amounts for the “IS” feature). I’m not that fussy on Canon, Tamron or Sigma, but I am pretty clueless when it comes to my little toy SLR camera, and value any comments. (more…)