Hello. My name’s Gary, and I live just outside Glasgow with my wife, my daughter and two black labradors. I’m a freelance journalist, columnist, author, copywriter, scriptwriter and radio talking head, and I write features, news stories and tutorials about technology, the Internet and pop culture for lots of magazines and websites as well as advertising copy for some of technology’s biggest names.

My debut novel Coffin Dodgers was published in June 2011, and I’ve written lots of non-fiction books too: several books for young musicians, one on working from home and one about laptops. I’ve also co-authored lots of computing and music books, some of which I can talk about and some of which I can’t. Before getting into journalism I played in various bands, some of which I like to talk about and some of which I don’t.

Although this blog occasionally touches on journalism, it’s a personal site rather than a work one. If you’re looking for intelligent, well written and interesting journalism you’ll find it in my magazine articles and books; if you prefer poorly punctuated knee-jerk nonsense with far too many mentions of Girls Aloud then, my friend, you’ve come to the right place.

The photo of me was taken by the talented Glaswegian photographer Iain McLean. He’s very good. You should hire him.

The small print

Opinions expressed on this site are my own and probably don’t reflect the opinions of my various employers. Re-reading some of it, opinions expressed on this site don’t always reflect my opinions either.

As this is a personal blog, I assume that any comments posted here aren’t for publication in print – if I want to quote you, I’ll ask your permission first. I don’t pass on commenters’ details to anybody, and while WordPress (the blog system I use) does ask for your email address for verification purposes it won’t be published anywhere on the site.

The whole point of having a comments system is to solicit comments, positive and negative – that’s why I blog, and I rarely delete comments. On the rare occasions I wield the big stick it’s to get shot of spam, illegal (ie libellous) content or people trying to be offensive for no good reason.

Syndication, copyright and cash

Everything on this weblog is licensed under a non-commercial Creative Commons Licence. Feel free to quote, copy, email, print or set on fire any of the articles here, but using any of my stuff for commercial purposes is a no-no. The various site feeds are provided for personal syndication only, so if you’re site scraping and selling ads on the resulting pages you’d better offer me a cut or I’ll send the heavies round.