Mark Longair, who I was lucky enough to count as a friend for more than 20 years and work with for two, died last Saturday, 10 January 2026, aged 49. After Mark published his blog post the previous Sunday, I wrote him a letter on Tuesday, intending to send it at the weekend, but on [ ]
Farmers in England are paid via the Environmental Stewardship Scheme to keep their land in good agricultural and environmental condition. This scheme is smaller than the better-known CAP payments, but still accounts for around £3 billion of public funding over the past decade, which isn’t exactly small potatoes (sorry). I recently discovered there’s open data [ ]
In the past year or so I did a lot of work on public-interest tech and data projects. I was so busy writing code, designing systems and hiring people that I failed to write anything at all about why these projects were worthwhile, and the sort of design and engineering challenges I had to overcome. [ ]
Land ownership in Britain is secretive, and always has been. About 18% of land in England and Wales is unregistered, and not even the government knows who owns it. Even information about registered land is not freely available you have to pay Land Registry £3 to find out who holds any piece of land. But [ ]
Using the Wilson score interval to identify the most delicious, and disgusting, foods at Britain s best online supermarket. Jump to the results. The hardest bit of cooking, for me, has always been choosing what to cook. Sure, it s fine if you only make dinner once a week then you can flick through a designer [ ]
If you are a parent, or soon to be a parent, you may already have discovered the US s Baby Name Voyager. It s a data-visualization classic, a wonderful way to bring 100 years of American baby names to life. And like (I think) the very best visualizations, it is useful as well as interesting: not only [ ]
For many women, there are few things more frustrating than trying on clothes. To put it in terms that my (mostly male) coder friends will understand: debugging CSS doesn t come close to the blood-boiling irritation of trying to work out whether you are a size 8, a size 10, or both. Because, yes, you can [ ]
Today, rail fares go up by an inflation-busting average of 5.9%, to howls of outrage from commuters and groups like Passenger Focus. But what many people don t realise is that 5.9% is just an average. And while Passenger Focus came across individual fare increases of up to 11%, I have scraped data from National Rail [ ]
We re house-hunting. And for me, like most coders, house-hunting involves lots and lots and lots of screen-scraping. As well as crawling Rightmove listings, I ve been looking at transport and house-price data. Specifically, I ve scraped travel times to London by train versus house prices, to examine the theory that houses get much cheaper once you escape [ ]