In the highly unlikely event that you’re a subscriber to this blog and not to the Government Digital Service blog, here are three posts I recently wrote there and neglected to cross-post here:

• Government corporate websites in eye-popping 3D
• Why do people need government department websites?
• The vision for government corporate websites in the single domain (with product wireframes)

I’ve a half-baked notion I might blog here about some of the more personal learnings from my work at the mo’, such as:

• Making the transition from waterfall to scrum; and from senior user to product owner
• Coping with a 50/50 split role between two biggish jobs

Odds-on, I’ll probably remain way too busy with those things and the kids to find time to write anything much here until early 2012. But stick with me, if you’re grooming your RSS feeds. This blog isn’t dead.

‘Tis the season for facile lists and for trying not to think too much about work. And as I’m about to say bye-bye to full sleep for a few months with the arrival of baby #2 (due in early Jan), I thought I’d mark the occasion by blogging my top ten pieces of sleep propaganda for tiddlywinks.

I love kids’ books to bits – ones about bed and sleep even more so. They account for some of the best moments I’ve shared with my son in the past three years; and have been a lifeline of comfort during some of the worst. Below are some of his and my favourite. I’d love to hear about yours.

1. Goodnight Moon
This wonderful rhyme about a rabbit saying goodnight to everything in his bedroom is tremendous wind-down fodder and never gets dull, mainly due to the detail in the illustrations. I’m still spotting new things in this after three years. Best line: “Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush.”

2. Peepo
Beautifully illustrated poem recounting all the things a (WWII-era) toddler has seen in his busy day. Like Goodnight Moon, there are almost endless things to discover and discuss in the illustrations. Best line: “He sees his sisters searching for a jar or tin / To take to the park and catch fishes in.”

3. I Wish…
I like to think this one inspires happy dreams about the moon and sea, with its magical rhyming tale of a boy and his teddy flying through the night. It even glows in the dark. Best line: “Past galleons laden with gold we would glide / As a thousand bright fishes flashed by our side.”

4. Sleepy me
I can’t vouch for my son, but I get very sleepy reading this. The repetition of the word ‘sleepy’ alone is partly responsible, but it’s the pictures of half-asleep parents, pets and babies that make this utterly soporific. Best line: “Sleepy story, sleepy sighs / Sleepy mum will kiss my eyes.”

5. On our way home
I love this one mainly for its dad bias. A simple, mainly pictorial tale of a baby bear and his daddy walking home to bed after a busy day playing together. Best line: “On our way home, Daddy raced me. And I won!”

6. I’d rather go to Grandad’s
Could there be anywhere more snug and safe for a young cat to bed down than at the top of a lighthouse owned by his grandfather? I doubt it. Best line: “First we go on a big fast bus, then we go on a train. And I can hold the tickets for there and back again.”

7. Peace at last
A classic, and lots of fun. I mostly like this for introducing the notion that parents need sleep too – and also that bed is the best place for it.  Best line: “Well, you would not believe what noises there are in the garden at night.”

8. Goodnight, Lulu
It says it right there on the back of the book: “guaranteed to ensure a good night’s sleep”. And it does, by reassuring little ones that mummies and daddies can easily scare away any monsters that could attack in the night – and there are no such things. Best line: “Then I would stomp and yell and chase it all the way back to the icky, sticky swamp where it belongs!”

9. Can’t you sleep, little bear?
In which a baby bear learns to overcome his fear of dark by discovering the moon and stars are always there, lighting up the night. Admittedly he ends up with a huge lantern on all night too, as has my baby bear. Best line: “‘But I brought you a lantern!’said Big Bear. ‘Only a tiny-weeny one,’ said Little bear. ‘And there’s lots of dark!’”

10. Back to bed, Ed
Last but by no means least, this book has worked wonders in explaining why big brave boys and girls should go back to sleep in their own bed, not climb in bed with mum and dad, when scared or woken in the middle of the night. Best line: “Mum and Dad had had enough!”

What do you make of my list? Any you’d add?

Appalled at the paucity of Ping? Here are a few online music discovery sources which don’t suck.

• Ghostly Discovery – frankly awesome iPhone app which helps you discover new music based on your mood, the sort of tempo you want and a sliding scale from organic to electronic.
• Last fm – You’ve heard of this one, right? It’s my streaming music radio station of choice because of its fantastically reliable recommendations based on your listening habits (scrobbles), friends, neighbours, or single artists you like. See also Pandora ( no longer available in the UK) blip.fm and Spotify. (I’m ‘neilojwilliams’ on lastfm, blip and spotify if you want to connect – but much more active on lastfm than the other two).
• Taste Kid – Website and iPhone app which learns your tastes based on the artists (and films, books, shows) you tell it you like, and spits out extremely good recommendations of other stuff to try.
• The perfect five – weekly blog of 5 great hand-picked tunes, all free to download.
• 14 tracks – weekly selection of stand-out tracks from the knowledgeable folks at Boomkat
• 22 tracks - free streaming jukebox with 22 playlists across 22 genres, updated weekly by various DJs, music journalists, radio personalities and other new music obsessives. If only it had an RSS feed.
• Apple’s Genius - mostly I use this for making playlists from my existing collection but (very) occasionally it also recommends other stuff in the iTunes store worth checking out.
• Ministry of Sound dance radio – iPhone app which helps you find every dance radio station under the sun.
• Juno recommendations and podcasts – dance music download site offering unparallelled podcasts and recommendations. Search iTunes for ‘Juno’ to see what’s on offer. See also Hospital.

So how about you? What tools do you use to discover music and why?

Photo credit: DRB62

If I do post stuff, it will be about things other than work. Normal (sporadic) service will resume afterwards.

But as of last night she’s broken cover and written her first ever blog post for the BBC, where she has a regular writing gig for daytime drama Doctors. It’s a great post, too.

So we’re now a two blog household, one if them considerably better written than the other. I’ll get to work on Dylan to make the hat trick. (Not that I can take any of the credit for getting Joy to blog, mind you!)

(This is a lazier than usual post for a lazy New Year’s Day. Normal service will resume when the year is in full swing…)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t so much as glance at someone else’s iPhone without wanting to grab it and have a nose at what applications they’ve installed. So for any fellow members of Appaholics Anonymous who read this blog, here’s what’s cluttering up my iPhone* on the dawn of the new decade:

Social web apps

• Tweetie 2 – the Twitter client to rule them all. Beats its major competitors (Tweetdeck, Twitterific) hands down on all fronts if you ask me. Only one tiny niggle: a bit too didactic on the etiquette of retweeting.
• Boxcar – does the one thing Tweetie 2 doesn’t, and does it very well: sends you push notifications of Twitter replies and DMs. Alerts you about Facebook too if you want. (Nah)
• Facebook – of course, Facebook. Gotta have the Facebook. The app can be a bit clunky and hard to find your way around though (a good companion to the full site, then) …but it beats trying to use Safari.
• LinkedIn – I mostly use it to accept new connections and supplement my iPhone contacts, but you can do pretty much most things you can do with the full site.
• Touch BB – a PHPBB forum client for iPhone. I use this every day, hooked up to a private forum I run for some old uni friends.
• WordPress – if you’ve got a WP blog, you need this app – it’s great for deleting spam comments while away from a computer, editing existing posts or drafts, or drafting (short) new ones.
• Huddle – to be honest, I’m yet to have much call to use this. But as a member of several Huddle communities, it’s bound to come in useful soon.
• Red Delicious – I use this app to access my Delicious bookmarks and a bookmarklet in Safari to add new ones. Am sure there are better ways of doing this, any recommendations?
• Skype – one of the first apps I installed and I’ve never used it. I’ve never been sure why I need Skype, but am prepared to be convinced and so I keep it installed in readiness for my VOiP epiphany.
• Audioboo - as per Skype, I’ve barely used this but can’t bring myself to delete it.
• Photoshop.com mobile – easy to use and elegant app, useful for cropping photos and applying basic effects.
• Flickr – for quick access to my own photos on Flickr and to search for others, e.g. to use on this blog.
• Shozu – a powerful media sharing app that works with Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more – and which I have barely begun to use. Keeping it to give it more of a trial run sometime.

Productivity apps

• Things – my ‘to do’ list app of choice. Much simpler than Omnifocus, mush better looking than ToDo. Syncs nicely with the desktop version over Wi-Fi. Only wish there was a cloud equivalent too.
• Evernote – for more substantial list making and occasionally taking photos of phone numbers on tradesmen’s vans.
• Quick Office - MS Word, Excel and that in your pocket.
• SimplemindX - An intuitive mind mapping tool.
• Pingdom – for checking server status of your websites.

News/content apps

• Newsie / Byline / Mobile RSS – I’m running these three clients for Google Reader and am yet to settle on any one which does it all (sharing, starring, offline reading, tweeting, emailing, unsubscribing, recategorising…) Your advice welcome.
• Independent / Guardian / Sky news / Thomson Reuters News Pro - I dip into one or more of these virtual ‘papes on my commute most days.
• Mashable - geek news on the move. I prefer using this sort of dedicated app to just using the RSS feed, but don’t ask me why!
  
• Instapaper – where saved webpages go to die, if I’m honest.

Travel and location apps

• Mini A-Z / Tube Deluxe / London Bus - aka the Knowledge.
• Directgov travel news – good work, fellas. Well worth checking before any long journey.
• AddLee.com – the best taxi firm in the world, in your pocket.
• The Trainline / National Rail - train times, bookings and live departure boards.
• Around me / ATM Hunter / Urbanspoon – pretty reliable for finding nearby banks, hotels, cafés, restaurants etc
• Fix my street – MySociety’s tool for complaining to the council about graffiti and potholes. Never used it yet but you never know.
• Google Earth – mainly for impressing old people. (Hello, dad!)

Music

• Last.fm – personal radio and streaming music; my music discovery engine of choice.
• Shazam – for identifying songs and buying them, and impressing old folk some more.
• In the Mood – for tweeting about what’s playing. Probably a bit annoying.

Telly & film

• Sky+ – lets me schedule my TV recordings from anywhere. Utterly awesome.
• Radio Times – because, although I wish there were more choice in the TV mag market, and in spite of it being utterly obsessed with Dr f**king Who, ‘RT Choice’ is probably the most reliable filter of decent quality telly around.
• Flixster – handy for seeing trailers of upcoming movies and keeping lists of stuff you’d like to see.
• Movie Genie - an IMDB client.
• [LoveFilm - doesn't exist yet, but I'm told it's coming. I love LoveFilm's online DVD rental service but an iPhone app for managing my rental list would make it so much better.]

Shopping

• Red Laser - another one for impressing people, this fun app lets you scan the barcodes of almost anything and get price comparison results for buying it online.
• Amazon / eBay UK – making it dangerously easy to spend my money.
• Ocado – yet to use this Waitrose online grocery shopping app, but if there was a Tesco or Morrissons equivalent I’d use it in a flash.

Reference

• Yell.com / Dictionary.com / Wikipanion / iTranslate / All recipes UK – these do what they sound like they do, and get you there in fewer steps than firing up Safari.
• Musée de Louvre – because it’s free and maybe I’ll be bored enough on a plane one day to improve myself wiv a bit of culcha.

Games

These are the keepers at the moment:

• Jewel Quest / iBlast Moki / Fling / Puzzle Bobble - Great puzzle games I never tire of and may never delete.
• Ravensword / Spider / Rolando 1 and 2 - Adventure and role player games.
• I Dig It Explorations / Robocalypse / The Settlers / Worms - Simulation and strategy type games.
• Fantastic Contraption / Crazy Machine / Crayon – Highly addictive physics games.
• Star Defense / Sentinel 2 / Tower Madness – Tower defense games.
• Speed Forge / 3d Rollercoaster Madness – Racing games.
• Scrabble / Hold’em / Table tennis / Arkanoid / Smart Go – Classic games.

Toddlertainment

Tried and tested on my two year old:

• Birds UK – bird calls and songs of all common British birds. Teaching daddy a thing or two in the process.
• Dora saves the Crystal Kingdom – and rides on a rainbow slide while she’s at it. And shouts a lot.
• Bubblewrap – mindless popping.
• Preschool Adventure - six activity games for toddlers.
• Balloonimals lite – inflate and pop balloon animals, without hiring a clown.
• Little Red Hen – the classic story, with animal noises.
• Pocketphonic – alphabet games
• Peekaboo Barn – animal noises
• iTot cards – great set of digital flash cards

Hmm, that’s a much longer list than it seems just from flicking through the screens on my phone.

And yet… with over 100,000 apps in the app store and counting I’m bound to be missing some gems. Personal recommendation counts for a lot against those odds, so I hope you’ve found my list useful and would really love to hear your suggestions too.

(H)appy new year and here’s to the next ten years of jaw-dropping advances in web and mobile technology. I’m rubbish at predictions but feel pretty confident in saying all this stuff will probably just look like Pong in comparison to what we’ll be using in 2020. (And my son will be better at using it than me).

*other smart phones are available. Hold your tongues, Android fans, I’m not an Apple fanboy.

But recently Croydon Council sent round an enthusiastic man with terrible B.O. to do a home energy review, and kitted me out with a load of cool energy saving stuff I never knew existed.

So, for my contribution to Blog Action Day 09, I’m going to take you on a tour of my house. This is stuff you can stick in your house too, stuff which is cheap, easy to install and saves you money while doing a teensy little bit more than you’re already doing to save the world.

1. Water saving shower head

Here’s mine. They cost around a tenner, come in all shapes and sizes, have a powerful flow just as luxurious as your normal shower but save about 4 litres of water every minute. Haahoo optional.

2. Chimney balloons

If you have fireplaces, you have draughts. Chimney balloons are like double-glazing for disused fires, and – as a bonus – also stop dead things falling onto your carpet. You can buy them here or here for £20.

3. Wireless energy monitor

You’ve heard of these. They show how much energy you’re using and the cost per minute. The wirelessness means you can carry them around the house and see what happens when you switch things on or off. Here’s me, switching on the kettle (a YouTube sensation in the making):

Mine’s an OWL, which appears to have won plaudits from pundits, though others are available. From £25.

4. Radiator panels

These are bits of moulded, shiny plastic which you stick behind your radiators on any external walls to reflect the heat back in, and come in packs of 5 or more for about £20. They save 80kg of CO2 a year and cut heating costs by about £10, according to this. And they make your house look a bit more like a spaceship, which is what we’re all striving for after all.

5. Low energy halogen bulbs

My house is full of tacky Argos spotlights, and for the two years I’ve lived here (and not got around to swapping them) I’ve been buying evil 50w bulbs thinking there was no alternative. But wait…

Croydon Council to the rescue! (A phrase not often heard). You can get these energy efficient GU10s which suck up less than a sixth of the power and last ten times as long. Hard to find in shops but very easy to find online for around a fiver.

And that concludes our little tour.

If there is a serious point to make here, it’s this. Tackling climate change needs everyone to switch to a low carbon lifestyle, and that’s a gargantuan ask. Innovative products like these are therefore absolutely vital to stimulate consumer demand by making it easy, affordable and desirable to make the change. They’re a key part of the transition to a low carbon world which – to quote from the government strategy:

will transform our whole economy. It will change our industrial landscape, our supply chain, and the way in which we all work and consume. For as well as being an environmental and economic imperative, the shift to a low carbon economy is also an economic opportunity. Businesses and consumers can benefit from significant savings through energy and resource efficiency measures. And supplying the demands of the low carbon economy offers a significant potential contribution to economic growth and job creation in Britain, not only as part of the short term economic recovery, but also through sustainable growth over the decades to come.

You can follow and have your say about what the government’s doing to stimulate all this here, or for a load more stuff you personally can do about climate change, have a look at the Blog Action Day site and Directgov’s Act on CO2 pages.

…has started hanging out around in my back garden, much to the delight of my toddler son.

You will need: Enamel paints, clean plastic pots, compost and small things that grow. Tree stumps optional.

Inspiration for this one came from The Dad Manual (an ace book which I’m slightly ashamed to confess I bought for myself. Full of stuff like how to make bows and arrows, explain jet engines, build go-karts and make pirate treasure maps).

• The first of hopefully many strawberry flowers (above)
• Some tiny baby figs
• Some promising-looking raspberry leaves

• The first signs of my broad beans and peas (planted back on 12th March):

• Some buds forming on my gooseberry bush (although I daren’t get my hopes up about this one, having had only one gooseberry from it last year)
• Apple tree leaves and buds also starting to appear

• The first beetroot seedling pushing through
• And my rhubarb crowns starting to produce something you could just about stick in a crumble

I won’t, however, show you the less successful propagation experiment in my shed. Suffice to say things aren’t looking too sunny for my tomatoes and peppers right now.

For my part, it has to be a pretty special tool to be worth forking out for, given the vast and ever-growing array of cool web 2.0 apps out there.

But I’m not averse, on principle, to ‘going pro’ with something that is life-changing, fully integrated into my world and which I would not now like to go without.

Twitter is definitely in that category, but what else? I’ve only gone pro with two apps, so far:

Fickr
How much? $24/year
Why? Because Flickr is nicer to use than Picasa web albums, integrates neatly with my other social web profiles and this blog, I’d reached the limit on accessing my archives using the free account and outgrown the free 3 ‘sets’ Yahoo gives you, and for a backup of my precious photos somewhere in the cloud it’s a bargain.

Remember The Milk
How much? $25/year
Why? Because RTM rocks, I have a Windows smart phone (for the time being) and the excellent RTM synchronisation program, MilkSync, is only available to RTM Pro users.

So what apps have you paid for, and why?

Steph is exempt having already answered on Twitter: “Flickr (for unlimited uploads) and Backpack (for more pages).”

Update: Some more answers have trickled in on Twitter:

• jamesclay @neillyneil I would pay for Evernote but haven’t reached the limit on the free version yet
• jamesclay @neillyneil Paid for Flickr, RTM (for iPhone), WordPress (for video), Gabcast
• jukesie @neillyneil paid for flickr (extra uploads) basecamp (larger projects) and remember the milk (just because I felt it deserved supporting)
• davebriggs @neillyneil I’ve paid for Flickr and some wordpress.com upgrades
  

Betty, my Speckledy hen, has gone broody.

This means she will sit on the nest for about 21 days, not laying any eggs and barely eating. Which is a problem if you’re Rosie (my other hen), and want to lay an egg. And a problem if you’re Betty and don’t get enough to eat or drink.

Some people swear by things like putting ice cubes in the nest, dunking the broody hen in cold water, or suspending her in a wire cage. It may come to that. (Still, it could be worse).

I’ll give her a few days of just gently lifting her off the nest, which worked when Rosie went broody last year, and see. Incidentally flash photography seems to work briefly too – she got up right after I took this photo, but ensconced herself again since.

So I promptly did the only rational thing and went looking for my house.

To my utter astonishment (given I live in little known Norbury), here it is, and what’s more I can pinpoint this photo to some time between May-July 2008 by recognisable features and alterations to my front yard.

I love Street View, and wish it had been around when I was last house hunting. The privacy concerns worry me not a jot.

(But then, I’m in favour of national ID cards, CCTV, barcode chip implants, cybernetic enhancements, domestic robots and flying cars. Though even I draw the line at sperm powered nanobots).

…Not realising until I read it back that it’s just the sort of thing Guy Fawkes (not that one) may have typed into his PDA-equivalent one October weekend in 1605.

What I meant was the relatively innocent task of planning a planting scheme for my vegetable plot this year. But it came out so very wrong.

In case I am suppressing a secret inner anarchist (or – and this is fairly plausible given my work – I’ve been hypnotised to bring down the government from the inside), I’ll share my evil veg-growing masterplan, and how I approached it, and you can decide if it’s an elaborate cover story or not…

Step 1: What to grow?

Sometime in late February (on a sunny day) I started thinking about the stuff I’d like to have a go at growing this year. And then I made a list. The criteria that mattered here were:

• Do I eat it? As in, actually buy it and eat it, regularly? If I know one thing about myself at the age of 32, it’s that I’m not about to start doing inventive things with celeriac, fennel and Swiss chard – so they’d be a waste of valuable space.
• Is it easy? I mostly want to grow things you can just stick in the ground outside. Hardy things. Frost, disease and bolt resistant things that say “heavy cropper” on the packet.
• Have I got the space/time? (Continuum). In truth, I worry far less about this than I should, as my wife will be more than happy to confirm. But while taking on too much yet again, I did do some editing. I crossed out leeks.
• Will it taste better than shop-bought? Don’t believe the hype, it’s not always the case. Carrots: not especially. Spuds: hmm maybe. Broad beans and tomatoes: hell to the yes.

Step 2: Pot versus plot

The recent weekend’s task started with divvying up the long list form step 1 into two more manageable lists of what’s going in the ground (in my small – but plenty big enough when I’m digging it over -plot, pictured right) and what’s going in containers of various kinds. The thought process went a bit like this:

• Crop rotation. Does garden lore say I need to grow different things this time? I won’t repeat the theory here. But I will repeat, for the sheer enjoyment, “umbellifers”.
• What works where? Not everything thrives in a pot. Climbers are easier to support with canes in the ground. Pots need constant watering. And so on.
• What do I need to access? My plot is at the far end of the garden. So I should try to put things I want to harvest often (like salads, potatoes and spring onions) in containers on the patio.

There’s also the question of what pots do I gots? But – as with space and time – I tend to plan first, and worry about these kinds of trifles later.

Step 3: Plan plot scheme!

Finally, for the stuff that’s going in the ground, I needed to figure out exactly what to plant where so I can get the most bang for my muck. I did it by:

• Measuring up. Get the seed packets out, check how much space everything needs, and subtract about 10% because seed packet writers are zealots. And measure up the plot, obviously.
• Drawing up. Analogue style. I could have used one of the many funky web 2.0 drawing apps, but part of the point of gardening is it gets me away from computers. (Er… apart from blogging about it, that is).

So this is the master plan, after several abandoned permutations, and the full list of stuff I am looking forward to harvesting this year:

In the plot:

• Peas, runner beans, broad beans – sown in succession
• Parsnips
• Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage
• Leeks

In lots of pots:

• Charlotte potatoes – in those bag things
• Lettuce (4 varieties), spring onions, tomatoes (2 varieties), peppers – on the patio
• Beetroot (2 varieties), courgettes (2 varieties), mini carrots – at the end of the garden

And along the fruity fence:

• Blackberries; gooseberries; raspberries; strawberries
• Apple tree; fig tree
• Rhubarb

Whether this all comes off as planned remains to be seen. It’s a tall order given the premium on my spare time. But this year I’m also hoping to have a little helper:

Anyone want to come round for and help me eat this stuff?

Swiftly followed by:

And look, she’s using Tweetdeck! Go sis! (And hello, if you’re reading this).

This is just some of the evidence of a weekend well spent. I also managed to plan my veg garden for 2009, more about which later this week.