“I had a headache for five days in that week.” During the parliamentary recess in February this year, MP Helen Goodman set herself the challenge of spending just £18 a week on food. She had received lots of messages from constituents worried about the bedroom tax (which hadn’t yet come in) and decided to see for herself what it would be like to survive on the resulting lower income.

Don’t tell me not to run in the station.

Announce my platform well in advance so that if I reach the station in good time, there’s no need to hurry at any point.

Signpost my platform properly so I don’t have to run around as I struggle to find it.

The rumours are true: it’s been about six years since I last bought a new toothbrush. Want to know why (and how)? Come to my talk tonight at the Restore Cafe in East Oxford.

Typical: of course the ticket machine chooses a busy time to go wrong. In Oxford station, queues were forming at a machine that refused to display Network Railcard as a valid railcard. The woman at the front of the queue tried for quite some time to make it work, then gave up and sought assistance. I was eavesdropping on her conversation with James, a busy member of station staff, when I got to the front of my own queue and encountered an identical problem. Soon it became clear that all the ticket machines had the same issue: refusing to display Network Railcard as an option.

I wrote earlier this week about boycotts and the pervasive idea that they “don’t work”. I hope I’ve explained why that’s the wrong way to think about your choices; you can’t punish Nestle or Vodafone by withholding your custom, but where you spend your money should still matter to you.

So boycotts are fashionable again. I’ve been boycotting Starbucks since the early Noughties because of their aggressive business tactics; now I’m joined in that boycott by hordes of people who are unhappy because of the company’s attitude to tax. Now I know how Michaela Strachan felt when statement earrings came back into fashion: pleased, slightly righteous, and tempted to shout “I was doing it first!” a lot.

Designing a train ticket website? If the usability is poor, I might buy the wrong ticket. Designing an online booking system? Bad usability could lead to a lot of confusion and unnecessary phone calls. Designing a medical device? Bad usability could kill someone.

When I see that I’ve got a voicemail, my heart sinks. I will put off listening to a voicemail in a way I would never, ever do with a text message or an email. Because listening to it is a chore in a way that reading a text never is. And that’s because most voicemails fall into a few specific categories.

Google’s decision to scrap Google Reader drove people to seek alternative RSS feed readers. Lots of us migrated to The Old Reader, which described the heavy influx of traffic from March onwards as “a nightmare” and took the decision to close user registration and shut the public site down. (At the time of writing, they are discussing “new proposals” which may reverse this decision.)

Today I searched Google for “NUJ” as a lazy way of bringing up the website for the National Union of Journalists.