For years, I said that one day, when I could, I’d buy the camera that played such a big part in my early career. After 35 years or so, this Sinar P2 5x4” camera is finally mine.

With Christmas and New Year just around the corner, this is my final post of 2024. It’s been an interesting—but certainly not the best—year.

I’ve always thought of myself as coming from Irish roots. I never questioned it. My family are Doyles. Doyles were Irish. So, my roots were in Ireland. Except they’re not.

The General Election might be over, but Count Binface hasn’t abandoned us earthlings. Instead, he’s embarking on a comedy tour and this week invaded Sky News’ Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge.

A few weeks ago, BBC Question Time’s Fiona Bruce announced the programme was coming to nearby Chester, so I filled in the online form and applied to be in the audience. I completely forgot about applying until a researcher phoned me the day before the show and asked if I were still available. I was.

I don’t remember exactly when—but it was around 20 years ago— Back in 2005, * Rob Weychert turned his (and our) pal Jason Santa Maria into a talking head of Jason’s alter-ego, Virtual Stan. Stan had a backstory, which I don’t fully remember, plus a robot pal called Zorthron.

I’ve been a paying member of YesCymru for the past year, because I believe that Wales would have a better future as an independent nation. At the very least, people who live in Wales deserve a vote on independence. I have thoughts about the YesCymru message and how they can make a better case for independence.

Rooting around in boxes in our storage unit, I came across the Nintendo Game Boy I bought new in 1990. The plastic covering the green LCD was missing, but it was otherwise intact. The box even contained a few game cartridges. I popped it in my pocket and took it home.

Maybe, calling my open source web designer and developer contract a “Killer” wasn’t such a smart idea?

“I’ve got an idea,” I said as Sue and I sat on beach outside Perth in Western Australia. “Why don’t we move to Australia for a couple of years? We love it here and it would be an adventure.”

One of the reasons for my redesigning this website was to make it more appropriate for the work I’ve been making most recently, but also as an opportunity for it to better reflect me as a person. A big part of that was the writing that I did in what I think of as my blogging ‘heyday.’

When illustrator Josh Cleland and I were designing our “It’s the taste” home page header, we were of course paying homage to the classic PG Tips TV commercials from the 1970s. In particular, the ad that’s been my favourite, Mr. Shifter. Yesterday, Choppers, the last surviving chimpanzee from that 1971 commercial died.

Sue and I were driving home last Sunday when I realised that on Tuesday this week we would’ve seen Motörhead live at the Manchester Apollo.

This week at Smashing Conference in New York, I had the very great pleasure of meeting Chris Lilley. I recognised Chris’ name, but it took me a day to remember that he had been the chairman of the ‘Style and Formatting Properties Working Group’ at the W3C, a precursor to the CSS Working Group. Chris is a hugely important person in the history of the web.

Marc Thiele’s started posting videos from his excellent Beyond Tellerrand event in Berlin last month.

I’m researching advertising successes for a new talk that I’m writing and of course that means PG Tips and their famous chimpanzees campaign that ran for 32 years from 1956 and within two years made PG the number one tea brand in Britain and kept them there for decades.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. Something tells me that Jeremy will approve of this.

After talking with Laura on Unfinished Business this week, about burgers in donuts, we moved on to discuss the Geek Mental Help Week that I’ve been thinking about and planning for the last few months. Something that I sincerely hope will help those of us who suffer from mental health issues and the others who support us.

Jeremy pointed me to this. I supppose he likes it because it fits his dislike of advertising. I like it because it fit my dislike of awards.

Like, I guess, everyone else, I now know more about ALS than I did before the Ice Bucket Challenge. The campaign has been hugely successful, has raised awareness and ten times more money than was raised last year to help combat the disease. Of course charity didn’t start and doesn’t end with the Ice Bucket Challenge and so my friend Paul Boag challenged me, Rachel Andrew and Carl Smith to:

My blog is ten years old today. Of course Stuff and Nonsense as a company is older than that by a few years, but today, ten years ago, on May 13 th *, I rolled out the welcome mat on the new site.

I’m putting my stake in the ground. If and when Apple releases what all the pundits keep calling an ‘iWatch,’ the tagline on their invitation to the press event will read: It’s about time.

A fascinating story in Texas Monthly—not a publication that I often read— about the court battle between the University of Texas and actor Ryan O’Neal over an Andy Warhol painting of Farrah Fawcett. Farrah and O’Neal were the Brangelina of their day—the glamorous Hollywood king and queen whose every move was captured by the tabloids. One of their fans was Andy Warhol, who became obsessed with the couple. He gave them a drawing on a tablecloth of two hearts coming together, and in 1980 he painted two nearly identical silk-screen portraits of Farrah, in which she stares intently, her red lips pressed together, her eyes bright green, and her hair brushed behind one shoulder. One painting went to O’Neal’s Malibu beach house, the other to Farrah’s home in the hills above Bel-Air.

In celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA two years ago, and in memory of one of its leaders, Aaron Swartz, we are planning a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.

One of the things I was talking to Liz about this week on Unfinished Business—you know, the ‘ Net Awards Podcast Of The Year’nominated podcast— was how at Stuff and Nonsense, we devote twelve days every year to supporting good causes pro-bono.

I’m not sure how I forgot to link to this last week, but our phone rang and I spoke to BBC technology reporter Dave Lee about Easter Eggs. Not the chocolate kind, but the much less tasty and much less interesting hidden delights in websites.

Last November I switched from a 13" MacBook Air to the equivalent MacBook Pro with a retina display. How does that feel?

It’s once again that time of year when almost every web designer, developer, podcaster and bottle washer that you follow on Twitter is asking you to vote for them in the annual Net Awards. Well, if you can’t beat’em, join’em.

I won’t blame you if you didn’t read it, but a couple of Septembers ago I wrote something personal about my name, how it made me feel, why I changed it and then regretted it ever since. You can read it now if you like, but the general gist is that being called Andrew when I was young reminded me of something I was missing and that made me terribly sad. So I asked everyone to call me Andy instead, and they did that for the next thirty-five years.

Talking with Dan on this week’s Unfinished Business got me thinking about photography and workshops and wanting to learn to make better photographs.

The Official Movie site for Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes has launched and, chattering chimpanzees, is it a piece of work! As if I weren’t excited enough about the film. It’s not released until July 2014 but the site gives fans a taste of what’s happened since the end of Rise.

Yep. Number forty-one of one-hundred. To be honest, when I was told about being part of the Drum Digerati list I wasn’t at all happy about it.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Alex’s friend Brad Frost and I talked about designing in the open, pro-bono projects for great causes like the Pittsburg Food Bank and the open project he and Melissa are starting for them.

I’ve lived with the new video feature in Instagram for about a week and while I was originally sceptical about whether video and Instagram would be a good match, I thought it best to wait a while before forming an expressing an opinion.

And here’s what happened:

Cute. Very cute.

A really fun site by David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams.

I like to think that at Stuff and Nonsense, our house isn’t so much a place to work as it is a house of fun and although we take the work we do very seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously at all. We hope that sense of fun comes across on our site and today we’re putting aside our embarrassment, putting on our baggy trousers and unveiling a new header on our home page.

Endless possibilities for mischief.

We know that it’s only web designers who habitually resize a browser window to see if a site’s responsive. But why not reward their dedication with a little something special? Add this to your stylesheet: @media only screen and (min-width: 960px) and (max-width: 970px) { body { -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); -o-transform: rotate(180deg); transform: rotate(180deg); } } This could be the most essential CSS3 media query you’ll need today.

How excited am I?

I can remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. It was 1983 and on my way to art foundation one day, I stopped my car at Kettering railway station and bought a packet of ten Benson & Hedges and a box of Swan matches. I pulled on the cellophane band, tore off the top and flipped open the golden box. I’ll never forget the smell of tobacco that rises from a freshly opened pack or the bitter smell of a match. I slipped a cigarette between my lips, struck a match and lit it.

Microsoft launches Windows 8 in just a few days, so now’s a good time to turn our attention to Internet Explorer 10. Here are two links to help you get prepared:

Here’s something personal I wrote for the Pastry Box Project today:

Remember “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE? Of course you do. Well now, thanks to renowned Liverpool historian Ken Pye, I’ve finally seen a photograph of Micky:

Before she died at the fantastic age of 98, my Nana gave me her boxes of family photographs. She knew I value family histories and would keep her things safe. I’m in the process of organising them and in one box I found a tourism brochure from Liverpool from around 1938/39. In it, an advertisement, for Liverpool Zoological Park caught my interest. In particular, “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE.

More about Micky the world’s cleverest chimpanzee. I’ve ed several parts:

I doubt it’ll come as much of a surprise to learn that I love my iPhone 4S. It was a major upgrade from the 3G I swapped my original iPhone for last September, but I’ve been less impressed with its battery life. Now I think I’ve found the culprit. Foursquare

The end of this week sees web design masterminds, mobsters and even petty criminals heading to Austin for SXSW. It’s like Parkhurst for design geeks.

I am the one, orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand My image is of agony, my servants rape the land Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law My name is…

So Web Directions North has wrapped and tomorrow we head to the mountains for a spot of cold weather sports activity (or probably in my case, my lips around a nice hot chocolate). But first, other news.

The end of this next month should see me taking the longest flight of my life; from London to Sydney for Web Directions, then on to Spain for Fundamentos Web. Two conferences, a world apart.

Early one mornin’ while makin’ the rounds I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down I went right home and I went to bed I stuck that lovin’.44 beneath my head Got up next mornin’ and I grabbed that gun Took a shot of cocaine and away I run Made a good…

Even after only the briefest of spells travelling in the USA this year, I became accustomed to those creature comforts that make a travelling designer’s life so much easier.

Driving around Engerlaaand, it’s hard to miss the flags of Saint George flying from buildings and cars. Every second person is sporting a replica shirt and petrol stations are doing a roaring trade in everything from Ferdinand fragrance air-fresheners to…

It’s time to tell the remaining untold stories from Arno Zimmerman. Unfortunately not all of Arno’s attempts at domain name acquisition were successful, but thanks to everyone concerned for being great fun to play with.

In today’s Arno Zimmerman episode, Paul Scrivens hones in on the money in’The Nine Rules’. Of all Arno’s contacts, Paul was the only person to name a figure. Arno would have been pleased to pay it too, if only life were so simple.

With awareness of standards and accessibility being raised by groups such as WaSP, companies and organisations across many sectors have adopted standards. Sometimes their decision to do so might have been commercial, other times out of a need to comply.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been acquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

In the news this week, three times winner of the Tour De France and occassional web designer Jeffrey Veen announced that MeasureMap has been aquired by Yahoo, AltaVista, Starbucks, Google.

Explaining about the difference in northern British accents, a conversation metaphorically headed up the M6 motorway, through the inevitable roadworks to Manchester.

It was announced yesterday that one of the most influential artists of the British 1960’s art movement, Patrick Caulfied, died on Thursday.

I love my Nano, I want to keep it close, keep it safe. My Nano is so precious, I can’t bear to think of it getting scratched.

I’m sorry to all my overseas friends (and possibly those of you under 30) who probably won’t have the faintest clue what I’m talking about, but the BBC Doctor Who web site last week announced the return of the Doctor’s once faithful dog, K9.

Travelling around the London Underground, it is difficult not to notice a series of posters for the British Legion’s Victory Thanks campaign. Among all the advertising for theatres and stores, these Victory Thanks posters stand out as striking and evocative.

Every now and again I pull out the tin and sift through its contents, photographs and other small treasures which my Grandad thought important.

School music teacher: (To class) Who would like to learn a musical instrument? Teacher: What instrument would you like to learn?

Since I delivered my (slightly modified) Anatomy of a Mouse presentation at @media2005, I’ve had time to formalise my thinking about my answer to one of the questions from the audience.

When I reached the studio this morning, (Ed says: Malarkey is always grumpy before 11am. ) there was a mysterious box sitting on my desk. Open the box! shouted the voices in my head, so guess what? I opened the box!

A while ago (when I couldn’t sleep), I sat up late watching re-runs of home decorating shows on UK TVStyle, a channel wall-to-wall with house make-overs.

Some of you may recall that way back in June last year, Stuff and Nonsense grew up, moved away from home and got a place of its own. I wasn’t so sure about the move at the time, but (happily) I was proved wrong and it’s been a good move.

Just like Scrivs announced this week that the CSS Vault has been sold, this site too has a new owner and I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is Malarkey. (Ed: What are you rambling on about now?) OK, I’ll get to the point.

Oh my kiddy aunt, it’s started already. Driving through Warrington yesterday, I caught my first glimpse of the UK Labour Party’s first campaign posters for the up-and-coming (to a church hall near you) General Election.

I’d just finished reading Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Round book (kindly given by Sue’s Mum for my birthday at the end of November) when the DVD pops into my Christmas stocking (this time, nicely gift wrapped for my brother by Amazon (lazy…

Most recently, Paul Chadwick has recieved much critical acclaim for his work on comic-book movie tie-ins such as Star Wars and the Matrix.

Two of my favourite comic books artists excel in black and white illustration, the first, Frank Miller is better known for his work on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and more recently, Sin City.

NB: This article refers to a prior version of the WWF UK online store that I designed in 2004. I was pleased to learn yesterday that our work has won the ECMOD 2004 (European Catalogue and Mail Order Days) Best Charity/Good Cause Related Catalogue Award for…

It’s funny how you build up a mental people before you meet them. So this weekend was going to be interesting as a band of Brit Pack bloggers, accompanied by their roadies and groupies, met up in London for art, beer and a bit of a chin wag.

I’m not going to be blogging now for the next two weeks as I have a few projects which need my undivided attention. But rather than let rumours of my untimely death circulate, I thought that I would let you know and leave you with a wee competition, just for…

Forget Superman or the Hulk, the Fantastic Four or (God forbid) Captain America! When I was a kid there was only one comic book hero, the mighty Judge Dredd.

We’re back from the south of France, two weeks without the phone, email or MSN. At home, my usual morning routine runs something like this, In France it’s a little bit different; two weeks of,

Time travel. It’s a subject that often keeps me awake at night, pondering… So I thought I’d interview a bunch of bloggers to help me out. Thanks to Brit Packers Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Jon Hicks, Gordon Mackay, Tim Parkin and Richard Rutter.

An eagerness to please should always push a designer to do the best for a client. But there are times where just when you thought the job was finished, a client will say, Can we just add… The four stage sign-off sheet can be our best friend.

Over the weekend, I installed iTunes on all the computers in the design studio and centralised our entire CD collection on the server.

Why are certain types of criminals glamorous? Not murderers or muggers, but forgers, safe crackers and con-artists. From the fictional Italian Jobster Charlie Crocker (original, not remake) to the late Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, I see a certain romance…

Working life at Stuff and Nonsense has been very hectic of late, infact there has rarely been a day off in the last twelve months.