Philosopher and historian by training, Operations Director by pay cheque. I am also a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University researching Edmund Burke on authority and the implications for leadership.

My site, like my research, is loosely divided into the major topics of leadership, philosophy, history, politics, business and technology. In many ways they are usually highly interconnected with any categorisation being akin to Wittgenstein’s notion of:

taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side

Reading

Most of my reading is for various research projects, but there are some recommended books from my various pleasures and interests.

Books for Pleasure

Any of the Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though the novels of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four are masterful

• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes is a highly recommended edition for anyone wanting to know more about the historical setting of the stories

J. R. R. Tolkien

• The Hobbit
• The Lord of the Rings
• Beowulf

P. G. Wodehouse

• The Code of the Woosters
• Right Ho, Jeeves
• Leave It to Psmith

Oscar Wilde

• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Importance of Being Earnest

Stephen Fry

• The Hippopotamus

Books for Interests

Niall Ferguson

• The War of the World
• The Square and the Tower

Andrew Roberts

• Masters and Commanders
• Churchill

Steven Pinker

• The Language Instinct
• The Better Angels of Our Nature

Yuval Noah Harari

• Sapiens

Daniel Kahneman

• Thinking Fast and Slow

Tom Holland

• Dominion

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Incerto

Hannah Arendt

• The Origins of Totalitarianism

Michael Burleigh

• Sacred Causes

How I Do Computing

This section is modelled on Richard Stallman’s How I Do Computing page. Great format for covering tech interests from a leader in the GNU movement.

While my privacy interests favour Linux, the practicalities of life necessitate pairing this with a Windows environment. My Windows PC is a home built desktop (AMD RYZEN Threadripper 1920X, Corsair Cooling, Nvidia GPU and plenty of RAM).

However, my personal operating system of choice is Linux-based. I currently use Pop!_OS with Typora for my focused writing environment and LibreOffice paired with Zotero for my research projects.

Privacy

Perhaps it is a creeping presbyopia, in which life seemed to afford a greater privacy in the past. Perhaps it is an increasing awareness of the intrusive nature of advertising and data mining. Whatever the cause, I have become a strong privacy advocate and try, difficult though it is at times, to Restore Privacy… with some Privacy Tools it can be done.

Recommendations

Firefox for browsing – modified and tweaked for privacy

DuckDuckGo for search

Threema for messaging

• Signal gets an honourable mention and is great on Android as an SMS replacement
• ProtonMail for email
• ProtonVPN for VPN

Tresorit for file storage

• NextCloud gets an honourable mention for those willing to manage their own service

Mastodon for social posting

• While I understand the pull of the world’s biggest social network, Stop Using Facebook has some compelling arguments if you haven’t seen them…
• PixelFed for social imaging
• And WordPress for blogging

For those looking for a Google Docs / Office.com replacement and don’t want to manage a NextCloud instance: CryptPad has a great suite of tools.