Month: July 2006

  • Scotland’s self-employed cry hot, salty tears

    According to the Evening Times: FURIOUS tax staff in Glasgow and East Kilbride today joined a 24-hour national strike in protest against new working practices. And they warned that unless an agreement was reached with management they would escalate the dispute. O noes the taxman is on strike!!!!!11111 etc.

  • A nifty wee Mac app

    [photopress:doodim_sc.gif,full,pp_image] Doodim is a freeware program that does a simple but handy thing: it dims everything but the currently selected window, making it easier to focus on what you’re doing. Only problem I’ve encountered so far is that it doesn’t seem to work with a second display. [Via Digg]

  • MySpace phenomenon, my arse

    Many, many years ago – in the mid 90s – I was in a band with a chap called Mark. Mark knew a girl called Tippi – they were from the same bit of Scotland – and she annoyed him immensely: she was one of those “I want to be famous at all costs” types,…

  • When demos go tits-up

    Microsoft shows off Vista’s voice recognition technology. It doesn’t go entirely to plan. [Youtube. Via Digg]

  • Sony faces the music

    Following on from my comment (in the Microsoft’s Doing an Xbox post) about Apple’s competitors’ inability to get their shit together, it seems that Sony’s coming to similar conclusions: Sony President Ryoji Chubachi, who heads the electronics business, believes that TVs and portable music players are two products in which Sony must show it’s a…

  • Oi! Crichton! Noooo!

    I’m posting this mainly to annoy Stephen: a climate scientist says Michael Crichton has misused his research. Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web,…

  • Zune: Microsoft’s doing an Xbox

    More details on Zune are starting to appear, and while there’s still no hard information on what the device will actually do (although the message from Microsoft is that it ain’t a portable Xbox; it’s a caring, sharing media playback device) the big picture is starting to emerge. I’m particularly interested in this snippet from…

  • The Internet is broken, so let’s talk about Disco Dog

    Why does the Internet always break when you’re on deadline? I don’t know whether it’s my ISP, the US power outages or evil space gremlins, but I’m getting nowt when I try various big-name sites – mainly .coms (including Google) but also .co.uks. Given that I can’t actually get any work done just now, I…

  • Splat’s entertainment

    As I mentioned last week, I’d been invited to see Sony blow up stuff as part of a new ad campaign – and because of the need for secrecy I wasn’t allowed to write about it. Which was annoying, as the Evening Times clearly benefitted from a leak and ran all the details on Friday.…

  • Microsoft Cock

    I’m indebted to No Rock ‘N’ Roll Fun for this fascinating fact about Microsoft’s iPod killer: Zune is apparently French-Canadian slang for penis. I’d make a joke involving the Zune and the Wii but I’m far too mature for such tomfoolery.