Blog

When not writing software, my other interests are astronomy and astrophysics. Those who know me well will be aware I have a strong impulse to explain and educate and that I'm motivated to confront the growing tide of misinformation and conspiracy the...

As a young teenager (many decades ago, and long before the internet of anything) one of ways I'd while away a dull rainy afternoon with friends would be to try to break their "secret codes" (and they mine). We'd each invent a secret symbol or new let...

In my previous blog, I outlined an approach whereby Excel could provide much interactive support to help break simple substitution ciphers - by counting letter frequencies, by applying guesses, and by highlighting popular bigram, trigram and quadgram...

One of the problems beginners often struggle with is how to enter phone numbers into a list of contacts in Excel. If you type a number with a leading zero and no spaces (e.g. 01234567890) - the leading zero disappears. If you include spaces (01234 5...

A One-Page Calendar Yesterday, I was inspired by a simple, but clever idea for a one-page calendar that I read about in Ethan Siegel's column in Big Think (see One Page Calendar) It's not the sort of calendar that you write your dental appointment ...

Speed networking (loosely based on speed?_dating_) is an increasingly popular way to organize business networking events. Participants sit at tables in twos, threes or larger groups, and talk about their businesses in turn for 60 seconds. When everyo...

In my previous blog, I wrote about how to organize a speed networking event for large groups using simple rules and prime numbers. This applies to networking events which are organized around tables. Another popular model, and one closer to the idea ...

In my previous 2 blogs I discussed how to organize Table-based speed networking using prime numbers, and 1:1-based networking using repeated binary sub-division. OK I didn't use those exact terms, but that is indeed what I did. It occurs to me that ...

I was recently inspired by a Facebook post that shared a number of Spirograph-like images of how 5 of the planets change in distance and direction as seen from the Earth. The original image (used to be) here... https://luminatress.com/post/184864366...

It probably won't surprise anyone that knows me well, that I quite like puzzles (as/when I have any free time to do them). So when someone recently shared a particularly fiendish logic puzzle with me to solve over Xmas, I happily sat down with a coup...

Solving Wordle with Excel If you're reading this, I assume that you're already familiar with the new online word game Wordle, which was invented by Josh Wardle, and is currently (April 2022) owned and published by the New York Times. In this game, ...

I recently treated myself to a new laptop, and like any new computer owner, was working through the tedious process of migrating old files across from the previous computer. Now it seemed a great opportunity to do a little spring cleaning too, and so...