When I originally created this site, it had a “news” section, which over time mutated into a blog.

At a later date I realised that personal things and work things were getting a bit muddled up, so I split off the personal stuff to Born Sleepy. In doing so, I envisaged this blog going back to essentially just being a “news” service, and most of the posts were just announcements about software releases.

At the moment there aren’t really any software releases, however. In addition, Born Sleepy, which was supposed to be my personal blog, still ended up carrying a lot of technical posts, as well as completely non-technical ones.

So I’ve decided to re-organise things once again. It’ll keep you all on your toes, if nothing else.

As a result I’ve moved back most of the technical posts to this blog, and henceforth decree this as the place I’ll write about the technical things I’m doing. Born Sleepy will very much remain active, but will be restricted to non-technical things.

I expect I’ll end up changing it all again in a while, but let’s see how long this plan remains in force!

It’s been pretty quiet around here recently.

Much as I wish it was because I’d been lounging on a beach somewhere, sipping cocktails and generally chilling out, it’s actually because I’ve been spending most of my time contracting on Sketch, and it hasn’t really left any space for other projects.

That’s all coming to an end in a few days, as I’ve decided that it’s time to move on.

So with a bit of luck you will see the sleeping ~giant~, erm, minnow that is Elegant Chaos slowly come back to life.

I have a large number of potential apps in mind, but at this stage I’m in no particular hurry to settle on one of them, and in fact I may take a little time out before doing anything much. I might even lounge on a beach or two, but I live in the Outer Hebrides so I will be well wrapped up if I do.

That said, if you have a project that you think I’d be interested in, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

I’ve finally got round to moving my blog Born Sleepy over to Jekyll as well.

As part of this, I’ve been rationalising which posts live where. Originally both this and Born Sleepy were part of the same site, and when they forked, I retained all the old posts in both places for the sake of any old links.

Now though I’ve decided to retrospectively tidy things up a bit. I’ll attempt to add enough redirections that old article links still work, but the indexes for both sites should now reflect just the content that is relevant for them.

As you can probably see, this site has changed!

I’ve finally migrated it away from Drupal (I was still on 6!), and it’s now a static site built with Jekyll.

I’ve probably missed a few pages along the way, so please let me know if you spot a broken link or some missing content.

Having the BBC make its Panorama program all about Apple is tabloid sensationalism, and it sends out completely the wrong message.

It’s saying to companies who attempt, in however ineffectual a way, to do the right thing: “stick your head above the parapet, and we’ll monitor you twice as hard as all of your competitors, even though they are engaged in exactly the same practices”.

The exploitation of labour in poorer countries is a massive problem, but it’s also what the current free trade, free market economies of the richer countries are largely based on.

Our cheap consumer goods don’t appear like magic from nowhere. These things only cost what they do because the people who make them were paid a pittance to work too long in dangerous conditions, and the materials they were made of were sourced in a similarly dubious way.

I’m not saying that it’s somehow easy for us as individual consumers to combat this, but it’s completely hypocritical for anyone who owns a computer, tv, mobile phone etc to single out individual companies without examining the conditions in which their own possesions were produced.

The way to solve this problem is to regulate. We need to raise the burden of proof on manufacturers and sellers that the wares they are peddling have been produced ethically and sustainably. We then need to make it illegal to import and sell things that don’t meet the standard.

That is something that can only be done by governments, and it can only be done if the political will is there to do it.

Which comes back to voters.

Which means you.