A fun long-ish read from the makers of the iA writer app on Europe’s desire to move away from Microsoft Office and what it might take: Severance illustrates something so familiar that it’s hard both to recognize and hard to…

Am super impressed with the way Doug is using AI tools to help him build useful software. Commonplace is a way of saving online stuff into collections. It’s a bit like Delicious of old. What’s more, browsing through the collections…

Interesting perspective on Ai generated software from Quentin Stafford-Fraser: As we enter an era where software development is much cheaper and easier, the number of people able to create their own bespoke apps will increase rapidly. Either you’ll do it,…

Really nice in depth case study looking at how Milton Keynes City Council transformed their planning services, using Arcus Global’s tech: Legacy back-office systems are holding many planning departments back—slowing processes, frustrating staff, and limiting the ability to deliver efficient,…

An excellent blog to follow for nerds like me that love old software.

As an experiment, relating to some work I’m doing for a customer, I asked Google’s Gemini to do some deep research and write a report about the market for revenues and benefits systems for UK local government. You can read…

A new Mac desktop RSS aggregator for me to have a look at.

John Gruber reports on the new version of OmniOutliner (6) which includes a featured called Omni Links: OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the…

📅 Daily Note: September 23, 2025

Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team: We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or…

📅 Daily Note: July 25, 2025

I *thought* I had settled on Devonthink as my everything bucket, but now I am falling down an Obsidian shaped rabbit hole thanks to Steve Messer linking to this monster: Every few months I set aside time for a “random…

📅 Daily Note: June 5, 2025

Really helpful stuff from Jason Kitcat at the Department for Business and Trade on matrix working. # – micropost 22920 Some interesting notes on the issues around the software market for local government. # – micropost 22934 My general take…

💻 New Mac, new setup (June 2025)

I’ve recently moved into an office in the garden – a fancy shed, in other words. Doing so exposed a weakness in my tech setup, based as it was on a Mac Mini. When I returned to the house, I…

📅 Daily note for 3 September 2024

August was not the chilled out month I was hoping for! Took a week off for staycationing but otherwise was nose to the grindstone on really exciting work, but work nonetheless. Hoping to be able to poke my head up…

Daily note for 29 October 2023

LocalGovCamp was lovely last Wednesday but exhausting. I did very well not to drink much at all the night before which definitely helped. But… so many people to talk to, so much going on. I attended way more sessions than…

Interesting links 11 March 2022

Things I’ve seen that are worth sharing. The next ten-years of digital government – Scott Colfer For what it’s worth, my instinct is that the NHS might be the place that leads (by doing) the settler phase over the next…

Setting up my new Mac

So, I got an unexpected refund from the Student Loan Company (bonus!) recently and spent it on one of the new MacBook Airs. It’s a beautiful machine. Apple seem to have fixed the keyboard issues they were having a little…