Stuff and nonsense
One for the Glaswegians
Huge police raid on Victor Morris. Blimey.
Lethal weapons, including samurai swords and batons, were seized when officers swooped on the Victor Morris store in Argyle Street. A nearby lingerie shop, also owned by Martin Morris - Silks & Secrets - was also raided in today’s operation.
A team of 20 officers brought out weapons in protective bags from that store.
Microsoft ads versus Apple ads. Microsoft FTW!
Credit where credit’s due. Having Tron Guy in the “I’m a PC” ads is utter, utter genius.
(If you’re reading this from outside the UK, the Get A Mac ads over here blew it by making the PC likeable and the Mac annoying and smug.)
Desktop Monbiot
This revolutionary software uses your computer‘s webcam to detect when you’re feeling happy, or idealistic, or wasting time staring dreamily out of the window while the Earth plunges towards ecopocalypse.
BANG! The vociferous Guardian pundit’s face looms out of your screen DOUSH! He delivers a pin-point demolishing of your most cherished illusions.
More Apple-related tomfoolery from David McCandless.
When subscription departments attack!
This isn’t staged - my subscriber copy of Car magazine came through the door with this vicious message:
Do front-facing baby buggies traumatise kids?
Yes, says the Daily Mail:
Baby buggies which face forwards may stunt children’s development and turn them into anxious adults, according to a study.
Infants suffer more stress and sometimes even ‘trauma’ in modern buggies with seats facing away from their parent, researchers found.
Guess what? That’s not quite what the study said.
Despite the news report, there is no evidence from this study that buggies which face forwards cause trauma or have an effect on how the child grows up. Such interpretations of its results are incorrect and could be interpreted as scaremongering.
The study used heart rate as a measure of infant ‘stress’ and the finding that babies facing forward have slightly higher heart rates is unsurprising given the different stimuli they would be experiencing. As such, this may have nothing to do with ‘stress’ levels. The cautious interpretation of the results taken in some parts of the research article must be emphasised. In other areas and in some news reports the results have been over-interpreted and may cause parents unnecessary anxiety.
iPhone bug automatically emails photos of your genitals to women
I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent.
[Apple support, via Fark]
Sex ramp!
[Via Fark]
Now I’m nostalgic for “dude, get a Dell”
The English language has suffered so much violence at the hands of marketers it’s too time-consuming to get irate at all of it. So when Dell decided that “yours is here” would be a good slogan, I ignored it just like a small child screws his eyes shut to make monsters go away.
Unfortunately it seems like Dell is escalating its campaign. Today, I received a flyer with this strapline:
YOURS IS SO EASY TO SHOP FOR AT DELL.
What?
It reminds me of a bloke I once trained in IT. He was a truly talented graphic designer, but he couldn’t write to save his life (not a criticism: my drawing skills never went beyond potato printing, and I’ve made the English language scream for mercy on many occasions).
Anyway. This was the copy on one of his portfolio pieces:
WHATS NEW IN CARS
FORD SIERRA THATS WHAT
To be honest, I quite liked it. And it’s a damn sight more readable than the Dell advert - an advert that no doubt cost Dell a lot of money. Or as Dell might put it, money a lot of cost Dell advert good very not.
The fireworks menace: this year, a solution
Another year, another three-week period of fireworks frightening the dog and making baby bigmouth’s bedtime an ordeal. Not to mention the depressing headlines: this week’s local paper tells of fireworks being chucked through a hearing-impaired pensioner’s letterbox. What fun!
Personally I don’t see any reason why fireworks should be available to anyone without a licence when every town has its own, properly run spectacular, but I appreciate that banning punters from buying explosives probably violates their human right to be a selfish bastard. So I have a solution: any adult can buy fireworks provided they pass a simple test.
Here’s the test:
Shopkeeper: hello! Would you like to buy some fireworks?
Customer: yes please!
Customer! You have failed the test!
Music piracy: solved!
It turns out that the answer to music piracy is simple: a logo!
Various download sites have unveiled a new “MP3: 100% Compatible” logo that - according to them - won’t just emphasise the cross-platform nature of MP3s, but will also help in the fight against piracy.
I love The Inquirer’s take on it:
You can now be safe in the knowledge that any MP3 files you download fron the INQ are safe and legal. Honest. Look we’ve got a logo and everything.
These download sites have a little more in mind than educating on MP3 compatibility – the trade body behind this initiative highlighted how this would identify legal download sites to consumers. Of course anyone brazen enough to offer millions of pounds worth of other people’s copyrighted music and movies would be in really big trouble if they were daring enough to copy and paste a logo onto a website (like we just did for example).