Andrew Owen

I'm a veteran communicator with decades of experience as a professional writer.
I've spent over a decade working with software development teams.
I'm available for contract writing, editing, design and voice-over work.

Experience

Journalist

Newspapers, Magazines, Radio

Technical Writer

Business Intelligence, Consumer Electronics, Education, Medical, Retail, Security

Engineer

Consumer Electronics, Content Management Systems, Digital Experience Platforms

Education

BA (Hons) Journalism

University of the Arts London

MSc Informatics

Birkbeck, University of London

Services

Writing & Editing

I have more than three decades of experience of writing original content. My editing credits include Chris Smith''s “How to Design a Microcomputer” and the Translation Commons guide to digitizing indigenous languages “Zero to Digital”.

Graphic Design

My graphic design credits include typesetting the Ultima Dragons' 25th anniversary booklet, over a dozen keyboard legend designs including the Mega 65 and Commander X16 and all the branding for the Chloe 280SE open hardware retro computer.

Voice Talent

I have several years of experience narrating training videos and doing live video demos. And I make short videos for an open source software project. But I’m always happy to try new things.

Portfolio

view project

My Clients

Blogs

A year learning a language with Duolingo

I should be bilingual. I grew up in a country where the indigenous language is not English. But given that it’s been 741 years since Wales was annexed by England, it’s not that the Welsh language is in decline that’s surprising, it’s that there are any native speakers left at all. I had a year of lessons before I left the capital for a border county. I remember how to count to five, and that’s about it. Instead I was taught French, badly. Over the years, I have tried various approaches to shake my monolingualism with little effect, until I went back to Duolingo.

iPadOS 26 is great, Liquid Glass not so much

Let’s address the transparent elephant in the room first. I don’t love Liquid Glass. It’s fine on my iPhone. The corners are too rounded on my 6.8 inch CarPlay display. If you have regular icons on your desktop on an iPad Pro, it’s a disaster. The transparency goes too far and the background icons blend into the foreground icons. I tried switching off transparency. It looks horrible. I tried permanent dark mode. Still not great. I made the icons big. That helps a lot, but it doesn’t fix it. I did finally come up with a solution: only have icon groups on your home pages. Then there isn’t so much color in the background to clash with the foreground icons. And now I can live with it. Having solved that problem, I moved on to making my iPad dock closely resemble my Mac dock.

Creating an information architecture with Chat-GPT 5

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched GPT-5, its latest and most advanced AI model, for all ChatGPT users (including free users). The company claims the model is smarter, faster and more useful, particularly across domains including writing, coding and health care. It also claims GPT-5’s hallucination rate, where the model fabricates answers, is lower. This is the first time free tier users have been given access to a reasoning model (if they hit their usage cap, they’ll be given access to something called GPT-5 mini). GPT-5 support is also included in Microsoft Copilot.

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