Archive for October, 2006
So you want to write about fire engines video games?
Want to be a games writer? The various “So you want to be a games journalist” blog posts (all of which you’ll find linked from Richard Cobbett’s blog, where he offers his own advice) will tell you everything you need to know, assuming The Triforce don’t put you off the idea altogether.
I’d write a post about getting into tech writing in general, but the advice would be identical.
That britblog piece is online…
As promised, .net’s put my best British blogs feature online. You’ll find it here.
Ooh lordy, it’s Sugababes
[photopress:heidi.jpg,full,alignright]Regular readers will know that I’m prone to hyperbole when it comes to pop music, but - is the new Sugababes single (and video) the pinnacle of human achievement, or what? The answer is, of course, yes.
Here’s why.
* It’s about sex. Sure, most good pop music is about sex, but this is clearly about the kind of sex that’s likely to cause psychological scarring, scare the neighbours and put your back out. Excellent!
* The lyrics are hilarious and involve a “pretty kitty”, a postman and a landing strip.
* The video’s gone for a BDSM/fetish theme, and as a result you see Heidi - one of the most beautiful women in pop - in a latex pencil skirt and killer heels. I was so shocked I dropped my pipe and burned a hole in my favourite slippers.
* The new Sugababe, quite splendidly, appears to be detective Rita Ortiz from NYPD Blue.
Of course, creating a video that’s custom-built to make thirtysomething men think rude things is all well and good, but it’s been teamed with a tune that’s probably the best thing the Sugababes have ever done. The bridge into the chorus does the tension/release thing, so you get some doomy chords - very gothy - before the song breaks into a chorus that’s so utterly joyous it could make an Easter Island statue crack a grin. Amazingly, some people would rather listen to the Arctic Monkeys than to this precision-tooled slice of pop magic. The fools!
Daily Mail “could cause cancer”, warns expert
Reading the Daily Mail could cause every conceivable kind of cancer, and massively increases the risk of breast cancer, experts fear. While other newspapers are also dangerous, the middle-market tabloid is particularly dangerous for women.
The new study, published in the journal Bigmouth Strikes Again, found a horrifying gap in current research. “We’ve looked at mobile phones, coffee and itchy fabrics as possible carcinogens,” explains the study’s author, Gary Marshall, “but nobody’s looked at the link with newspapers. It turns out that when you ask people with cancer whether they read a newspaper, most of them do - and a very high proportion of them read the Daily Mail. It’s obvious - the Daily Mail causes cancer.”
Critics suggest that Marshall’s study is “a load of shite”. As top cancer expert Mr B. Offin points out, “it’s utter nonsense. Of course you’d expect a high proportion of breast cancer sufferers to be Daily Mail readers - it’s a very popular newspaper among women in their forties and fifties. But to draw a link between newspaper reading habits and illnesses isn’t just bad science, but utterly offensive too. You might as well argue that owning legs causes cancer. It’s nonsense.”
Marshall angrily refutes the criticisms. “People who disagree with my findings are clearly part of a big global conspiracy,” he says. “Everybody panic!”
Ahem… that was sparked by this story, which suggests that mobile phone use kills your little soldiers:
Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.
Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate.
Hang on a minute. “Doctors believe?” This is one study, in which every single participant had a fertility problem. Surely for proper science you’d need to study an equal number of men without fertility problems and analyse their mobile phone use? And screen out other factors that may be relevant, such as diet, lifestyle, alcohol intake and so on? Allan Pacey thinks so:
Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said “This is a good quality study but I don’t think it tackles the issue. If you’re using your phone for four hours a day, presumably it is out of your pocket for longer. That raises a big question: how is it that testicular damage is supposed to occur?”
He said mobile phone use may be a marker for other lifestyle factors known to affect sperm quality.
“Maybe people who use a phone for four hours a day spend more time sitting in cars, which could mean there’s a heat issue. It could be they are more stressed, or more sedentary and sit about eating junk food getting fat. Those seem to be better explanations than a phone causing the damage at such a great distance” he added.
Even the study’s author says it’s just a possibility, although you’ll need to read the Guardian’s story to see the quote:
Ashok Agarwal, who presented his findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in New Orleans, stressed the study did not prove mobile phones were damaging male fertility, but urged scientists to investigate the possibility.
So, his study’s basically saying “ooh, this is interesting. Let’s have a proper look and see if it’s a coincidence or if there’s something going on here.” Could we postpone the panic until there’s some actual evidence?
Glass CD sounds better. Eh?
According to this Inquirer report, there’s a new kind of CD in town.
A JAPANESE SOUND boffin has come up with a glass CD which he reckons does not warp, distort, and looks and sounds nicer than those nasty plastic creations… He said that plastic CDs were not completely transparent, information on them cannot be read perfectly. They are also susceptible to bending or warping if left in sunlight or humid areas, which leads to sound distortion.
That doesn’t make sense. CDs are digital information, so there’s either data there or there isn’t. You can certainly damage them, but putting your zeros and ones in glass instead of plastic isn’t going to make any difference to the sound quality.
Deal or No Deal: Jon Ronson goes behind the scenes
One of the best things I’ve read in ages.
Don’t buy a big laptop. Buy two computers instead
I’d mentioned this in the Mac vs PC thread, but I wanted to expand on it a bit: if you’re considering an expensive laptop, you might be making a mistake. If you need a desktop replacement because you’ve no room for a desktop, or because you’ll be using your computer in a different place every day, or because you’re a laptop techno boffin who’ll be using it on stage, then by all means go ahead. But if you want a laptop for travelling, the big one might not be the best buy.
Many laptops, such as the MacBook Pro, are real desktop alternatives. But they also cost an awful lot of money, and they’re hefty things to carry around. Any time I’ve used a laptop when travelling - on planes, on trains, on ferries - I’ve wished I had a smaller computer (particularly on planes, where you get less room than a veal calf). Unless you need serious horsepower from a mobile PC, a top-end laptop is a daft buy: even the titchiest machine is perfectly capable of DVD playback, office applications and anything else you might need on your travels.
Instead of spending £2,000 on a desktop replacement, spend £1000 on a desktop and £750 on a small laptop. The desktop will be at least equal to the spec of a high-end laptop, it’ll have a bigger screen, and it’s better from an ergonomic point of view. The little laptop will be smaller, lighter and therefore more portable than a big beast of a machine - and you’ll be less upset if it gets broken, nicked or blown up by terrorists because you’ll still have a working machine at home. Best of all, you’ll have saved enough cash to treat yourself to a top-end iPod.
Guilty pleasures: The Killers
I know it’s hard to believe sometimes - well, most of the time - but I do know the difference between things that are cool, and things that are uncool. But when it comes to music, I seem to have a mental block: I can list all the reasons why a particular song is uncool and should be shunned, but I’ll fall in love with it anyway.
When You Were Young by The Killers is a pretty good example. I can’t make up my mind whether it’s the product of cold-eyed careerism or an endearing and unsuccessful attempt to channel the band’s influences, but either way it’s a huge rip-off of some better-known artists. It’s got the bass breakdown from U2’s Beautiful Day and the guitar sound - and, it seems, most of the guitar solo - from the same band’s Miracle Drug; the key riff is alarmingly close to Coldplay’s Talk (which, of course, is Kraftwerk’s Computer Love through a fuzzbox) and vocally and lyrically it’s Springsteen on pomposity pills.
And I haven’t stopped listening to it for days.
All together now - we’re riding down a highway skyline on the back of a hurricane…
Wheeeeee!
Alpine’s in-car iPod adapter: brilliant! And rubbish!
Hooking up an iPod to your car stereo is a wonderful thing, but if you don’t have a proper connection you’re stuck with a mess of cassette adapters and cigarette lighter chargers (or worse, iTrips). So hurrah for Alpine, makers of really nice-sounding car stereos, who have an iPod connector that gets rid of the cable clutter and makes iPod integration easy.
The single best thing about it? Listening to it.
The single worst thing about it? Using it.
I’ve seen some rotten interface design in my time, but Alpine’s approach to iPod integration is probably one of the worst examples… ever. Alpine user interfaces are pretty rotten at the best of times, but when you add an iPod to the mix even the most technophiliac Alpine owner will end up weeping hot salty tears of rage. Inconsistent, incoherent and unintuitive doesn’t begin to cover it: the control system was clearly designed by someone who hates the entire human race and believes that the iPod’s simplicity is the worst thing about it.
Put it this way: I’m surprised that the stereo doesn’t punch you in the face every time you try to use it. It’s *that* unfriendly.
So if you want to, ahem, iPod your ride, you should seriously consider Alpine’s kit for its simple connection and superb sound quality. But if you want to keep hold of your sanity, you might be better off with a cassette adapter.
If you’re buying a PC this Christmas, buy a Mac
As you’d expect, from time to time people ask me for advice on what machine to buy. Usually the answer is a question - what do you want to use it for? - and based on the response I’ll suggest a PC or a Mac, a desktop or a notebook. There’s no such thing as a computer that’ll suit everyone… or is there?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and, other than budgetary constraints - and to be fair, the difference in price between basic PCs and basic Macs isn’t much these days - I’ve come to the conclusion that for the average punter, a Mac’s the better buy. That’s partly because of the usual Apple reasons - lack of viruses, blah - but also because of Boot Camp and even more importantly, open source software such as Firefox, OpenOffice.org and so on.
Sure, there are still things PCs are better at than Macs, such as games, but an entry-level PC with integrated graphics won’t be a spectacular performer so it’s probably a false economy. If all you want to do is play games, get an Xbox or a Wii or a PS3. If you’re into modding, a PC’s probably better. And if you’re a hardcore gamer whose ideal machine has enough power to solve the meaning of life, a PC’s still the better bet. And if you’ve invested in digital music downloads and players that use Windows Media copy protection, or PC-specific hardware such as horrifically expensive internal graphics cards or sound cards, there’s not much point in switching.
But other differences have gone away, and the biggest such difference is compatibility - instead of slow emulation via Virtual PC, you can run windows apps via Boot Camp (or Parallels Desktop) if there’s a particular program you can’t live without.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niches where a PC is the right machine. But for the average digital photo-collecting, web browsing, online chatting, emailing, music downloading, odd-letter-writing man (or woman) in the street, I’m struggling to come up with good reasons why a PC would be better than a Mac - beyond the marginal price difference (which I think is negated by the need to install 500 security programs on a PC and the bundling of iLife with Macs).
Have I missed anything important? I’m genuinely curious.