geek

  • Being a total Busy Dad, the greatest mental barrier to playing my electric guitar was the time it would take to get all my pedals out, connect them together and power them up. Then put them all away again when the rockin’ arena must return to an office. The solution – build a pedal board,…

  • Hack pack

    Couple of notes on music apps: Garageband is really fun and powerful app – I use it on my iPad to record my electric guitar using the Tascam IXZ dongle and headphones, so as not to wake the kids. Here’s me butchering George Harrison’s Something in Garageband: [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/282326855″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /] The backing guitar…

  • You can listen to me on Sean Callahan’s Sports Geek podcast, talking blackcaps.co.nz, our social media stuff and wot’s coming up for the world cup. Sean’s based in Melbourne and works with a heap of teams and leagues with their digital and social efforts, as well as producing a cottage industry in podcasts. When I…

  • Peak nerd

    Making custom retro-look mute and volume labels for the good old Apple Extended II (which now lives at work) that I remapped the function keys for is probably a sign of… something.  

  • There’s a school of thought that says whenever two chaps in a garage get a 0.3 beta of a social network out the door, digital folk everywhere should drop everything and get on it. This is bollocks. Your valuable and limited time, energy and resource is best spent on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or the platform(s)…

  • I’m a big fan of features like The Verge’s What’s In Your Bag? and The Setup, where folk share the stuff they use everyday in a cheerfully narcissistic fashion. [Get the full run down on the Bangladesh trip over at sportreview.net.nz] For the last month I’ve been in Bangladesh with the BLACKCAPS, writing for our website,…

  • I use Twitter a lot, for work as well as my own fecking about. Much of this happens on my phone – but I’ve never quite settled on the Android Twitter app that’s quite right.* Actually, that’s not true. Tweetdeck for Android was perfect – but Twitter killed it. It was fast, easy to use and no-frills, relatively. I’d go…

  • Today’s announcement that the English Premier League will only be available over the internet has caused a little angst among people worried about their broadband speed. Because many folk aren’t getting the best out of the broadband connection they have, here’s the best single thing you can do to improve things at your place*. Your…

  • On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to be on Social Media Club Auckland’s When communities go bad panel, along with Anna Connell, Mike Kooge and Chris Keall.   The panel. Photo filched from SMCAKL site.  Some brief thoughts: Being trolled is part of the territory for doing corporate social media. Of course, social media is just…