Some years back I used SmartFTP* for my daily FTP needs. I believe back then it was free to use for non-commercial, personal use so I was fine. Then they brought in a paid-for model. I understood this, software companies need to make money as much as anyone else. I looked at the cost and it was a bit too high for me. I'd used other FTP clients before but none seemed to work as well as SmartFTP but the cost was prohibitive, for me at least. It really wouldn't have taken much of a price reduction for me to pay, it was right on the bubble. So I moved over to FileZilla.

FileZilla is a great project. Free to use and works well, but lacked the odd feature that I liked in SmartFTP. Also for some reason I had a lot more time-outs when uploading larger files with FileZilla. But it did the job so I persisted. After all, it's free!

Recently a well-known and highly-praised FTP client for the Apple operating system announced it was porting it over for the Windows operating system. Great! So I signed up to be a beta tester. Today my beta version arrived in my mailbox. I hurriedly installed it and tried to do the sorts of things I usually do with the FTP clients. So far it works very well indeed, especially for beta software.

What's really important is that this software is free to use in perpetuity. I can use it without paying a penny for as long as I like. However, the developers gratefully accept donations. I love this business model. For the little-guy like me this means I can still pay what I can afford for the software, support the developers and feel better about benefiting from all their hard work.

Maybe if SmartFTP had done the same, I would never have looked elsewhere.

* I don't want to pick on SmartFTP, it's a great client at a great price and I never had any problems using it. It's just an example.

I've tried to bite my lip on this one but it's bugging me too much. I don't give a flying f**k what music George Lamb and Mark Hughes like or want to play. I use Spotfiy because it lets me listen to music I like. Persist in trying to push me in to listening to what amounts to commercial radio and you lose a user.

I'm not a subscriber and probably never will be. I've made my peace with that. I don't feel guilty, I listen to the ads. But there is a big difference between a commercial for a new LP and massaging the egos of a couple of failed DJs. We aren't exactly talking about great music historians here.

Stop it.

I've been a regular, usually daily, visitor of digg.com since a few weeks after it's launch. I even spent time working back through the pages to get to the beginning. I can confidently say I have seen almost every front-page story headline on there. I guess I click on about 20% of the stories I see.

In it's early days it didn't seperate out content. When it brought in seperate filters to show just pictures, or just video, I didn't care. I wanted to see it all and make my own decisions. After a while I started to see patterns emerge. For example whenever a new XKCD comic was released it would appear on the front page. For a while it became more of an announce list than a news aggregator. The same 'sources' would appear just with new content. I realised then that it had probably got too big to ever be the same again.

I don't want to pick on Kevin Rose, or any of the other Digg staff. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try and please everyone and in a way I'm sorry they've tried to do that. But I guess they have investors and revenue is the bottom-line.

Like I said, I've been an almost daily visitor for years but I've never used my account there. I don't 'digg' things. I don't bury things. I don't look in 'upcoming'. I don't comment. What I liked about digg to start with, what made it truly unique to me was that the community curated the content for me. I liked the fact that I wasn't obliged to take part, I could just consume.

The sad truth today is that since the launch of the new Digg I look maybe two or three times per week. It still has loads of great content and I still get something out of the experience. It seems though that I'm almost being forced to log in, find people to follow, put together 'My news'. I just feel I won't get the wonderfully obscure surprises that Digg used to throw up for.

I don't blame Digg for this at all. It's like we're old friends that go back a long way but have clearly grown apart. I still have a lot of affection for the service and how ground-breaking it appeared to me at the time. I'll still visit and use it, but it just ain't the same.

As a keen and semi-professional photographer I monitor with great interest the apparent rise in cases of persecution by the police in public places.

I've seen videos and read reports of some wholly disgraceful treatment of innocent photographers and it strikes me that standing up for one's rights just makes matters worse.

Though I've never been officially stopped and searched I have been engaged by PCSOs and politely asked what I'm taking photos of. I tell them and they go on their way. While I am willing to stand my ground on some subjects I don't think being militant in your defense is going do you much good so here are the simple rules I go by:

- I am happy to give my name, but only to the Police
- I am happy to give my address, but only to the Police
- I am happy to show some ID (eg. drivers license), but only to the Police
- I will even attempt to explain why I am photographing something
- If on private property and asked to stop, I will, without question
- On public property I will not stop
- I will not delete photos or allow others to delete photos
- I will not hand my camera or other equipment over to anyone

Back in 1992 when I first started using the web (the internet is not the web, but that's a subject for another day) the only browser available was Mosaic. Mosaic rendered pages using black text on a grey background. There was no CSS. Typeface styles could not be set inline either. Typefaces, sizes, styles were all set in the browser and were common to all sites visited with that browser. Images were a luxury as few people had the connection speed to make them viable.

As time went on those who wrote front-end code were given more and more power and scope to make websites look any way they wanted. A good designer built a site that was not only a pleasure to look at, but easy to navigate and most importantly easy to read. Others did not. So browser developers retained the styling capabilities of their legacy systems. The one that remained most used was the text-resizing. This allowed users to retain the typeface, the colour and the style of text the designer intended but resize it for ease of reading.

Later browsers grasped the idea of the page being 'rendered' with both hands and abandoned the text re-size in favour of a whole-page zoom. As useful as this is there are still times where poor markup causes text to be hidden behind another element. No amount of zooming can alleviate this so I can still override the typeface size with browser settings.

But in eighteen years of being a regular world-wide-web user there is one feature that I would still love to have. A simple setting that I would make reading just about anything online a far more pleasurable experience. I want to control the line-height. I want to be able to increase, and in some rare instances decrease, the space between lines of text in a paragraph. Is this so hard?

And for the record I know I could probably do this with some clever custom default CSS, or something like a Greasemonkey script but I think this is a such a huge usability issue it should be built in to all modern browsers.